Grasso, Charles wrote:
> Product Safety has an implied rational self interest component. After all
> what person in their right mind would ship a non-compliant product?
>
> Emissions has a much lower acceptability as the net benefit to "humanity"
> is at best obscure. What's really needed is a public education campaign to
> sell the benefits of EMC and - you know what - if we can't do it maybe its
> time to reevaluate the entire discipline?
In my experience, management gives preferential
treatment to EMC over safety. More people,
more equipment, more education.
I admit a bit of jealousy for my EMC
colleagues. They seem to be in the forefront
of product development processes, and they
get a lot of beneficial management attention.
They have marvelous, well-attended annual
symposia, and a number of really good
publications. And, they have academia behind
them, doing research.
Safety processes are easy compared to EMC
processes. While there may be an "implied
rational self interest" in shipping a safe
and compliant product, the effort in doing
so is miniscule compared to EMC. However,
the consequences of an error are orders of
magnitude greater for safety than EMC.
My experience with the general public is
neither safety nor EMC is of particular
interest (unless a problem occurs). For
casual conversation, I don't often reveal
the nature of my engineering activity; its
a conversation stopper and an eyebrow
raiser (safety is a big enough deal that
they need someone to do it?). I doubt
that EMC is a conversation stopper.
Indeed, the net benefit of EMC and safety
to humanity is obscure! No matter what
we do, we won't fix this. Indeed, the
better we do our jobs, the more obscure
we become!
Hey! If you want to do work that is
recognized by the public, get involved in
the environmental regulatory issues! At
the moment, these get lots of publicity.
Best regards,
Rich
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