Quality Matters
The 33rd meeting of the Reference Material Committee of ISO, ISO/REMCO was held in Hangzhou (China) from 3 to 7 May 2010, and was hosted by the Standardisation Administration of China and the China Association of Standardisation. ISO/REMCO now has a membership of 70 members of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and liaison with 18 international organisations and seven ISO-internal committees. The new ISO TC liaison introduced at this meeting is with ISO/TC 158 “Analysis of gases”, with Dr Adriaan van der Veen acting as the REMCO liaison officer.
ISO Standard ISO 17025 is the cornerstone of the “Measured Once, Trusted Everywhere” concept and the accreditation of labs and testing establishment to ISO 17025 by accreditation bodies underpins the credibility. ISO 17025 is all about facilitating the free movement of goods and services and so helps to eliminate monopolies, cartels and all sorts of anti-competitive activities.
Peter Jenks
the Jenks Partnership, Newhaven House, Junction Road, Alderbury, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP5 3AZ, UK
ISO 17025 has been with us now for 12 years and in some industry sectors it is getting hard to find a commercial laboratory offering chemical testing that is not accredited to ISO 17025 for some or all of its scope. In just 12 short years the importance of “quality management” to a laboratory has undergone a seismic shift.
Christopher Burgess
Burgess Analytical Consultancy Limited, ‘Rose Rae’, The Lendings, Startforth, Barnard Castle, Co. Durham, DL 12 9AB, UK
John Hammond
Starna Scientific Ltd, 52–54 Fowler Road, Hainault Business Park, Hainault, Essex, IG6 3UT, UK
Continuing the series of articles on spectroscopy, we return principally to the UV-visible area of the spectrum, but this time to the science of luminescence (fluorescence and phosphorimetry), in all its many forms. Given the diversity of the application areas and instrument types available, in such an article we can only briefly give an overview of the topic and interested parties are, therefore, recommended to follow-up the listed references for more in-depth discussion on the points raised.
John Hammond
Starna Scientific Ltd, 52–54 Fowler Road, Hainault Business Park, Hainault, Essex, IG6 3UT, UK
The Irish writer George Bernard Shaw once said: “England and America are two countries divided by a common language”. Whilst this statement generally refers to the over 4000 words in everyday use in the United States that are not in British English, in the scientific world “is it metre or meter”, or for spectroscopists, nanometre or nanometer?
However, irrespective of that debate, whatever the spelling, terms such as these have associated definitions, found in various reference texts, such as dictionaries, vocabularies or databases, and if we cannot agree on the spelling, what chance of achieving consistency in definition?
Fortunately, help is at hand, and it is the recent introduction of a “Concept Database” by ISO which has prompted this article.
Detailed below are just a few of the “databases” now available, and examination of the term “Resolution” is used as an example of each.
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Friday, September 3, 2010
