This text is a reflection on the fate of a special kind of scientific object - anatomy collections - and their place in contemporary times. Though the phenomenon of keeping and displaying such collections is generally dying out, those specimens which survive continue to puzzle and fascinate us. To understand the current status of such collections, and the nostalgia evoked by the specimens within them, I argue, we should approach them as modern ruins. This allows us to think of them as places of absence, pointing to unfinished lives and unfinished scientific projects. The paper begins with the story of a preserved human face from the Francis I. Rainer anatomical-anthropological collection (Bucharest), and continues by discussing the fate of that collection, and of anatomy collections more widely. Ultimately, the paper asks, what is it that we want to preserve: specimens, practices, or research philosophies?

Þóra Pétursdóttir raises the point that archaeology is limited regarding what it can achieve, including the challenges posed by the Anthropocene, by a series of theoretical assumptions. She challenges the ‘traditional’ archaeological ‘key tropes’ in matters of this new epoch, namely the concepts of culture history, deep time/distant pasts, and the nature–culture divide. Instead, she proposes a number of new guiding points to orient archaeological inquiries, framed as part of the object-oriented ontological (OOO) philosophies. In reply, I claim that the use of OOO theories is rather unhelpful for addressing the topic of the Anthropocene, given that they lead to important ethical and political consequences: a fetishization of things, an abandoning of responsibility and an alienation of humans. They are also based on the confusion that analytical distinctions are in some way the ones responsible for the existence of inequalities, ecological destruction, racism or discrimination. Paradoxically, precisely through their annihilation, there is no room left for acknowledging the alterity of the past.

In this paper, the density of the time to ruin is studied in the context of the classical compound Poisson risk model. Both one-dimensional and two-dimensional Fourier-cosine series expansions are used to approximate the density of the time to ruin, and the approximation errors are also obtained. Some numerical examples are also presented to show that the proposed method is very efficient.

In the setting of the classical Cramér–Lundberg risk insurance model, Albrecher and Hipp (2007) introduced the idea of tax payments. More precisely, if X = {Xt: t≥ 0} represents the Cramér–Lundberg process and, for all t≥ 0, St=sup_{s≤ t}Xs, then Albrecher and Hipp studied Xt - γ St,t≥ 0, where γ∈(0,1) is the rate at which tax is paid. This model has been generalised to the setting that X is a spectrally negative Lévy process by Albrecher, Renaud and Zhou (2008). Finally, Kyprianou and Zhou (2009) extended this model further by allowing the rate at which tax is paid with respect to the process S = {St: t≥ 0} to vary as a function of the current value of S. Specifically, they considered the so-called perturbed spectrally negative Lévy process, Ut:=Xt -∫(0,t]γ(S_u)dSu,t≥ 0, under the assumptions that γ:[0,∞)→ [0,1) and ∫0∞ (1-γ(s))d s =∞. In this article we show that a number of the identities in Kyprianou and Zhou (2009) are still valid for a much more general class of rate functions γ:[0,∞)→∝. Moreover, we show that, with appropriately chosen γ, the perturbed process can pass continuously (i.e. creep) into (-∞, 0) in two different ways.

We consider a Markov additive process (MAP) with phase-type jumps, starting at 0. Given a positive level u, we determine the joint distribution of the undershoot and overshoot of the first jump over the level u, the maximal level before this jump, the time of attaining this maximum, and the time between the maximum and the jump. The analysis is based on first passage times and time reversion of MAPs. A marginal of the derived distribution is the Gerber-Shiu function, which is of interest to insurance risk. Several examples serve to compare the present result with the literature.

In the spirit of Albrecher and Hipp (2007), and Albrecher, Renaud, and Zhou (2008) we consider a Lévy insurance risk model with tax payments of a more general structure than in the aforementioned papers, which was also considered in Albrecher, Borst, Boxma, and Resing (2009). In terms of scale functions, we establish three fundamental identities of interest which have stimulated a large volume of actuarial research in recent years. That is to say, the two-sided exit problem, the net present value of tax paid until ruin, as well as a generalized version of the Gerber–Shiu function. The method we appeal to differs from Albrecher and Hipp (2007), and Albrecher, Renaud, and Zhou (2008) in that we appeal predominantly to excursion theory.

We provide a distributional study of the solution to the classical control problem due to De Finetti (1957), Gerber (1969), Azcue and Muler (2005), and Avram et al. (2007), which concerns the optimal payment of dividends from an insurance risk process prior to ruin. Specifically, we build on recent work in the actuarial literature concerning calculations of the nth moment of the net present value of dividends paid out in the optimal strategy as well as the moments of the deficit at ruin and the Laplace transform of the red period. The calculations we present go much further than the existing literature, in that our calculations are valid for a general spectrally negative Lévy process as opposed to the classical Cramér–Lundberg process with exponentially distributed jumps. Moreover, the technique we use appeals principally to excursion theory rather than integro-differential equations and, for the case of the nth moment of the net present value of dividends, makes a new link with the distribution of integrated exponential subordinators.

In this short note we show how new fluctuation identities and their associated asymptotics, given in Vigon (2002), Klüppelberg et al. (2004) and Doney and Kyprianou (2006), provide the basis for establishing, in an elementary way, asymptotic overshoot and undershoot distribitions for a general class of Lévy insurance risk processes. The results bring the earlier conclusions of Asmussen and Klüppelberg (1996) for the Cramér-Lundberg process into greater generality.

We consider several one-period reinsurance models and derive a rule which minimizes the ruin probability of the cedent for a fixed reinsurance risk premium. The premium is calculated according to the economic principle, generalized zero-utility principle, Esscher principle or mean-variance principles. It turns out that a truncated stop loss is an optimal treaty in the class of all reinsurance contracts. The result is also valid for models not involving ruin probability. An example is the Arrow model with the Kahneman-Tversky value function.

Consider a classical compound Poisson model. The safety loading can be positive, negative or zero. Explicit expressions for the distributions of the surplus prior and at ruin are given in terms of the ruin probability. Moreover, the asymptotic behaviour of these distributions as the initial capital tends to infinity are obtained. In particular, for positive safety loading the Cramer case, the case of subexponential distributions and some intermediate cases are discussed.

The theory of piecewise-deterministic Markov processes is used in order to investigate insurance risk models where borrowing, investment and inflation are present.

We show how ruin probabilities for the classical continuous time compound Poisson model can be approximated by ruin probabilities for a compound binomial model. We also discuss ruin related results for a compound binomial model with geometric claim amounts.

The compound binomial model is a discrete time analogue (or approximation) of the compound Poisson model of classical risk theory. In this paper, several results are derived for the probability of ruin as well as for the joint distribution of the surpluses immediately before and at ruin. The starting point of the probabilistic arguments are two series of random variables with a surprisingly simple expectation (Theorem 1) and a more classical result of the theory of random walks (Theorem 2) that is best proved by a martingale argument.

In the usual model of the collective risk theory, we are interested in the severity of ruin, as well as its probability. As a quantitative measure, we propose G(u, y), the probability that for given initial surplus u ruin will occur and that the deficit at the time of ruin will be less than y, and the corresponding density g(u, y). First a general answer in terms of the transform is obtained. Then, assuming that the claim amount distribution is a combination of exponential distributions, we determine g; here the roots of the equation that defines the adjustment coefficient play a central role. An explicit answer is also given in the case in which all claims are of constant size.