Description: The Financial Accounting Standards Board has developed a data bank containing information about pensions and changing prices, extracted from 1,100 companies’ annual reports.

Description: The authors comment on James C. Hickman's paper about the Social Security decoupling issue. Decoupling generally refers to the separation of the procedures used to determine benefits for future recipients from those that adjust benefits for current recipients.

Description: In May 1981 the Academy distributed an exposure draft, “Qualification Standards To Sign Statements of Actuarial Opinion on NAIC Annual Statement Blanks.” In it we read, with pleasure, the following bit of proposed wording: “Before considering himself or herself qualified, the actuary should have sufficient experience . . . With that experience the actuary should have . . . developed a healthy skepticism concerning data and other information proffered by others . . .” This article describes that the healthy skepticism was removed in the future language and the editor's disagreement with the ommission.

Description: In our issue last October we offered to send some mid-19th century volumes of the Journal of the Institute of Actuaries to a responder willing to pay the shipping cost. These were your Editor’s personal property, and our interest was in finding a good home for them. We confess to having feared that nobody would apply.

Description: It was in 1974, we recolld, that an NAIC Lapsation Task Force, expressing its frustration with excessive lapses experienced by some companies and some agents, said that there was nothing effective that state commissioners could do about this. But in 1977 the repletors took the first necessary step toward doing something by seeking recommendations from this advisory group, capably chaired by LIMRA’s Helen T. Noniewicz. At least 14 Society members contributed to its work.

Description: The total number of actuaries-casualty, life and pension-in North America last year was 9,229 see our June 3, 1981 issue, page 7. The world is shrinking in actuarial affairs these days, just as it is in all other respects. But how lively an interest do actuaries in North America take in actuarial activities elsewhere on the globe? This article looks at these facts and the IAA membership of North American Actuaries.

Description: We believe that some actuaries who have neglected reading their mail will welcome a reminder on behalf of the Minority Recruiting Program.

Description: Article on details of SOA member growth by decades. At the end of 1929 the roster of Fellows counting both the Actuarial Society and the American Institute but eliminating duplications totalled 360. Half a century later, the number was 4,024.

Description: Article from The Actuary, December 1983, volume no. 17, issue no. 10, that is an editorial written by the editor of The Actuary that highlights that in recent years many U.K. insurance companies have moved away from London so that now there are perhaps three times as many major insurance centres as before World War II. This has given rise to substantial congregations of actuaries and actuarial students elsewhere than in London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Norwich and other longtime insurance cities. This editor had the pleasure of visiting these newer groups as well as to the Student's Societies in London and Edinbrugh.

Description: Article Why He's Who He Is - A Conversation With John O'Connor in The Actuary, June 1979, Volume 13, Number 6