The Securitization of Longevity Risk and its Implications for Retirement Security

The economic significance of longevity risk for governments, corporations, and individuals has begun to be recognized and quantified. The traditional insurance route for managing this risk has serious limitations due to capacity constraints that are becoming more and more binding. If the 2010 U.S. population lived three years longer than expected then the government would have to set aside 50% of the U.S. 2010 GDP or approximately $7.37 trillion to fully fund that increased social security liability. This is just one way of gauging the size of the risk. Due to the much larger capacity of capital markets more attention is being devoted to transforming longevity risk from its pure risk form to a speculative risk form so that it can be traded in the capital markets. This transformation has implications for governments, corporations and individuals that will be explored here. The analysis will view the management of longevity risk by considering how defined contribution plans can be managed to increase the sustainable length of retirement and by considering how defined benefit plans can be managed to reduce pension risk using longevity risk hedging schemes

Towards CausalGPT: A Multi-Agent Approach for Faithful Knowledge Reasoning via Promoting Causal Consistency in LLMs

Despite advancements in LLMs, knowledge-based reasoning remains a longstanding issue due to the fragility of knowledge recall and inference. Existing methods primarily encourage LLMs to autonomously plan and solve problems or to extensively sample reasoning chains without addressing the conceptual and inferential fallacies. Attempting to alleviate inferential fallacies and drawing inspiration from multi-agent collaboration, we present a framework to increase faithfulness and causality for knowledge-based reasoning. Specifically, we propose to employ multiple intelligent agents (i.e., reasoners and an evaluator) to work collaboratively in a reasoning-and-consensus paradigm for elevated reasoning faithfulness. The reasoners focus on providing solutions with human-like causality to solve open-domain problems. On the other hand, the \textit{evaluator} agent scrutinizes if a solution is deducible from a non-causal perspective and if it still holds when challenged by a counterfactual candidate. According to the extensive and comprehensive evaluations on a variety of knowledge reasoning tasks (e.g., science question answering and commonsense reasoning), our framework outperforms all compared state-of-the-art approaches by large margins.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures. 4 table

The Relationship between Teacher Quality and Teaching Effectiveness Perceived by Students from Industrial Vocational High Schools

[[abstract]]This research explores the relationship between teacher quality and teaching effectiveness perceived by students from Industrial Vocational High Schools. The conclusions are: (1) The present conditions of teacher quality and teaching effectiveness perceived by students are positive. (2) With different student “Grade,” “Teacher Gender,” “School Type” and “School Category,” teacher quality perceived by students is significantly different. (3) With different student “Gender” and “School Type,” teaching effectiveness is significantly different. (4) Teacher quality and teaching effectiveness are positively related, meaning the prediction power of teaching effectiveness, with teacher quality as the predictor, is significant

Postnatal onset of retinal degeneration by loss of embryonic Ezh2 repression of Six1

Some adult-onset disorders may be linked to dysregulated embryonic development, yet the mechanisms underlying this association remain poorly understood. Congenital retinal degenerative diseases are blinding disorders characterized by postnatal degeneration of photoreceptors, and affect nearly 2 million individuals worldwide, but ∼50% do not have a known mutation, implicating contributions of epigenetic factors. We found that embryonic deletion of the histone methyltransferase (HMT) Ezh2 from all retinal progenitors resulted in progressive photoreceptor degeneration throughout postnatal life, via derepression of fetal expression of Six1 and its targets. Forced expression of Six1 in the postnatal retina was sufficient to induce photoreceptor degeneration. Ezh2, although enriched in the embryonic retina, was not present in the mature retina; these data reveal an Ezh2-mediated feed-forward pathway that is required for maintaining photoreceptor homeostasis in the adult and suggest novel targets for retinal degeneration therapy

Managing Capital Market and Longevity Risks in a Defined Benefit Pension Plan

This article proposes a model for a defined benefit pension plan to minimize total funding variation while controlling expected total pension cost and funding downside risk throughout the life of a pension cohort. With this setup, we first investigate the plan’s optimal contribution and asset allocation strategies, given the projection of stochastic asset returns and random mortality evolutions. To manage longevity risk, the plan can use either the ground-up hedging strategy or the excess-risk hedging strategy. Our numerical examples demonstrate that the plan transfers more unexpected longevity risk with the excess-risk strategy due to its lower total hedge cost and more attractive structure

Research on Multiple Intelligences Teaching and Assessment

[[abstract]]ABSTRACT This research aimed at fusing the multiple intelligences theories with the teaching of one chosen course: color theory. Two groups of students from a polytechnic university in central Taiwan were chosen as research subjects, and an experiment was designed and performed to explore the effects of multiple intelligences teaching on the experimental group, versus that of traditional teaching on the control group. Students from the experimental group performed significantly better than students in the control group on an actual hands-on design project assignment

A Study of the Effectiveness of Collaborative Teaching in the “Introduction to Design” Course

[[abstract]]ABSTRACT This research incorporated a collaborative teaching model into a selected “introduction to design” course in order to explore its influences on students’ learning effectiveness. The research subjects were selected from a polytechnic university in central Taiwan, and included 59 freshmen from the commercial design department and 57 from the spatial design department. After detailed analysis, the following conclusions have been drawn: (1) none of the pre-test results for any of the units in the professional theory have reached a significant level for students from either department. This means their pre-requisite knowledge for the introduction to design course is homogeneous. (2) The incorporation of a collaborative teaching model can improve students’ learning effectiveness. (3) The students from the commercial design department have greater improvement in learning effectiveness than those from the spatial design department. (4) Both the teachers and the students showed a positive attitude towards the incorporation of the collaborative teaching model