Word: grahams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...medical history are important. Smoking can knock 10 to 15 years off of an otherwise healthy person's life, and diabetes, obesity, blood pressure, heart disease and cholesterol all factor prominently into formulas life insurance companies use to estimate applicants' life expectancies and set rates for policies, says Paul Graham, VP and chief actuary at the American Council of Life Insurers, an industry trade association...
...World events can also play a role; avian flu, if it begins to spread from human to human on a large scale, instead of from bird to human, could cause upwards of 1 million deaths according to some estimates - and that's getting the attention of life insurance companies, Graham says. "That's the biggest event we're watching, much more than terrorism...
...Seems like everybody wants a little piece of that Kennedy magic—Anthony Hopkins, Lindsay Lohan, Sharon Stone, Elijah Wood, William H. Macy, Demi Moore, Martin Sheen, Heather Graham, Helen Hunt, and Christian Slater to name a few. Unfortunately, this over-the-top movie star-apalooza merely signals what’s to come—a bombardment of hyperbolic political maxims and religious statements that are better suited for an Al Sharpton rally than a thoughtful movie...
...that's a dangerous problem. When our emotions overtake our reasoning we worry about sensational events which are statistically unlikely to harm us - such as airline disasters, shark attacks, or terrorism - rather than everyday dangers that kill thousands. John Graham, who spent four years as administrator of the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, says news of SUV tire failures left him besieged with demands for tire pressure warning systems even though government reports listed 41 car-crash deaths per year due to under-inflated tires, versus 9,800 deaths from side-impact crashes. "People's capacity to visualize...
...rather than the rule. "Television," he says, "messes up the probabilistic mapping you have of the world." Our questionable math skills don't help either; most people have trouble distinguishing the statistical difference between one chance in 1,000 and one chance in ten million. "Both sound small," says Graham, "but one is ten-thousand-fold more likely." Understanding those numbers, rather than taking what Sunstein calls a "risk-of-the-month" approach, will save lives. "Right now we've got a lot of concern about vivid events," Sunstein says. "We'd do much better with a more disciplined approach...