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About CAS
The Casualty Actuarial Society is a professional organization whose purpose is the advancement of the body of knowledge of actuarial science applied to property, casualty, and similar risk exposures.
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Author Archives: Brian Fannin
Open Communities and Lucrative Networks
I’ve been a Deadhead for over thirty years. One of the things that made the band so easy to get into was the fact that their concert recordings – thousands of them – were freely traded among fans. I had boxes filled with cassettes that allowed me to experience over a quarter century of performances. … Read more
Posted in Research.
It’s Time to Take Visualization Seriously
In 2019, I gave five talks about data visualization. This was great fun, but as I looked back, I felt compelled to confront a difficult question: what are we as actuaries still not getting about this? Haven’t actuaries embraced data visualization? We understand that it’s important. We understand that it’s an essential element of communication. … Read more
Posted in General.
COVID-19 and the P&C Insurance Industry
Property casualty insurance is an interesting beast. Whereas life, health and pension are defined by what they cover, P&C – as a label – scarcely does justice to its scope. At a moment like this, it seems more fitting to apply the more apt, if nebulous, term “general insurance” to consider how actuarial practice will … Read more
Posted in Communications, Research.
Collaborating in the Cloud
Last August, the CAS made a significant organizational investment. We created an account on GitHub, one of the leading cloud-based platforms, which implements the version control utility, git. Everyone who read that last sentence will have one of three reactions: 1) I love git, it’s about time the CAS did this! 2) I’ve heard of … Read more
Posted in Research.
Exploring the Complex Relationship Between Math and Music
Music is expressive, it is simultaneously immediate and timeless, diverse yet universal. Music can lift us to a higher form of communication. (Think of humans and aliens learning to communicate at the end of “Close Encounters.”) And – like most human experience – music is also very mathematical. A caveat- there is a danger in … Read more
Posted in Communications.
Speaking at Society Symposium was Super
Last month I spoke at the Society of Actuaries 2018 Analytics Symposium in Minneapolis. The experience was a delight. Because it was an SOA conference, I had expected that at times I would feel confused or missing critical background, but there were very few instances of this. Several presentations may have meant more to me … Read more
Posted in Communications.
Let’s All Visit Jupyter
The actuarial workflow typically looks like this: you complete an analysis in a spreadsheet, then you paste the chart into a word-processing document. If you want to make a change to the math, or the data, that copy-and-paste step must be repeated. It’s easy for the two (or more!) documents to fall out of sync, … Read more
Posted in General.