Life Expectancy: Does my Insurance Company know about This?

In the previous post about life expectancy, we looked at some data of the last 20 years and extrapolated linearly. It seemed as if men and women would finally live equally long somewhere in the next decennium.

While thinking and reading about the way life expectancy is calculated, it struck me that the calculation is not fair. I started out describing the way the calculation is done and why I think it is wrong. During this, I found out that the Wikipedia page about this topic already contained the answer:

It is important to note that this statistic is usually based on past mortality experience, and assumes that the same age-specific mortality rates will continue into the future. Thus such life expectancy figures are not generally appropriate for calculating how long any given individual of a particular age is expected to live. But they are a useful statistic to summarize the current health status of a population.

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy)

Basically, in the calculation, one assumes that when you are born does not influence the probability with which you will die (at a certain age). This is obviously false.

The article further describes that models exist to adjust the probabilities used in the calculations in order to correct for this systematic underestimation.

Can someone guarantee me that my insurance company uses a corrected statistic instead of the original one? I’m afraid they think I’ll die 10 years earlier than statistically expected and thus charge me too much money?!

Life Expectancy: The difference between male and female

In this post on FlowingData, some interesting statistics are shown about life expectancy in the US.

Ever wondered why insurance companies have higher rates for men than women? The main reason is that on average, women live longer than men. In other words, the risk of dying for a man of, say 50, is higher than for a woman of that age.

Why is this? I have some ideas, but no means to prove them. What can be studied from the data is the evolution of life expectancy and the consequences of this evolution. When looking at US data for the last 20 years, simple (linear) extrapolation tells us that in 2047, men and women will have the same average age. Looking at the data for Belgium, the year is 2074.

I will probably be long dead by then, but according to this linear extrapolation, my grandchildren will have children that have life expectancies of 93 years!

I agree, linear extrapolation is an approximation. But the tendency is there: men's life expectancy is getter higher at a slightly faster pace than women's.

More about this topic (including some cool graphs) later.

How to cope with change: An alternative approach

CHANGE...

A lot of people are involved in change: Every project is a change, and every change should be a project. In project management, one is used to document risks of the project and think about how to mitigate those risks. Sometimes, mitigating the risks can be costly. But on the other hand, having the risks and the possibility that something goes wrong may cost more.

A risk that is often forgotten in projects (and thus also in processes of change) is the one of 'changing people's mind'. Letting a human being start working (or even thinking) differently is a great challenge.

In other words, there is a technological barrier and a mental barrier to any project or change process. Both generate their own set of risks to be taken into account. In many cases the mental barrier is forgotten or at least underestimated.

A technique that is widely adopted in situations like this is 'chunking' the technology: go step-by-step. Start small, but gradually extend the scope of the change. Doing this on a technical level usually also impacts the mental barrier.

Recently, I was talking to a project manager for a technology company involved in the 'people change' process in relation to nanotechnology and its applications in biomedicine. He told me that the mental aspect of the whole project, the fact that little things enter our body, or even remain there for years, is to a large extend not yet common ground in our society. This is a considerable risk for the development of new applications of nanotechnology.

In order to mitigate this risk, the project manager told me they sometimes developed a completely different product first (and freezed the other project) because this new product was easier 'to sell'. So basically, you develop something in parallel in order for people to feel comfortable with this change because it will make future changes easier.

"But this costs a lot of money!" Yes, obviously, but so does developing a product that has a high risk of not being adopted because the mental leap is too big.

Did you encounter situations where the parallel development approach might have been successful? Please share it with us in the comments.

A new project...

Long time ago... I used to blog every now and then. It used to be about technology.

I changed focus in my professional career and in the meanwhile started a few other projects that limit my time to spend blogging. It is not that I do not have any ideas anymore, quite the contrary, but they usually involve extensive thinking/writing.

One project recently started is the writing of a book. When people ask me where I got the idea of writing a book, I usually answer that it has always been there, I only needed a topic to write about. Chatting with my good friend Koen Vermeir (see for instance here) we came to the conclusion that we were talking a lot about the same things, from different perspectives. We decided it was time to note that down.

Don't expect a printed copy any time soon, we gave ourselves 5 years! Stay tuned for more info though...

Why Personal Productivity may be Hard and 'The Corporation' has the answer

Eli has drawn my attention to 'The Corporation'. Shame on me for not knowing and having seen this documentary before (1). One word struck me when I heard it, because it is a topic I wanted to discuss already for quite some time in a different context: Accountability.

What does it have to do with personal productivity then?

I'm involved in quite some thinking about IT and business processes lately. Defining the process is generally easy, the measurement of their performance both from a process as well as a quality/content point of view is much more difficult (2). One thing, though, that is a core component of every step in the process is defining the person who is accountable, which is usually different from the person who is responsible for doing the work. Usually, people use a so-called RACI diagram to define the respective roles for every step in a process or task.

Personal Productivity is all about processes (think GTD, for instance) and personal work flow. Similarly, it's not easy to measure the quality of the process or deliverable. But what really makes personal productivity hard is the fact that one person is both accountable and responsible, or in other words: we have to 'control' our own work.

Maybe that is why we need a personal assistent?


(1) No, I'm not going into the details of the documentary, and I am not commenting on the reasoning of Eli at this time.
(2) No, that is also not what I wanted to talk about now (but will do in the future).