Talking Actuaries and Data, The Poisoner's Handbook, and an Update to Public Pension Projections

A trio of videos to start the week

A quick bit of material for today, in no particular order:

Talking about actuaries, data, data science, and standards

In this video, I’m discussing issues surrounding data and data science with Soumava Day:

The video description

This coffee chat session features a seasoned Actuary who shared her viewpoints on the importance of data and data management in Actuarial risk assessment study.

Guest speaker:
Mary Pat Campbell, FSA, MAAA
Follow her blog to learn more about Actuarial Science and statistics/mathematics: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/

After watching this video, you will gather information on the following topics:
a) The importance of data in Actuarial risk assessment initiatives,
b) a brief overview of Actuarial Standards of Practice(ASOP) and it’s significance in managing data quality and data integrity issues in Actuarial world,
c) Mary’s opinion on how Data Scientists could provide additional support to Actuaries which might pave the way for future collaboration in Insurance industry.

Subscribe to my channel to gain access to future coffee chat sessions featuring academia and industry experts. #datascience #coffeechat #science #research #data

At one point, I bring up aspects surrounding data quality and COVID, which I discussed in these previous posts:

July 2020: Mortality with Meep: COVID-19 Deaths and the Importance of Dates

March 2020: Coronavirus, Bad Data, and Daniel Defoe

Book (and documentary and tv series) recommendation: The Poisoner’s Handbook

I enjoyed the book and the documentary, and I’ve enjoyed many episodes of Murdoch Mysteries.

Here are some links (I get some minor revenue from Amazon links):

Link to the book at Amazon (affiliate link)

PBS documentary on American Experience and it’s link on Amazon video

Murdoch Mysteries, which is on a lot of different streaming video services.

The main characters from the book are both in Wikipedia: Charles Norris, the medical examiner and Alexander Gettler, the forensic chemist.

Public Pension Projection Tool: 2021 Update

You can download the spreadsheet from my DropBox.

My data source, as per usual, is the Public Plans Database. It’s now up to over 200 plans.

Prior posts using the projection spreadsheet (earlier versions):

April 2017: Watching the Money Run Out: A Simulation with a Chicago Pension — the pension in question is Chicago Municipal, which is one of the worst-funded pensions in the country. This was the pension plan that “inspired” me to create the spreadsheet.

May 2017: Testing to Death: Which Public Pensions are Cash Flow Vulnerable?

October 2017: Happy Halloween! Some Scary Public Pension Projections

December 2019: Merry Christmas! Have New Public Pensions Projections

I may do something similar to my October 2017 testing — but I may wait on this. While many plans did see anemic (or negative) returns for FY2020 (which generally ended June 30, 2020), the great inflation-and-federal-bailout-driven bull run really pumped up FY2021 returns.

Also, what I really want to see is what “actuarial gain” plans had for FY2021 from all the extra mortality.

Enjoy!

You can check out my YouTube channel if you’d like to dig into more mortality, pensions, book, and other videos.