Maintaining Our International Competitiveness PDF Download

Excerpt from Maintaining Our International Competitiveness: The Importance of Standards and Conformity Assessment on Industry, Vol. 12: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Technology of the Committee on Science, U. S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, First Session, June 29, 1995 The subcommittee met at 9:30 a.m. in room 2325 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the Honorable Constance A. Morelia (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Mrs. Morella. The hearing will now come to order. I want to thank you all for being so very patient. This has somehow become very typical around here. One doesn't know from one five minutes to the next whether or not we will be running over to vote or not. We are setting a record I think certainly during this period, which I think had once been set in 1978, for the number of hours continuously where we had been voting. As you probably have heard and certainly if you watched C-Span at any point if you don't sleep well at night and turn it on at 4 in the morning there we were or 2 in the morning, and we are still in session since 10 o'clock yesterday morning. So if our eyes close just know we are still listening. If we don't get to all the questions, I hope you will allow us to be able to submit questions to you for your response. We are convening today to discuss improvements in Federal and State standards and in conformity assessment. I look forward to hearing from the very distinguished panelists regarding this subject, and again I reiterate my thanks to you. Standards play a crucial part in all facets of our lives. Standards are the reason it is possible to buy film from Japan and use the film in an American camera. They allow you to purchase any computer disc, regardless of the brand, and use it in your hard drive Under the direction of the 102nd Congress, the National Research Council released a study titled, "Standards, Conformity Assessment, and Trade in the 21st Century," and that came out in March. The study made 10 recommendations, which I look forward to addressing more closely in today's hearing. The United States, unlike most other countries, has a very decentralized voluntary consensus standards system. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.