The Week in Meep, 11 Nov 2023: DataViz, Career Advice, Modeling, and Manet/Degas
Taking a quick break from the Movember fundraising, which is off to a good start.
This week, I gave two talks and went into the city (which always means New York City).
DataViz Advice
My first talk was for the virtual annual meeting of the Society of Actuaries.
Here are my slides (in PDF):
Most of the dataviz in the slides (actually, I think all of it) has appeared here on STUMP before.
So here are the related STUMP posts (most of which have demo videos):
Dec 2021: Merry Christmas! Excel Gifts -- Some Beautiful Themes from Great Art and Warnings on Errors
Mar 2023: These are a few of my favorite graphs - has jitter graphs and animated tile grid maps
Aug 2022: Meep's Data Visualization Evolution: Tile Grid Maps
Two books that I’ve found particularly helpful in terms of thinking through the principles are Jonathan Schwabish’s Better Data Visualizations and cole knaflic’s Storytelling with Data
Most of the best dataviz resources aren’t software-specific.
Career Advice
Another talk I gave this week was at Columbia University’s Proseminar for Actuarial Science. I am not sharing those slides (not sorry), but I am sharing a link to the podcast I recorded with the Society of Actuaries (yes, again):
The intention was advice for new entrants to the career, but I also had advice for people later in actuarial careers.
But wait, I have some career advice from other people from podcasts I regularly listen to!
One of the pieces of advice I generally have is to have a broader awareness of the environment one operates in. Two podcasts I regularly listen to are Insurance AUM and Awkward Insurance.
Insurance AUM deals with the asset management side of insurers, and actuaries tend to focus on the liability side… though, in the life/annuity space, actuaries do sometimes get more involved in the assets, at least with regards to strategy if not selecting the specific assets to buy.
Here is an episode in which the host Stewart Foley interviews Margot DeMore and Milena Humplik of Broad Street Consulting Group. They’re executive recruiters specializing the the financial sector — that is, they’re headhunters looking for employees for insurance asset management very specifically, and that’s a specialized space indeed.
Awkward Insurance focuses on insurance agents and brokers, primarily in personal lines (that’s home/auto insurance, but sometimes they get into other coverages). The hosts talk with Michael Koscielny in this recent episode about layoffs going on in the insurance industry in the U.S. (and in some other countries) right now. These sorts of waves occur periodically in insurance … and other industries, too, obviously.
I listen to both podcasts through Apple podcasts, just embedding these in different methods.
Meep’s Short-Lived (Other) Modeling Career
The following picture popped up in my facebook memories…
I’m Lifetime Guarantee.
Yes, the picture quality sucks, but this is from a newspaper ad for Hub Furniture stores from about 1987 or 1988 in the Virginia/Maryland region. The other two kids are my middle sister Amy (I’m the oldest of three) and our friend Dorian. Her step-dad had the ad account, you see, and we weren’t union. (That is, we were cheap.)
This was a very short-lived modeling career for furniture ads.
If I find the TV ads, I’ll be sure to share. They’re a hoot.
Manet/Degas
While I was in the city, I popped by one of my favorite places, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
They’ve got a new exhibit on Manet and Degas, who were buddies.
Lots of great pieces in the exhibit, with context, chronology, etc. I do like that they picked the very paintings I wanted to use to contrast - The Absinthe Drinker by Degas …
…and Plum Brandy by Manet.
The reason these are paired, not just because these have contrasting moods — one clearly exhausted/depressed, the other wistful/secret smile — it’s because it’s the same model used to pose in both, at the same cafe.
Just note: it’s a popular exhibit, and they do require a check-in. Those who are members (like myself) get a digital jump ahead in the line.
Membership has its privileges.
Sumo!
The last grand sumo tournament of 2023 starts tomorrow, and as a reminder, all my sumo content is moving over to my Sumo Stats substack.
I did create some new content - a profile of one of my favorite wrestlers, Tobizaru.
In general, I won’t be bugging the crowd with my sumo stuff much. So go over there if you want to see it.
Hakkeyoi!