Description: This is a letter to readers of The Actuary from Arnold Dicke and Walter Lowrie to solicit opinions on the problem which seems to crop up each time an examination is to be set.

Description: What is going on with the exchange rate, anyway? In 2002, $1 U.S. bought $C 1.60, and now in May 2005 you only get $C 1.25—that’s 20 percent less! Where’s it going next? One way to answer that question is with a time series model.

Description: Statistics about funded status of the National Basketball Association players pension plan.

Description: In this note, we rearrange the statement and the proof of a theorem in Greville. The presentation appears to be more compact the materials, however, are not new.].

Description: Article is about community rating and risk adjustment including possible disadvantages for healthy experience-rated or self-insured groups.

Description: Fraud is often a dynamic and challenging problem in credit card lending business. Supervised modeling/segmentation techniques are commonly used in fraud detection to distinguish risky transactions from non-risky transactions. However, these techniques frequently rely on identifying risky behavior at a global level. In this paper, along with the classical approach, a new technique has been studied to improve the behavioral fraud detection capability. The application of this proposed technique enables us to identify risky behavior at the account level.

Description: The actuarial committee that authored this report developed a model to estimate the revenue the tax would generate. The results point out key considerations for an excise tax on high cost health plans, including the wide range of results generated by sensitivity to certain assumptions.

Description: It is the purpose of this paper to provide data derived from actual claim experience on lives age 65 and over in a form that will facilitate actuarial calculations involving modification of durations of hospital stay and variations in the allowances provided for miscellaneous services billed by the hospital. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1963, Vol. 15, pt. 1, No. 43.

Description: The theory underlying the Moving Weighted Average graduation method is restated in the language of linear algebra which provides for an enrichment of the family of formulas. A comparison of the results of applying six members of the family to 100 simulated data sets is provided.

Description: This paper considers the problem of actuaries acting as advisers to individuals. This activity is covered by regulations, discussed in the paper, that currently recognize other professions but not actuaries. The paper recommends that actuarial organizations lobby the relevant legislative and regulatory bodies to provide actuaries pursuing an investment-focused career path with the same exemption status as other professionals.