Description: Summary of recent SOA-sponsored research on Enterprise Risk Management practices as applied to health insurers, self-insured plans, and health finance professionals.

Description: The August/September 2014 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.

Description: The February/March 2016 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.

Description: Discusses the peer-review process as it relates to articles submitted for TAXING TIMES.

Description: Email blast process and email preference setting description.

Description: A compilation of reader responses is presented to a real life situation posed involving a management, leadership, or other business decision. This issue’s case study involved management hiring someone to make changes, then ignoring all suggestions.

Description: Actuaries, like other business professionals, communicate quantitative ideas graphically. Because the process of reading, or decoding, graphs is more complex than reading text, graphs are vulnerable to many sources of abuse. This is the abstract of a paper that will help creators design more effective graphs and will help viewers recognize misleading graphs. The paper summarizes guidelines for designing graphs that show important numerical information and gives examples of commonly encountered graphs that mislead and hide information. The complete paper appears in the April 1998 issue of the North American Actuarial Journal. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 1998 Vol. 1.

Description: This article studies the syllabus as a dynamic, interactive teaching tool that informs and is informed by both solutions of complex course problems and student difficulties with these problems.

Description: It is well established that empowerment of staff is a critical leadership trait. But what are the metrics to recognize that you have achieved it? What steps enable this achievement? Which psychological attributes explain its efficacy?This article proposes to answer these questions through a multi-disciplinary examination of empowerment in the context of three leadership domains.

Description: The article describes principles for optimal sub-tasking of a project goal. Two experiments each one comparing different approaches are presented. A summary of principles for optimal goal setting presents seven key points: i)levels of outcome goals should be recognizable and lack ambiguity; ii) each subtask should be atomic, i.e. not be capable of being broken up into further subtasks, iii) the subtasks should be uniform, lacking ambiguity, so that any new trainee could master it without the need for further guidance; iv) each subtask should be attainable in a reasonable amount of time; v) mentor feedback should be provided during the initial stages of learning or training; vi) upon mastery of each subtask trainees should be encouraged to maximize their overall score; vii) after mastery of individual subtasks, while attempting to maximize scores, trainees should be provided with a mixture of easy, intermediate, and difficult tasks.