The General Insurance Board of the Faculty and Institute of Actuaries responded to some of the criticisms raised in the Morris review of the Actuarial Profession and in the press by rating agencies and others, regarding the Actuarial Profession's approach to actuarial reserving in general insurance by setting up a taskforce known as the General Insurance Reserving Issues Taskforce (GRIT). The taskforce worked from 2004 to 2006 and produced a significant report, including some new professional content and recommendations for further areas of development and research. Since then, through the GRIT successor body: the Reserving Oversight Committee (ROC), many working parties have formed and many General Insurance Research Organisation (GIRO) presentations and papers have been forthcoming. One area that has been a recurring theme through the last five years is how the Profession models and communicates the uncertainty in the claims reserving process. In the context of recent events in global financial markets, the forthcoming new regulatory framework of Solvency II, and the developments in other professions globally through IFRS and other drivers, it is timely that actuaries take stock of the many changes in our practices over the last five years and consider the direction actuaries should take for the challenges that lie ahead. This paper is a meta-study of the output of GRIT and ROC on reserving and uncertainty, with the intention of meeting these objectives.

Derivatives of velocity and temperature in the wind over the ocean were found to be quite variable. Probability distribution functions of squared derivatives were consistent with lognormality predictions by Kolmogoroff, Obukhoff and Yaglom. Kurtosis values for velocity derivatives ranged from 13 to 26 and from 26 to 43 for temperature derivatives. Universal inertial subrange constants were evaluated from dissipation spectra and were found to be 40 to 300% larger than most values reported previously. Evidence for local anisotropy of the temperature field is provided by non-zero values of the measured derivative skewness.

Objectives: The mode of contact and response levels of authors who had been asked to provide missing or incomplete data for a systematic review on diet and exercise interventions for weight loss was examined.

Methods: We contacted authors by electronic mail, letter, or both. Survival analyses were performed with the Kaplan–Meier method to determine differences in the proportion of responders over time among the different modes of contact and to determine whether response rates differed between authors from the United States and those from other countries. Logistic regression was used to determine whether the number of items requested and publication date influenced the likelihood of response.

Results: Two hundred forty-one (39.9 percent) studies had missing or incomplete data (e.g., sample size, age, caloric restriction, exercise amount, and so on). We were unable to locate ninety-five authors (39.4 percent). Of the remaining authors, forty-six authors (31.5 percent) responded to information requests. Time to respond differed by contact method (p<.05): e-mail (3 ± 3 days), letter (27 ± 30 days), and both (13 ±12 days). Response rates from U.S. authors did not differ from those of other countries.

Conclusions: Our study suggests poor success in the acquisition of essential information. Given considerable time and resources, weight loss studies require improved reporting standards to minimize the relatively unsuccessful attempt to contact authors for important and necessary information.

The burden and duration of asymptomatic malaria infections were measured in residents of the malaria endemic village of Gonoa, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. Plasmodium falciparum, P. vivax and P. malariae infections in people aged 4 years to adulthood were compared. Frequent sampling at 3-day intervals for up to 61 days allowed assessment of individual episodes of infection. Statistical assessment of P. falciparum detection revealed a periodicity consistent with synchronous replication of this species over periods up to 27 days. The duration of P. falciparum episodes was longer across all age groups than that of P. vivax and P. malariae. A trend for decreasing duration with age was also noted in data from each species. This was most prominent in P. falciparum infections: median duration in 4-year-olds was > 48 days compared with a median between 9 and 15 days in older children and adults. The results are consistent with the slow acquisition of immunity to antigenically diverse Plasmodium populations and suggest a faster rate of acquisition to P. vivax and P. malariae than to P. falciparum.

In this paper I propose to consider Ovid's poem as a document of literary criticism, which offers us a striking treatment of the role of the audience in reception. Ovid's concerns are twofold: on the one hand he is concerned with the ostensible manner in which his own works have been read, but he also discusses a wide range of other texts, and in doing so, offers readings of them, which, I will argue, illustrate the open-ended nature of reception and meaning.

Now, undoubtedly we are sometimes too willing to label works as ‘anti-Augustan’ or ‘Augustan’, as if that was all that could be said about them; the glib use of such terms often seems to obscure more complex and more interesting questions (the Aeneid and the Georgics are familiar examples). But with Ovid, however, such issues are at least raised by the poet himself, since the exile poems do deal with Ovid's attitude to Augustus, and the twin possibilities of writing poetry which can offend the emperor, or which can please him. Now while Ovid's famous explanation of the causes of his exile as ‘carmen et error’ (Trist. 2.207) may perhaps be a smokescreen — Ovid adducing the Ars Amatoria as his fault in order not to have to go into the details of what the error was that had offended Augustus — Tristia 2 must still be considered on its own terms; Ovid writes as if it is possible for Augustus to be offended by his poetry, and therefore the issue is an important one.