Actuarial Research Conference

I’m writing this post from Minneapolis where I am attending the 51^st Actuarial Research Conference, being jointly hosted by the University of Minneapolis and University of St Paul.  I’d say that the weather is a nice change from Canberra winters but that is perhaps a little rich given I just got back from the Gold Coast!

I suspect it is a uniquely Australian experience to fly more than 24 hours to somewhere for less than 4 days before heading straight back home.  This travel was particularly painful, with my joy at the short LAX customs and domestic security queues being quickly replaced by finding out my 8:30am Los Angeles -> Minneapolis flight had been delayed till 3:30pm.  This is not a pleasant feeling after a 14 hour flight from Sydney -> Los Angeles!  After running around for a while I managed to get on an 11:25am flight (at one stage I held boarding passes for three separate flights out of LAX) but my luggage decided to get on the 12:45pm flight, necessitating a further hour wait at Minneapolis airport for it to arrive.  Needless to say I was a little tired and cranky after I finally got to my Minneapolis hotel!

This is my second ARC, having attended the 46^th conference at the University of Connecticut in 2011.  I enjoyed the first one so much that I wrote an article about it in the Actuary Australia magazine.  At this conference I’m presenting in the very final session on Saturday about my Massive Open Online Course – you can download a copy of the presentation from here if you’d like.

I write this on the Thursday evening of the conference, having just come back from the gala banquet at the University of St Thomas.  Like the last conference, I’ve found this one to be a joy so far, with it being large enough to have lots of interesting presentations to go to, but small enough that it still has somewhat of a community feel and it is easy to randomly introduce yourself to someone knowing that you will have something interesting to talk about.  I find that North Americans are very good at these sorts of social gatherings; they have an ability to make you feel at ease and comfortable with the small talk.  I think it is partly because they tend to be very curious about Australia and how we do actuarial education and research there.  Anyway, as an introvert I find these conferences to be the most enjoyable I have attended.

The opening keynote from Jay Olshansky was particularly interesting.  He explained why the great claims of people living until 150 are a fallacy based on the biology of the human body, and that gains in future life expectancy are likely to be far more incremental given that our bodies aren’t designed to live far beyond our “warranty period” (i.e. the end of our reproductive abilities).

I look forward to what Friday and Saturday hold, but not so much the flights home after that.  I arrive home on Monday at 9:15am and then teach a class at midday…it could be ugly!

Adam Butt.