Cyber Insurance: recent advances, good practices & challenges

The aim of this ENISA report is to raise awareness for the most impact to market advances, by shortly identifying the most significant cyber insurance developments for the past four years – during 2012 to 2016 – and to capture the good practices and challenges during the early stages of the cyber insurance lifecycle, i.e. before an actual policy is signed, laying the ground for future work in the area

Measuring the Monument: fibre optic sensor systems show why Hooke’s and Wren’s plans for a giant telescope within the Monument in London failed

Fibre optic sensor systems have often been used for structural health monitoring applications, usually on bridges, in tunnels and sewers and in various infrastructure where installation is usually only affected by access. This work has tackled a problem of structural monitoring on one of London’s iconic historic buildings, where installation of the chosen fibre optic sensors had to be very carefully planned and agreed with the building owners who imposed severe limits to avoid creating any damage to the structure. Given these restrictions, a fibre optic sensor system was designed and installed to enable the accurate determination of the structural parameters of the building, solving a 350-year-old question of why the building was not able to be used for its original subsidiary purpose, from its design by Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren, as a telescope. Results of on-going research and analysis are reported

Chemical treatment of olive pomace: Effect on acid-basic properties and metal biosorption capacity

In this study, olive pomace, an agricultural waste that is very abundant in Mediterranean area, was modified by two chemical treatments in order to improve its biosorption capacity. Potentiometric titrations and IR analyses were used to characterise untreated olive pomace (OP), olive pomace treated by phosphoric acid (PAOP) and treated by hydrogen peroxide (HPOP). Acid-base properties of all investigated biosorbents were characterised by two main kinds of active sites, whose nature and concentration were determined by a mechanistic model assuming continuous distribution for the proton affinity constants. Titration modelling denoted that all investigated biosorbents (OP, PAOP and HPOP) were characterised by the same kinds of active sites (carboxylic and phenolic), but with different total concentrations with PAOP richer than OP and HPOP. Single metal equilibrium studies in batch reactors were carried out to determine the capacity of these sorbents for copper and cadmium ions at constant pH. Experimental data were analysed and compared using the Langmuir isotherm. The order of maximum uptake capacity of copper and cadmium ions on different biosorbents was PAOP > HPOP > OP. The maximum adsorption capacity of copper and cadmium, was obtained as 0.48 and 0.10 mmol/g, respectively, for PAOP. Metal biosorption tests in presence of Na+ in solution were also carried out in order to evaluate the effect of chemical treatment on biomass selectivity. These data showed that PAOP is more selective for cadmium than the other sorbents, while similar selectivity was observed for copper. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved