Editors' Notes

The staff of The Actuarial Review thanks you readers who have contributed names and articles for our upcoming parody issue. (Names withheld to protect the not-so-innocent. We know who you are.) To date we have received enough material to fill about one page. We need more, much more! We need articles on the following topics (or on topics we haven't dreamed up!):

• CAS Eliminates Exams:
  "Those other countries can't all be wrong!" says CAS President-Elect
• Study Reveals Differences in Rate Filings Prepared by Male/Female Actuaries
• American Academy Proposes Social Security Solutions
  (Encouraging Smoking Tops the List)
• Results in From First CAS Sex Survey
  (Surprising Frequency and Severity Statistics)
• CAS Rejects Mutual Recognition Application from Italian Bookmakers, CAS Board Accused of Racism
• Nonactuarial Pursuits: CAS Members Beat Their Spouses

We also need parody versions of all the regular columns—"Random Simper," "BrainDead," and the rest. Please send us articles and opinion pieces that you've always wanted to see in print!

Speaking of "print," Rich Newell asked me why we continue to snail-mail The Actuarial Review to all of you. Good question… And perhaps the time has come to spare some trees and publish online only. We last considered this almost ten years ago, when the CAS Web site was in its infancy. We decided that our technology was not good enough and too many readers still didn't have convenient access to the Internet. Nowadays, probably every one of you has Internet access during at least part of the day, certainly often enough and long enough to read or download The Actuarial Review. We can alert you via e-mail when each new issue becomes available. The 2004 AR budget is $36,400; the actual cost is "only" about $34,000. That's roughly $10 per member that could otherwise go towards higher salaries for the CAS staff or fancier appetizers at CAS seminars. If you are unwilling or unable to download AR from the CAS Web Site every four months, please send us an e-mail message (ar@casact.org).

One nice thing about AR on the Web site is that we can correct our mistakes as soon as they are discovered. I know, I know: the editorial staff is supposed to fix mistakes before anyone else is allowed to read a new issue. We do find and fix most of them, especially the small ones, the ones that only editors notice. Once in a while, unfortunately, we miss an obvious blunder, such as the top of page 19 in the August issue. What you should have seen was "ASTIN in Bergen by Kris DeFrain." We published the correct article, but under the title and author's name of last year's ASTIN article. The mistake was obvious to Kris DeFrain, who pointed out the mistake to us (and had every right to be much less polite than she was). I apologize for the error. We did fix it immediately in the on-line edition. Unfortunately, the hard-copy edition is cast in stone.

Well, paper, then.

Say, maybe that explains why no one else told us about the error! Does anyone actually open and read the hard-copy AR anymore?