New Site Announcement: Actuarial News
Contain your excitement
I will be getting back to more mortality posts, but before that, I am here to announce:
Party time!
My external memory
Okay, it’s very bare-bones right now, but this is replacing the very many “watch” threads I used to have on the old Actuarial Outpost site.
I will be aggregating news, opinion, and data pieces from all over the internet, and will likely even be digging up old items.
The “watch” threads I used to do, the main purpose from my perspective was to act as my external memory. I slapped tags on my posts (in all caps) so that I could go back to a thread, search for the tags (say ILLINOIS) and get all the Illinois pension stories, for example.
Unfortunately, since the death of the Actuarial Outpost, I’ve been dumping a lot of these “random” links into my blog posts, such as at the end of this post: Public Pension Roundup: Bailing out Pensions, The Return of Pension Envy, Kentucky Lawsuit, and more.
With the new site, I will be dumping all the random stuff under the general category of public finance, public pensions, MEPs, investments, and more over there. I will focus on my own analysis and commentary on this site.
Learning Curve
It has been a long time since I’ve been on WordPress, which is the engine for the new site; WP has evolved a great deal since I last used it. I’m using one of the basic themes for now. The site will likely undergo some transformations before I find a theme and approach I like.
For right now, you can take a view at a few posts to see how I do my news aggregation:
Editorial: Vote-conscious aldermen embrace a fiscally unsustainable pension idea
Democrats Introduce Bill to Protect Pensions, Expand PGBC’s Power
America is experiencing the worst recorded increase in its national murder rate
I capture the original link; maybe write a description, summary, or grab and excerpt; publication date; publication site; and authors, if any are identified.
I’m working out my tags and categories — categories are very large topics, such as mortality or public pensions. Tags are for more detailed information, such as the publication name, article author, legislation name, or key individuals named.
I’m still using this as my external memory, so I’m focusing on being able to search my collection of “curated” pieces for my own purposes of building up patterns… and why not share it with the rest of y’all?
With the new site, I can focus solely on my own commentary here, and shove my huge pile of index cards elsewhere.
See you tomorrow with more mortality trends!