Description: The August/September 2013 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.

Description: The editor of HealthWatch addresses the readership on actuarial best practices and purpose of ASOPs. Issue No 60

Description: The article summarizes two of the highest rated sessions sponsored by the Reinsurance Section during the 2013 SOA Annual Meeting in San Diego.

Description: One of the most fundamental concepts in actuarial practice is the time value of money. For any work in which future cash flows are allowed for, such as reserving or pricing, it is natural to discount to present values so that an appropriate amount of money can be set aside today, allowing for future investment returns. This article discusses yield curve extrapolation methods along with the benefits and drawbacks of these methods.

Description: One of the most fundamental concepts in actuarial practice is the time value of money. For any work in which future cash flows are allowed for, such as reserving or pricing, it is natural to discount to present values so that an appropriate amount of money can be set aside today, allowing for future investment returns. This article discusses yield curve extrapolation methods along with the benefits and drawbacks of these methods.

Description: The October/November 2015 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.

Description: Article describes best practices for teaching a course module that involves multiple parameters. A good example is hypothesis testing which requires consideration of the parameters, sample-size, population distribution, known variance and has as consequences whether a normal or t distribution should be used or whether non parametric methods are used. The articles recommends use of the Prime Implicant Normal Form as a means of teaching. It shows the superiority of this method over other forms such as heuristics, complete rules, or graduated approaches.

Description: The following case study walks through the steps of a predictive modeling exercise to illustrate one way analytics can streamline the underwriting paradigm.

Description: The December 2013/January 2014 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.

Description: A typical course has some "hard" parts. These "hard" parts are the places where weaker students begin to fail, lose interest, and give up. The paper introduces a metric by which to evaluate each course topic. High metric values indicate "hard parts" of courses. The paper recommends spending more course time on hard parts and less course time on easy parts. The paper also recommends using disclosure: Tell students - this part of the course is "hard" and they may feel uncomfortable which is why more time is being spent on it." This approach to hard parts works! Failure rates are significantly reduced, while retention, satisfaction, and student scores improve.