Dr Michael Maran, Chief Science Officer, Catlin, was recently welcomed to the Radar subscriber group as from 1st September 2012. Dr Andrew Auty, Director of Re: Liability (Oxford) Ltd, explained that the Radar service is growing in strength within the Lloyd’s market.   For more detail on the Radar service: http://www.reliabilityoxford.co.uk/radar/. Contact: andrew@reliabilityoxford.co.uk .

The author was asked to prepare an IMC lecture, to be presented in Cambridge. The lecture began with some good advice before moving on to examples of emerging risk: phosphates, carbon nanotubes, diesel exhausts and breast cancer. Subscribers to the Radar service can get the technical details on these topics; the good advice is summarised below. Change is continuous. The problem: Head office could spend all their time analysing changes in exposure. In practice, trigger levels are used to reduce wasted effort. These thresholds filter out the noise, result – only the big changes are to be evaluated and re-judged. If the portfolio is big enough the net effect of small changes, may average out. Sounds good, but the human response to this approach is always to make sure that any estimate of change comes to just below the trigger level.  Moving exposure out of the reckoning is not good practice, but may be convenient both in terms of apparent competitiveness and gives increased confiden