Can You Increase Your Intelligence?

This posting on the Scientific American Blogs suggests yes...

- Rick

Leadership

From Forbes.com, one person's take on how to be persuasive in business. Some nice insights and anecdotes.

- Rick

2011: A Record Year for Insured Catastrophe Losses

A posting today from Business Insurance notes that, according to Munich Reinsurance Co. research, "2011 was the costliest year on record for insured natural catastrophe losses... Insured losses from natural catastrophes totaled about $105 billion..." The article says that about two-thirds of the losses were from the Japan and New Zealand earthquakes (although the posting then says that the two earthquakes caused $53 billion in damages, which is more like one-half, but perhaps I'm missing something).

Here's a link to a press release from Munich Re regarding their research.

- Rick

Our Data Runneth Over

An article, "So, What's Your Algorithm," from today's Wall Street Journal discusses the opportunities associated with enormous databases, and the need for people with analytical skills who can develop appropriate algorithms. "... analytics harvested from massive databases will begin to inform our day-to-day business decisions. Call it big data, analytics, or decision science." The amount of data out there is truly staggering.

A great opporunity for actuarial science majors, math and statistics majors, and others with quantitative and analytical skills to have an important impact on the future.

- Rick

Long-Term Care Insurance - Gone!

Very interesting article from The Washington Post online - interesting from an insurance perspective, and from the perspective of how Washington plays its game.

The Obama administration has eliminated the long-term care insurance program from the 2010 health care law.

"The program was to be entirely self-financed with the premiums participants paid. Obama officials said that presented them with a problem: If they designed a benefits package generous enough to meet the law’s requirements, they would have had to set premiums so high that few healthy people would enroll. And without a large share of healthy people in the pool, the CLASS plan would have become even more expensive, forcing the government to raise premiums even higher, to the point of the program’s collapse."

As the article says, this will also affect deficit-reduction plans associated with the health-care law.

- Rick

Nobel Winner - Short and Sweet

Here is a graduation speech by one of today's two Nobel prize winners in economics, Thomas Sargent. Given at UC Berkeley in 2007, it is very short and a nice summary of some of what we know about economics.

- Rick

Social Security vs In-Vitro Fertilization

Here is a very interesting case (from foxnews.com) regarding the rights to survivor's benefits of a child, conceived via in-vitro fertilization after the father's death.



Advances in medical and other sciences will continue to provoke the emergence of fascinating, complicated, and important issues in the risk and insurance area.



- Rick