In 1992, I wrote an article on a method of modifying the Decennial US Life Table to accommodate any pattern of excess mortality expressed in terms of excess death rate (EDR), for the specific purpose of calculating the reduced life expectancy, e. I believe this was the first article published in the Journal of Insurance Medicine (JIM) that dealt specifically with life expectancy as an index of ...

In the statistical literature, there has been considerable development of methods of data releases for multivariate categorical data sets, where the releases come in the form of marginal and conditional tables corresponding to subsets of the categorical variables. In this chapter we provide an overview of this methodology and we relate it to the literature on the release of association rules wh...

For 2 × 2 × K contingency tables, Tomizawa considered a Shannon entropy type measure to represent the degree of departure from a log-linear model of no three-factor interaction (the NOTFI model). This paper proposes a generalization of Tomizawa’s measure for 2 × 2 × K tables. The measure proposed is expressed by using Patil-Taillie diversity index or Cressie-Read power-divergence. A special cas...

Attempts to understand how information content can be included in an accounting of the energy flux of the biosphere have led to the conclusion that, in information transmission, one component, the semantic content, or “the meaning of the message,” adds no thermodynamic burden over and above costs arising from coding, transmission and translation. In biology, semantic content has two major roles...