Hi Martin and Richard, The world consists of ordinary people and lawmakers. As ordinary people we must comply with laws, and respect the wisdom behind laws. On the other hand, ordinary people also have some ways to express their views on the current laws in modern democratic society. All lawmaker should respect public opinions as well.
In EMC/Safety world, compliance engineers are ordinary people, and committees are lawmakers. Can we find some way to improve the communication between lawmakers and ordinary people? I think the EMC-PSTC forum is a good place for lawmakers to listen to public opinions and explain their intentions. Best Regards, Barry Ma b...@anritsu.com -------------------------- On Fri, 24 March 2000, Rich Nute wrote: Hi Martin: There are three issues in your message: 1) compliance to the standard; 2) reasonableness or appropriateness of the standard; 3) value added to the product through compliance. You point out that messages posted to this list address compliance to the standard, but not the other two issues. I believe the nature of the issues is such that we can effectively address compliance issues and resolve them but not the other two. A committee addresses the content of standards. Discussion of the value of the limits and of other content of a standard is only effective insofar as members of this listserver are also members of the committee. We have a few committee members as subscribers, but not all committee members are subscribers. So, a broad discussion of standards contents cannot be brought to a conclusion through the subscribers to this listserver. I have often commented on contents of safety standards, but such comments are not effective in changing the standards; to change a standard I must make a very specific input to the committee or to a member of a committee who agrees that the issue should be addressed by the committee. For political reasons, committee members are reluctant to share their views in a public forum such as this. The view may be mistaken as an "official" interpretation or position of the committee. "Official" outputs of standards committees are the minutes and the draft standards produced by the committees. For comments on those standards to be considered, the comments on those outputs must be through the "official" channels for such comments, not in a public forum such as this listserver. So, discussion of the appropriateness of the standard or its contents is largely ineffective in this forum. Its not that we don't have concerns regarding the contents and appropriateness of standards, its that this is not an effective place for such discussions. The same comments can be said for the value added to a product by virtue of compliance to the standard. We all have doubts as to some or all of the requirements being of value. But, expression of those doubts here will not be effective in implementing any change. Of course, the regulatory engineer's place is to question the appropriateness of a standard and its contents. And we do so. Some of us sit on the committees that draft and change the standards. But, we can't all sit on the committees; the committees would be huge and unwieldly. Whether or not safety and EMC standards make this world a better place is an interesting question. I think the EMC standards are effective in doing this. Emission and susceptibility limits establish compatibility that normal equipment operation is assured. I'm not sure safety standards are effective because we don't have a solid engineering basis for the safety standards. Instead, safety standards are based on inversion of bad experiences. This is not a good, systematic approach for predicting injury and providing safeguards -- which is what we SHOULD be doing in product safety. Best regards, Rich ____________________________________________________________________ For the largest MP3 index on the Web, go to http://mp3.altavista.com ____________________________________________________________________ ------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE EMC Society Product Safety Technical Committee emc-pstc discussion list. To cancel your subscription, send mail to: majord...@ieee.org with the single line: unsubscribe emc-pstc For help, send mail to the list administrators: Jim Bacher: jim_bac...@mail.monarch.com Michael Garretson: pstc_ad...@garretson.org For policy questions, send mail to: Richard Nute: ri...@ieee.org
