by meep
You may have seen this recent story in the WSJ:
Actuaries quantify risk. One of their riskiest endeavors is trying to become one.
Among people taking at least one exam from the Society of Actuaries—the field’s biggest U.S. credentialing body—15% eventually pass the multiple tests required to become an Associate,...
by meep
On Monday, December 6, 2021, I gave a talk with the title “COVID Data Follies: Vaccination Rates, Relative Risk, and Simpson’s Paradox”, to the Actuarial Science program at Illinois State University (thanks for the t-shirt, y’all!):
You may have heard statistics in the news that most of the people testing positive...
by meep
That’s some paradox, that Simpson’s Paradox.
(and it comes up all the time in real life)
With the notice that the fully-vaccinated Texas governor has tested positive for COVID, I thought I’d do my own post on why we see so many fully-vaccinated people test positive for COVID....
by meep
As an actuary, Bobby Bonilla Day is my favorite day of the year.
The short version of the story is that Bobby Bonilla’s agent negotiated a very valuable deferred annuity arrangement for his client over 20 years ago, and Bonilla is still benefitting from this deal.
Bonilla got a guaranteed 8% nominal...
by meep
While Trump continues to sue to try to stop the veritable locomotive chugging toward Joe Biden’s inauguration, Biden’s staff announced a COVID task force:
As expected, the board’s three co-chairs are Marcella Nunez-Smith, a Yale physician and researcher; Vivek Murthy, a former U.S. surgeon general; and David Kessler, a...
by meep
The Actuarial Outpost, as it was, is finally dead. For actuarial chatter, join us at Go Actuary.
For those who used to keep up with my “watch” threads, I will be sharing the links on my blogs for now. I’m looking for a content management solution for what I...
by meep
The leaves have changed color (or completely fallen off the trees) so that means it’s time for the Social Security Administration to announce the COLAs (cost-of-living adjustments) for benefits in 2021:
PLANSPONSOR: Social Security Announces COLA for 2021
Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits will...
by meep
Let’s take a look at U.S. COVID mortality, and some other COVID-related issues.
Using data from the CDC, the official (provisional) COVID death count is 204,613 as of 16 October 2020.
With total deaths of 2,226,473 recorded...
by meep
People who have been reading me for a long time know that I like to keep a record on the Actuarial Outpost, but that site’s nameservers seem to have gotten hijacked by a domain-squatting operation.
I know one workaround: go directly to their IP address of 204.232.242.165. I...
by meep
Yes, this is going to get quite technical as I go down farther in this post, but I will start with a piece somebody forwarded to me, which explains the issue in words. I think many people are more comfortable thinking in words than numbers, though that is not necessarily...
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