Wet work is the main cause of occupational contact dermatitis in the cleaning industry. Dermatologists and occupational physicians need to base their primary and secondary prevention for workers in the cleaning industry on the characteristics of wet work exposures. We quantified the burden of wet work in professional office cleaning activities with a continuous standardized observation by train...

In this paper, we use the bootstrap technique to obtain prediction errors for different claim reserving methods, namely methods based on the chain ladder technique and on generalised linear models. We discuss several forms of performing the bootstrap and illustrate the different solutions using the data set from Taylor and Ashe (1983) which has already been used by several authors.

Articles from this issue of the Bulletin indicate that clinicians are frequently adopting clinical practices that have not been supported by an evidence base. Examples of these practices are prescribing more than one antipsychotic and reserving clozapine for patients who have had multiple antipsychotic trials. This commentary suggests that these practices can be used to define important researc...

This paper describes an interdisciplinary experiment in controlling semi-autonomous animated human forms with natural language input. These computer-generated characters resemble traditional stage actors, in that they are more autonomous than traditional hand-guided animated characters, and less autonomous than fully improvisational agents. We introduce the desktop tkeatev metaphor, reserving f...

The log normal reserving model is considered. The contribution of the paper is to derive explicit expressions for the maximum likelihood estimators. These are expressed in terms of development factors which are geometric averages. The distribution of the estimators is derived. It is shown that the analysis is invariant to traditional measures for exposure.

In this work we study one of the possible approaches to the optimization of the distribution of reserving files at the nodes of a network based on the reliability criterion. To estimate reliability we use an approach related to the notion of a “reliability order” parameter.

The Munich chain-ladder method for claims reserving was introduced by Quarg and Mack on an axiomatic basis. We analyze these axioms, and we define a modified Munich chain-ladder method which is based on an explicit stochastic model. This stochastic model then allows us to consider claims prediction and prediction uncertainty for the Munich chain-ladder method in a consistent way.

Buchwalder et al. [2] have illustrated that there are different approaches for the derivation of an estimate for the estimation error in the chain ladder reserving method. In this paper we demonstrate that these approaches give estimates that are for typical parameters close to each other. This is done by proving upper and lower bounds.

We describe a pricing structure for the provision of IT services that ensures trust without requiring repeated interactions between service providers and users. It does so by offering a pricing structure that elicits truthful reporting of QoS by providers while making them profitable. This mechanism also induces truth-telling on the part of users reserving the service.