News & Views

The April 2022 exam results have been published and APR student staff achieved an 89% pass rate across all IFoA exams taken. In this article, Jack Foley compares our performance with the industry average.

APR recently held a Charity Challenge to raise donations for The Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC) through a virtual mission. In this article, Jenn Claybourn takes a look at the results, the money raised and the important cause this mission was for.

Ross Witney-Hunter and Josh Payne apply some statistical modelling techniques to try and predict the outcomes of this year’s Wimbledon singles competitions.

Thomas Pycroft examines the numbers behind Wordle and looks at the best strategy for maximising your chances of solving the puzzle in two guesses.

The latest step in the government’s plans to reform the Solvency II regime for the UK insurance sector has now been published. In this article Ross Gordon and Claire Grant provide details on these plans and potential knock-on effects.

SQL injection is a common type of attack carried out on databases. Despite its simplicity, SQL injection can have a number of serious consequences for databases that are not adequately protected. In this article John Nicholls introduces the concept of SQL injection and gives a number of steps organisations can take to avoid this type of attack.

As actuaries, we often come at programming tasks with a very practical mindset, but there is a lot of theory out there that can be extremely useful to know about when weighing up potential solutions. In this article Joseph Barnett takes a look at functional programming, gives a brief overview of its history and discusses how it differs from other types of programming.

Following on from their inaugural meeting in November, APR’s Actureads book club reunited to discuss The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye. In this article, Curtis Anderson gives his key takeaways from the book and a selection of additional resources for anyone interested in exploring the topic further.

Ross Gordon discusses the key current drivers of demand for APR’s services, as well as touching on some that have the potential to be key drivers in the near future.

Awareness of cognitive bias has grown in recent years. They are errors in our judgement or thinking that occur frequently. In this article Mujtaba Syed introduces some of the types of cognitive bias, gives a fictional case study from an actuarial setting where cognitive biases were likely at play, and ends with some brief tips for preventing cognitive bias.