Insight – the Control Cycle As society gradually re-opens, the government has to make assumptions about the coronavirus. So we should describe what we expect up-front and then go about aggressively testing that expectation. We are effectively conduct a real-world experiment, along with everyone else in the world, about howContinue Reading
Get a bunch of actuaries together (particularly life insurance actuaries) and sooner or later we will start talking about pandemics. Fortunately for us, our experiences are almost entirely theoretical. We’ve lived through AIDS (for the life insurance actuary, a very slow-moving pandemic, where the challenge was more about underwriting thanContinue Reading
Climate change affects extremes more than you think. If the distribution shifts even a little bit to be hotter/wetter/drier/windier, then even without changing the likelihood of extremes, the very rare extremes we were used to become much more likely. Continue Reading
I went to a talk this week at my son’s school by Paul Dillon, from Drug and Alcohol research training Australia. I had heard great things about Paul as a speaker, but not the thing that impressed me most – he had great statistics! So time for a blog postContinue Reading
Everybody Lies, What the Internet Can tell us about who we really are, by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is an economist and data scientist. He uses data, particularly massive data about google searches, to draw conclusions about human behaviour. I loved this book, and to the frustration of my family, IContinue Reading
In what is now my traditional first post of the year, I’ve written my usual round-up of my reading for the year here. A fairly eclectic set of books, with perhaps a bit more memoir than normal. My two favourites were these: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu The Bad-Ass LibrariansContinue Reading
I rarely see mortality statistics from Australia. So here from Actuarial Eye is an infographic you can use whenever someone wants to know just how afraid of crocodiles they should be. Wishing an enjoyable festive season to all of my readers – and try and avoid all of theseContinue Reading
Prompted by a friend, I’ve been taking a look at the data for NSW school suspensions, particularly for aboriginal students. You have to get deep into the NSW Board of Education website to do this (and convert pdfs into excel spreadsheets!) but it is worth it. In Australia, we haveContinue Reading
Regular readers will know I take a keen interest in the regulatory role of the Appointed Actuary. See my previous posts here, here and, most recently, here. This week APRA released a consultation package with proposals on how the role should be changed to make the role fit better into the regulatoryContinue Reading
One of my most visited posts is about the likelihood of ships disappearing without a trace. Sadly it is getting renewed attention because a huge Korean cargo ship has disappeared off the coast of South America. So far only two of the 24 crew members have been found. It is trueContinue Reading