Electronics Engineers are Scared to Accept Challenges

Dear Jaime Soto

In India we pay 25% to that price and there are several hundreds of companies. The problem we talked about is of general nature and not that very serious one. It is more profitable for you to get the work done in India, China, Singapore, Korea. Malaysia, Thailand. I do not know much about Pakistan but they must be doing it fairly good at low cost there also.

I found a lot of problem buying electronics and circuit board processing in Latin America as most of the companies were sending the PCB work to USA and were not doing in their countries. I met people from Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Mexico, Guatemala etc. Name of person from Chile was Rafael. As my meeting is way back in 1988, I assume that your country might have progressed a great deal. I also learnt at that time that Chile is a mixed race Spanish speaking country. Only people from Brazil were Portuguese speaking and were calling George as Horhe.

I felt great about Chilean white wine and Mate. I will love those two things and if you come to India, then this could be a great business stuff here. India now has great money in IT sector and young people love things like white wine and can pay good money for it. Your country should not miss this opportunity and it can change the scenario of your country as it is billion dollar business here now. I am not sure about mate as local tea is more competitive but I do like the taste of green, coco-nut shell stuffed mate with metal straw, and hot water.

I think it is time for all Latin American countries to get linked to India, a very friendly country and make your life much better in coming years. You can also fly to Singapore from Madras city in 3-hours and can have greater fun.

I know this is just a realy stupid question but didn't you do a qualifying production run with this fabricator first? If copper in the logo is an issue tell them to silkscreen the logo and the high voltage issue is fixed. then have them rework the boards where copper was used for the logo. But from everything you have said you are at fault for creating more waste because you accepted the boards and started using them without a qualifying run.

You ask "Who is responsible for it?", the answer is you. I don't mean to be rude but from what you have said I have come to the conclusion that you are not prepared to deal with the manufacturing side of product design or contract negotiations. I would recommend that you team up with someone that can help you in this area.

Yep.

And on the earlier topic of "They're using my boards to advertise their company!", well, let's just assume that's exactly what they're doing (I seriously doubt it, but that's a topic for another day). Hell, if they want to use your products to advertise their services, then let 'em - and get paid for it. Charge 'em for the privilege (and put it in the contract)! Nor, as the previous poster said, do their logo/batch codes need to be fabricated in copper. And if there are high-voltage and/or high impedance areas on your board, conformal coat the board. Glass/epoxy boards (and please don't say you're using phenolic. Please?) is hygroscopic - it absorbs moisture. Conformal-coat the boards and have them screen their info on top of that. If they want to advertise, then let 'em. This isn't a problem Shyam. It's an opportunity - and one you're largely ignoring.

No, these are are 2.4-mm thick double sided Glass Epoxy material PCB with lots of ground screen for shielding RF and are meant for high quality nuclear and space application and I paid double the amount to get the work done in quality and to my specifications and yet this person spoils the job.

Had they not done something they did and for that mistake which spoiled the boards, their other work is good and better than any one else does in India. I can not out right call them bullshit. I think they will do a good job in future and are friendly people. I am simply reacting to what they did on my 400 boards and for which I promised to pay very high. I care for good work and good people and I also react badly to their bad habits. Now they know they did wrong and will never dare to repeat it. If I charge for LOGO advertizement then there total factory value will be the cost of advertizement and I do not want to take over their factory. I will like them to continue doing things in a proper way.

He now willing to clean his shit on my PCBs, because he is responsible. Actually he degraded his company status by doing so and had he asked, before, I might have advised properly.

It is not the identification but his company LOGO he placed in copper in wrong area.

Think this is your board, you make a design using $12000 software and send to a person who asks double money and then sends this board to you. What is you are going to react to? Call it your mistake? Then you are a good punch bag I suppose. If you react and fire the man then I think your reaction is normal.

Shyam writes: "If I charge for LOGO advertizement then there total factory value will be the cost of advertizement and I do not want to take over their factory."

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Huh?

These PCB manufacturers in India are small scale factories and their total asset will be less than a salary of an engineer in USA for an year. However, they do a job for me which will give $4000 x 400 amplifiers = $1,600,000 if I get good PCB, manufacture them properly and sell them all. They have caused problem in my that much level of business plans and wasted time of mine and my other engineers who were to build these amplifiers. I usually do not reply on one person and have given boards to 5 fellows and out then only one did a good job and good number of these amplifiers were made and sold out now. The next production will start again with only selected people who did good job.

I do not work in small volume and low price zone. I take lot of pains in design and each part is tested. Still we run into lots of problems at times and these are part of our business. I am working for my goal to become few billion dollars worth business in less than 10 years and that requires highly dynamic plans and quick solutions. I will now move these facilities within my own factory areas and will not reply on out side supports for long. These are initial level hurdles and I am concentrating on products more than on production plans. By next year, things will change as huge money will be dumped into the business to make it visible to the world.

Dear John

If I accept advertisement fee for the problem created by them then in next product it becomes their right to place an advertisement wherever they wish to place and in fact, they can send a board with only LOGO of their and no-circuit of mine at all. Even advertisement is something that the agency plans on the advertising media.

This company forced on me something in a very bad way, which I disagree to accept as I have not agreed for it. I agreed only for payment if they do my PCB as per my Gerber files, on my specified material, in my specified procedures. Neither I have asked them to place their company LOGO nor they requested me to allow that, It is placed by them as their will and fancy which I rejected as outrageous and stupid move and called their work useless and not as per my specifications and drawings.

Hi Shyam,

Just out of curiosity does you company have ISO 9000 or India's equivalent certification?

In Australia it is called ASO 9000 but it is primarily the same thing just modified slightly for Australian conditions. If you wish to deal with any sort of government body or regulated industry you must have ASO 9000 certification. No certification means you can't even submit a tender or quote on a jub.

In India, both ISO9000 and local ISO14000 are in practice. There are other certifications also in India like ISI. If I have to supply to Refinaries then they also need certification from their specified agencies. Hence, ISO9000 alone does not work in India. Our new production line will be certified by multiple agencies as my cirrent facility is rsearch facility and not a real production line. I use ISO9000 certified companies to produce my goods, so you can say, they are certified for International use.

Hi Shyam,

• In India, both ISO9000 and local ISO14000 are in practice. There are other certifications also in India like ISI. If I have to supply to Refinaries then they also need certification from their specified agencies. Hence, ISO9000 alone does not work in India.

ISO-9000 is not designed as an all industry wide total certification process on its own but rather a system that allows quality and fault tracking to a level that complies with the given standards. It is normal that there are other standards for certain industries that will need to be complied with in addition to the ISO-9000 certification and these additional standards will vary form industry to industry, country to country and even from project to project.

Put simply ISO-9000 is a way of tracking faults and problems so that the source of the fault or problem can be traced. It also allows you to trace items that you have produced and either sold or supplied to customers or other divisions of you company in a way that enables you to contact the appropriate parties and arrange for suspect equipment to be either inspected, replace or repaired

Whether you actually bother to recall or repair faulty equipment is a whole different matter but the important part that is required for certification is tracking system.

It is also common for other standards to refer back to ISO-9000 and use it as an addendum to that standard so that systems are not duplicated.. For example you may have a standard for the petrochemical industry that has a whole host of physical standards that that need to be complied with for the prevention of explosions that also stipulates that ISO-9000 must also be complied with. That way they do not have to go and stipulate all the record keeping that is required and prevent duplication.

The reason I asked was that if you do have ISO-9000 or the Indian equivalent, then the company that supplied the blank PCB had no option but to add a serial number. Since they implied in their letter to you that it was necessary for them to add the information they did then I would suspect that they were ISO-9000 certified and as such had no option but to add the information they did.

ISO-9000 is specifically designed to track faults exactly like the one that showed up with the boards with the added artwork. If there was no way to track the individual boards and they didn't fail immediately but rather some time later, after they had been distributed and were in use, you would have no way or tracking where the fault originated. You would have no way of knowing which of your suppliers had manufactured the blank PCB. Even worse you would also have no way of knowing which of the pieces of equipment that had already been distributed contained the faulty boards and would therefore have no way of contacting the affected customers or users to enable inspection and or repair as necessary.

I am afraid that that's just the way it is and if you wish to work with other ISO-9000 or equivalent certified customers then you have absolutely no option but to do exactly what the supplier of the boards did when they added their logo and part numbers etcetera.

I agree that they should have contacted you prior to inserting it and just doing it on their own fruition was wrong but if you go after them legally they will just turn around and say that you should have realized that they needed to add the data they did and if the location was critical then it was up to you to stipulate exactly where they could insert the information. If they didn't insert it they would have been in breach of ISO-9000 and could easily loose there certification.

The whole ISO-9000 certification can be a real pain in the backside and usually goes way to far with the depth and details that need to be kept but it is a fact of life and if you wish to play with companies that have ISO-9000 certification you have no option but to comply.

The company I worked for back in the 1980 and early 1990s went through gaining ASO-9000 certification and it took nearly 3 years to comply with what needed to be done. Basically we needed to be able to track the history down to field replaceable sub assembly and had to both add a serial number to all of them and create a history that detailed what, when, where and by whom work had been carried out on each sub assembly. We also needed to keep track of which customers had each sub assembly so that in the event we located a generic fault we could then contact the relevant customers and inform them of the problem and make arrangements to replace or check the suspect sub assembly.

While we were in the process of gaining certification we had problems with $2.00 timing belts failing prematurely. It appeared to be a problem with the alignment of the timing pulleys which would cause the belt to track slightly off and rub on the edge of the pulleys, thus causing them to wear rapidly and fail prematurely. However, when we went back and looked at the records we realized that all the belts that were failing had come from a single batch that had been supplied over 12 months earlier. It had taken all that time for them to filter down through the supply chain and end up being installed in the field. It was then a simple matter to look at the records and find which customers had the faulty belts installed and replace them prior to them failing. For me it saved three 6,000 km round trips that would have each taken the best part of a week to remote customers. Because I knew the belts would fail prematurely the next time I was on site I replaced the faulty belts and eliminated the fault before it failed. That's what ISO-9000 is all about.

Currently there is a lot of work being subcontracted to China and to a lesser extent India, however, by far the majority of companies in China do not have ISO-9000 certification. Given that it is not uncommon to end up with a fault per unit ration of or in excess of 1 you can understand why ISO-9000 becomes so critical

I know it's a pain but if you plan to work in the global market place I would suggest that you get ISO-9000 certification as soon as possible because it is not going to be long before you will not be able to sell anything more sophisticated than a roll of bog paper (toilet paper) without it. Also be warned because I don't think its going to be that long before even the bog roll is going to need ISO-9000.

Thanks for lots of detailed information.

ISO-9001 was in-house filtering good and bad parts. ISO-9002 forces purchase from ISO-9000 certified companies. Now that I may not find part from ISO-9000 company but easily good thing from street vendor, I will go for it. Where will you eat your food? ISO-9000 certified hotel or wherever you can expect a good tray of food. On sea beach you will buy sea food from any vendor. I am a vegetarian so I eat all that grows in farms and in India, farms are not industry so I get uncertified food for my taste.

I agree that certification process sure put some degree of confidence. You can also bribe those certification fellow and can get certified ordinary chalk as antibiotics capsules. You have to bribe them in any way as they are not going to do it without money. There is a lot of money involved in certification. Once you have certificate for packing coke then you can pack as much pesticides you want in those drink bottles and bribed fellows will defend you if you give them some more money.

It is known to the government that 33% medicine in the market are fraud. They also know that coke contains lot for pesticides than permitted. Dead animal and bone fat meant for washing soap being sold as edible vegetable oil. They do that survey and yet do nothing about it as it is good money making thing to some one out there.

The funny story in India was that Killer Charles Shobhraj in jail used to charge $100 from people who could meet him and there was a long queue who wanted to meet him to learn his way of killing and escaping from all jails. Everything that is dirty easily get sold.

One company was filtering good and bad parts, and then found more bad than good, so management was worried. They made more money from rejected bad parts as there were more buyers for those items than for good parts. All those bought bad parts did not tell their buyers that they were selling bad parts. Go to the net for any product and you will find it somewhere. Is it certified good part, no one going to ask or will tell you.

I bought few antenna very cheap 10 for $1 and these worked well. I bough from certified SWISS company another set $100 each, and these were so-so. I think those were certified for poor working.

• I agree that certification process sure put some degree of confidence. You can also bribe those certification fellow and can get certified ordinary chalk as antibiotics capsules. You have to bribe them in any way as they are not going to do it without money. There is a lot of money involved in certification. Once you have certificate for packing coke then you can pack as much pesticides you want in those drink bottles and bribed fellows will defend you if you give them some more money.

Try pulling a stunt like that in Australia and there is a very good chance that before long you will end up spending a considerable amount of time behind bars.

• It is known to the government that 33% medicine in the market are fraud.

Whilst there is no guarantee that 100% of the drugs on the Australian market are genuine the forgeries are few and far between. I can not remember hearing of such a problem but I can remember drugs being recalled due to unexpected side effects or accidental contamination.

There have been a few cases of food bore pathogens getting into the market but these are generally pretty rare and the department of health usually goes after them with great zeal and gaol time for the people that should have prevented it is a real possibility.

I am a certified glider pilot and I am also certified to carry out daily inspections of gliders and certify them safe to use. However, if I miss something and the aircraft crashes due to something I should have noticed then I am personally liable for the results and could easily loose everything and end up in gaol for manslaughter.

If India wants to have a chunk of the world market that is commensurate with its population the I would suggest they clean up their act pretty quickly.

Perhaps if I am not wrong then Britain sold their Falkland Helicopters to India in that way as most of those things never fly in the sky and are very good for fire works. There must be some good story in each country. You know how wine is made in France? It is under the legs and sometimes under the buttocks if people go a bit more crazy. If your worker has common cold and it is noodle factory in which he works, then noodles will taste a bit juicy. I got some of them that smelled DDT and when I threatened the manufacturer, then he admitted that sometime during to power fail in between the production run, noodles can not get dried so moisture ferments the noodles and you get that fungus for free. Do they document all that? I have not seen any such document yet. In China they sell Tiger as food and in Japan they sell Dolphins as sushi and I am sure they never document all that even if they have ISO-9000.

Does this mean that you accept these things as inevitable? You don't believe that we should correct them?

Dear Vulcan

Yes, I agree that code need to be followed and errors need to be corrected. People do bad engineering everywhere and cover up come right from their governments is very sad thing. I think, we all are human and position alone does not modify our character. It is for the individual to hold to the highest level by self control and mechanisms such as quality control sure can play a positive role in inhibiting the likely entry of bad players. Total elimination of bad thing may be possible but may not be practical and economical. You have to trust people and there comes problem.

Many time people fill data from their experience and approximation and not from actual research. This is a serious world wide problem. Recently, I was asked to be a referee for a research paper that was to be published in the IOP journal, I found that data shown by the author was fabricated one and was not a real experimental one as he copied one data graph for many channel VLSI chip he claimed to have developed. It is impossible to have identical data as noise will differ in shape and he has shown same shape for both noise and data for few channels. I raised this issue and asked him to give reason for presenting information in that way to the public. I can no longer trust the research of this person at all now. I can not disclose details any further and just want to say that people commit blunders, which they should have avoided. Perhaps such people think they are smart enough and no one will know if they bluff, and also at times try to take others for a ride, and this exposes them some time or the others. While, "to err is human", keeping far from it is more human.

• In China they sell Tiger as food and in Japan they sell Dolphins as sushi and I am sure they never document all that even if they have ISO-9000.

I think you will find that both are a delicacy in there relevant countries and are specifically marketed as dolphin, whale, tiger etcetera.

• You know how wine is made in France? It is under the legs and sometimes under the buttocks if people go a bit more crazy.

Where did you get that idea from. While the standards for what can be sold as wine varies throughout the world there are strict regulations in both France and Australia.

First off there are rules and regulations on what you can call a wine. You can either name the wine according to the type of grapes used to make it. For example Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, etcetera.

Alternatively you can name it according to the region where the grapes were grown. For example Champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy, Mosel, etcetera. Now many people believe that if you produce a wine using the same grapes and techniques used in the Champagne region of France then you can call that wine Champagne. This is totally false and the only wines that can be called Champagne must come from the Champagne region in France. It's the same with all the other regions and a wine mane in France, South Africa, USA etcetera can't use the name of an Australian region like Grange, Barossa, etcetera.

There are also strict rules of what can be added to wine and basically the only ingredients allowed are:

• Juice and skins from grapes or current grapes. While you can make an alcoholic beverage from other fruit juices like orange they can not be called wine.
• Yeast. There are a number of yeasts that can be used for the fermentation and you can even use the naturally occurring yeast that is found on the skin of most grapes.
• Potassium Metabisulphate and Sodium Metabisulphate. These are used to sterilize the crushed grapes and eliminate and wild yeasts or bacteria that may be on the grapes when they are crushed. This is normally done during or immediately after the crushing process and the juice is then allowed to sit so that they can evaporate off before the yeast is added. By the time the yeast is added there is normally only trace amounts of these left.
• Tartaric Acid. This occurs naturally in grapes but to a variable amount. Depending on the yeast that is used you need to adjust the pH of the juice for optimal growth and this is done by adding tartaric acid.
• Sugar. Sugar is sometimes added to the wine to cause secondary fermentation. Sparkling wines made according to the méthode champenoise have a small amount of sugar added at the time of Bottling. This then gives the remaining yeast something to feed on and produce CO₂ turning the wine into a sparkling wine.
• Carbon Dioxide CO₂. You can carbonate wines by injecting them with CO2 but if you do this you can not say that the wine was produced according to the méthode champenoise but rather a sparkling or carbonated wine.
• Oak. Wine can be allowed to age in oak barrels that vary in size from a few liters to hundreds of thousands of liters. How long the wine stays in these barrels and the age and type of oak used depends on the type, quality and complexity of the wine. For example a wine made using chardonnay grapes will stand in virgin or new oak barrique for a few months while a full bodied shiraz may stand for up to 2 years and use last years chardonnay barriques.
• Sulphur dioxide, SO₂. This us used as a preservative and anti oxidant that is normally added immediately prior to bottling. This is one of the reasons that it is important to let wine stand after being opened and prior to drinking. There are a host of other things that also evaporate off shortly after opening as well and generally you will find the wine smother and more subtle on the pallet after standing for half an hour. There is an interesting little experiment that demonstrates how a wine changes shortly after opening that you may find interesting. Next time you open a bottle of red wine pour a small amount in two separate glasses. Then take one of the glasses and after placing you hand firmly over the top of the glass to seal it shake it vigorously for a few seconds. Once all the bubbles had risen to the top then go and compare the two glasses of wine. You will be surprised at the difference and how much smother and more complex the wine that was shaken. You will also notice that while shaking the wine there is a marked pressure build up in the sealed glass.
• Hydrogen Peroxide H₂O₂. This is often used to neutralize any excess SO₂.
• Flocking Agents. There are numerous flocking agents that are used to settle any particulate matter prior to bottling. These are of no real consequence because the wine is then decanted and filtered leaving no trace of them in the final product.

That's about it. I may have missed a few minor additives that are occasionally used but basically if you add anything else you can no longer call it wine. This is also an international standard and if you wish to export you wine you must comply with these rules.

As for the crushing with your feet it's just not done. Could you imagine trying to crush a couple of tonnes of grapes under foot let alone the several thousand tonnes that the larger wineries crush. You could do it on a small scale but the health concerns are minimal because you always dose the wine with a sterilizing agent prior to adding the yeast. If you didn't then the final product would be undrinkable.

Until recently I lived south of Adelaide, South Australia, on the edge of the Southern Vales wine region. There were over 30 wineries with a 20 minute drive of our house and I became friends of many of the winemakers in the smaller wineries. During vintage, when the grapes are harvested and crushed, it gets pretty hectic and I often helped out at the wineries. One of the wine makers actually let me make 2,200 liters of Cabernet Sauvignon by myself and it later won a trophy at one of the regional wine shows in the small volume boutique wine category. There are a lot of myths out there about what goes on and how wines are made, the stomping on grapes with your feet being one, that are nothing more than myths.

One of the important things to realize is that to create wine you are really culturing a very specific type of yeast under highly controlled conditions. If your hygiene, and quality control is not up to scratch it's incredibly easy to get some sort of infection in the wine that will completely destroy it. It's very easy to tell because the wine is undrinkable and often produces hydrogen sulfide H₂S.

All that aside, the important thing is if you accept poor standards of manufacturing then manufacturers will get away with it. However, if you don't then they either need to change their ways or go out of business. I know that there is a lot of outsourcing of manufacturing going to China and India at the moment but there are also serious problems arising from this and the quality of manufactured goods and equipment has suffered dramatically. From what you have said Shyam, about the sort of standards and short cuts that are being taken by manufactures in India I am not surprised that there are problems.

Personally I believe all this outsourcing of manufacturing is a really crap and short sighted idea. It only looks financially viable till you start to take into account the number of premature failures and time spent repairing problems that are due to poor quality control of the manufacturing process. Whenever possible I deliberately avoid companies and businesses that have outsourced manufacture to China and to a lesser extent India. If there is no option then I personally test the product very thoroughly prior to accepting it.

I have seen documentaries on national geographic where people were shown crushing grapes for Red Wine under their legs and whatever else they could use as force. There are many other food items are made in this way.

There was another festival show in which people through crushed tomatoes on others. There were many people in a truck crushing those tomatoes under their feet and also those were falling in the meshed up tomatoes and those tomatoes were thrown over people standing in the street. It is some kind of vegetable mud festival like thing.

Starch balls are also made in this manner and under poor hygienic way. In San Francisco fortune cookies were produced in a very clumsy way and Chinese workers were sweating under their 12 hours continuous hard work.

You and me, all are looking for good food in any way.

• I have seen documentaries on national geographic where people were shown crushing grapes for Red Wine under their legs and whatever else they could use as force. There are many other food items are made in this way.

I have too but it's only done on really small quantities of grapes and never gets into the production chain. It's really only done for the camera and a total myth. Believe me, even with the absolute smallest fermentation tanks you ate talking about 2,000 kg of grapes which would be absolutely impossible to crush under your feet. Even the smallest boutique wineries use fermentation tanks that take at least that much and when you get to the bigger commercial wineries you are talking about crushing thousands of tonnes of grapes a day.

• In San Francisco fortune cookies were produced in a very clumsy way and Chinese workers were sweating under their 12 hours continuous hard work.

When I am working CR4 posts on my own I usually have the TV tuned to one of the Discovery Channels and coincidently at the moment I was reading you post on how the fortune cookies were made they were showing a fully automated machine that create nearly all the fortune cookies for North America. It a fully automated process and the only time people come any where near the product is when they add the raw ingredients to the giant mixing bowls. After that they are never touched or come any where near human hands and are eventually heat sealed in individual packets prior to being paced in quantity.

You need to be careful as while there are traditional ways of making things like crushing the wine with your feet or the cookies by hand in reality it is now only done that way for tourists or for cameras while the real production is highly automated and technical.

In San Francisco the great looking city, the China Town I visited for a day. I found that almost none in that town owns a car and if one does then leaves the place after tendering apology to the local community of their own. The houses were only 1.5mx3m size that of a window and three stories linked with many houses in chain. They were better than pigeon holes but very close to those thinks. The size of the single bed and the size of the room almost was matching and perhaps only small space to walk. Most of the cookies were cooked on the ground floors in small rooms with many large size oil frying tubs used for the purpose. It was highly congested working place. I bought one packet for $2 which may have 50 of them. I also learnt that those people used to send cloths for laundry in China. Their population may be 100,000 or more in that zone.

I found that large number of children of Indian community were going for fun to Alcatraz by boat. I think there may be good number of people from India also in the zone. I also went to see that special Jail once housed dreaded criminals. I was more surprised by local attitude to sex and same sex marriage is very common in Americans in that zone. I was travelling with my business friend and they thought we were married and when they were told we are just friends, then they pronounced us Gentlemen.

This time I will travel Washington Sate - Alaska and also Los Angles. I was in Texas but did not see anything special there. As my children (son and daughter) will be in eastern states, so will also like to see those areas. I have only seen New York in that zone.

I was watching a documentary on Austrian Tribes. It was by a British observer, and more on painting on rocks and associated ancient music communicated through paintings. It was very interesting one. I feel like coming to your place one day and will like to spend a day in those hills and with those people with history within.

Hi Shyam,

• Food processing workers often have wet hands and legs so also suffer from fungus infections. They keep working there and no one really sends them for medical check up before giving employment. Many times they work in hidden areas from public and what you eat comes from a dirty place to a clean table.

While I can't comment on the standards of hygiene for working with food around the world I can in Australia. One of my hobbies is cooking and occasionally I would act as guest chief at a restaurant for special charitable fund raising events.

When I was doing one of these guest appearances the restaurant really only supplied the venue and kitchen while I supplied my own team of staff, raw ingredients, cooking utensils and wines. The menu for these events consisted of dishes that I had developed myself and that were not available at any other restaurant at that time, although several did appear in local restaurants after their debut at my events. The wines were selected by some of my winemaking friends to complement the menu and often consisted of the really exquisite wines that came from their private cellars and were not available to the general public. While you did have a choice of meals the menu was sent out with the invitations and when you replied with the payment you also returned the menu with the selection of dishes you wished to eat. That way I could order exact quantities and not have any waste. I also organized door to door bus and limousine services that picked up the guests and returned them home afterwards so they didn't have to worry about driving home while entoxicated.

Anyway, enough of that and back to the regulations. It does vary from stat to state but all commercial kitchens are regularly inspected by the local health department and you must display and be familiar with the rules and laws that govern food handling. In a restaurant kitchen it is not necessary to wear gloves but you must have separate facilities to wash you hands and must do so when entering the kitchen or when you move from uncooked materials to cooked materials. You are also supposed to have separate utensils for preparing and handling uncooked and cooked materials.

Now, in the mass production kitchens and factories it is a whole different ball game and the standards are much more stringent. First off not only are they inspected on a very frequent basis the larger ones have a resident food inspector that is based there full time. Anybody that goes into the food handling area must cover their hair and wear gloves, special clothing and special waterproof boots. There are also volumes of rules and regulations that go with preparing food in bulk like this.

There are the occasional rouge element that try to circumvent the regulations but it is relatively rare and they usually get caught. There is also a medical safeguard and if you ever come down with any of the more dangerous food poisoning diseases the treating doctor must notify the department of health who then carry out an investigation into where the infection came from.

While Australia is not completely immune to food poisoning and it is impossible to be 100% certain that any meal will not cause a problem the serious cases are pretty rare and are always investigated quickly.

• I was watching a documentary on Austrian Tribes. It was by a British observer, and more on painting on rocks and associated ancient music communicated through paintings. It was very interesting one.

The Australian aborigines have had a pretty torrid time since European settlement and while in the past much of it was due to racial discrimination I believe the current problems are more to do with the vast cultural void separating them with European culture.

When Australia was first settled the Australian aborigines were living in a true stone age hunter gather wandering subsistence lifestyle. They never developed a common language or written form of language, had not developed any form of fired ceramics or utilized any form of metal what so ever. There was plenty of gold lying about and easily accessible but they never used it in any way, shape or form. They also never cultivated crops or domesticated any of the wild animals. Until recently it was thought that the dingo had arrived in Australia with the aborigines as a domesticated dog some 40,000 years ago it has recently been discovered that it arrived only 4,000 years ago and was partially domesticated at the time. While it is possible to domesticate a dingo to a certain extent they are always wild animals and need to be treated as such.

The big problem is that it is just not possible to take a stone age society that has not changed in the last 40 millennia and expect them to catch up with 40,000 years of cultural, social, technical and to a minor extent biological evolution in 200 years. The two cultures are truly separated by a 40,000 year wide gap and are totally and completely incompatible. There wandering life style is not compatible with our bordered and highly structured agriculture, they are not used to the sort of goal orientated society we have and the list goes on and on. It is truly like trying to develop chalk and cheese.

The result has been a total upheaval of their lifestyle and as a result things like alcohol, child abuse, disease, violence, homelessness, lawlessness etcetera have all become huge problems and nobody has any idea how to solve it. There have been considerable grants of land to certain tribes so they can live there the way they wish but you still have clashes of culture and law.

The whole thing is a total mess from start to finish and I really don't see that there can ever be an answer and the two social structures are so diametrically opposed that they have become mutually exclusive. By law it is illegal to discriminate on race, skin colour, cultural background, religious belief, sexual preference etcetera so you can't legally operate two separate cultures but if you don't things just get worse. Alcohol is a huge problem but if you deny access to alcohol you are breaking the law so what can you do?

Many people blame the European settlement for the problems but I don't think it really mattered because sooner or later they were going to run into a far more advanced culture and the same thing would have happened. It was just the luck of the draw that it was the English that managed to settle the continent first.

Mind you, the entire continent has suffered because it is not only the aborigines that were isolated. The flora and fauna has been totally isolated for a very long time and so had developed along a completely different evolutionary line. A couple of examples are the echidna and platypus. Both are warm blooded and suckle their young in a pouch but unlike all other mammals they do not give birth to a live infant but rather lay eggs. Then you have the koala that has such a highly specialized diet that it only eats a very select range of gum leaves and normally doesn't need to drink water. The introduction of new diseases and pests like rabbits, foxes and worst of all cats has devastated the natural wild life driving literally thousands of species into extinction.

Even with it's faults and problems Australia is a pretty good place to live and the attitude is far more lay back than most European societies. Most people have the philosophy that they work to live and see work as a necessary evil rather than the workaholics one often sees in places like Japan where people live to work.

• I feel like coming to your place one day and will like to spend a day in those hills and with those people with history within.

I hope you do one day make it to Australia, I think you will find it fascinating and a real eye opening experience but be aware that Australia is a very, very, very big place and you can't just hop in a car or on a train to get to the next place. The two closest capital cities in Australia are Adelaide and Melbourne which are 650 km apart by air and over 700 km by road. Until recently I lived in Adelaide and part of my job as a field engineer meant looking after customers as far away as Darwin. To give you some idea that slightly further than going from the northern most to southern most tip of India. Several customers were in Darwin itself but there were a couple that required an additional 500 km round trip to get to and of course they were in completely opposite directions. Anyway, there are loads of incredible things to see but they are usually separated by vast distances and it takes a considerable amount of time to get from place to place so make sure you leave yourself at least a month and preferably more to travel around.

I hope you do make the time and effort to visit Australia and I look forward to showing you round Sydney and things like the Sydney Harbor Bridge and Opera House and if you are feeling really energetic you can take a guided tour and climb to the top of the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

I learn one nice thing that you along with your friends can take over fancy kitchen cooking and can have fun. I think you can be invited in India and be given an opportunity and money for it. It sounds great to me.

I am sure, if given a change to your tribes right from beginning then they will be as good as any engineer, or doctor, but sure their culture, which is living education system will possibly push them away from joining your society and their people always will be deprived of their person. It will also be hard for you to accept one from there.

In India, tribe may only look slightly different from others so that does not come in their way to take up to the change. Perhaps, the fear of the society of getting lost is the one makes it more difficult and harder to change.

Other problems are almost identical here. We have many pockets of tribes in dozens and they are not at all linked to each others. We now have reservations in education and jobs for them and also charge low fee or no fee at all. I can not say if we are doing good or bad. We also have a scheme to preserve their knowledge. I have taken a degree in ecology and Environment and tribal medicine knowledge was one of the study. I think, their gene bank will get polluted and then we can not say that in another 100 years people will have much idea of them. Now they for education at least at primary level and can read and communicate. However, if they want to become doctor, engineer or scientist, then there is a preference for them. We also have minister from them as education is not a criteria to become a minster. However these minister live dual life. To fool their people and to keep the vote bank they want them to remain tribes and for themselves they want to fly, use mobile, luxury cars and big bungalow in the center Delhi. One minister was posing as if was fighting with Ghosts or witches for decease of the locals and did not arrange medicine for them. You can easily understand the problem. There are people who kill women calling them witches as they do not know TB or other simple curable deceases. We are free treatment even for AIDs in India and there are hospitals all over the country. However, wasted interest make the people to believe in Ghost stories and Witchcraft stories. People simply slice the head of women and carry the head in public. These people are jailed but never punished severely as they are not civilized like others in majority. We have somewhat, different attitude in law for these people and also for Muslims who have Muslim Law and separate civil code. Hindu and Christians are many others who came to India and are not Muslims and Tribes are under same Law and civil code. There is some reservation and some protection for casts in Hindus. I am Hindu Brahman by cast so will be the last one ever to be considered for any benefit for being an Indian and I and my family have to live in highest competition to survive. This has been the case for my entire life from the day I was born and to this day. I will not see uniform society at all and I do not mind it as it is my country and my people want it this way.

· I am sure, if given a change to your tribes right from beginning then they will be as good as any engineer, or doctor, but sure their culture, which is living education system will possibly push them away from joining your society and their people always will be deprived of their person. It will also be hard for you to accept one from there.

One would certainly like to think that given equal opportunity then there would be a different outcome.

There are however a few problems that come up because the Australian aborigines lived for some 40,000 years in isolation from the rest of the world. One of the big problems is immunity and how common diseases that we don't have any problems with cause serious health concerns. A classic example is dental caries. Prior to the Australian aborigines being exposed to Europeans dental caries was completely unknown but now dental health is a serious problem and it is rare to find an adult that does not have a big problems with tooth decay and missing teeth. Alcohol is another big problem and while the evidence is to a great extent anecdotal they do appear to become intoxicated and stay intoxicated fare more easily and with considerably less consumption that people with other ethnic backgrounds. I have heard that it has something to do with the enzymes in the liver that are used to metabolize alcohol but I have not seen or heard any scientific data that backs up the anecdotal evidence.

On average Australians are amongst the longest living people on earth with an average lifespan of slightly over 81 years the Australian aborigines come in something like 20 years less than this. The gap is even greater than that because the overall average is for the entire population and include the premature deaths of the indigenous population.

You need to keep in mind that the Australian aborigines have been living in a totally different and isolated environment for something like 1,600 generations. They are superbly adapted to the nomadic hunter gatherer life style that they had up until around 8 generations ago. However, when you suddenly thrust a whole new life style, sociopolitical structure, diet and host of infectious diseases on them they have no chance of adapting over the 8 generations or less since European settlement.

This is in no way meant to be racial or derogatory but there entire existence has evolved around there way of living and even the way of thinking and structure of the brain has evolved around that existence. When you start throwing things like fixed agriculture, social and political boundaries and the whole relatively stationary and fixed life style with cities, fixed times of work and highly structured, goal oriented society with complex rules, regulations, boundaries and parameters it just isn't comprehensible. Likewise Europeans can't understand or comprehend their nomadic take things as it comes day to day existence.

The lifestyles are about as diametrically opposed as you can possibly get and getting them to coexist is something that I must admit has been handled extremely poorly in Australia. At one stage the government did try forcible assimilation and took many of the children from their parents and placing them with white foster parents and needless to say turned out to be an absolute catastrophe that produced absolutely nothing positive and created a massive feeling of mistrust and hatred.

It is something that I have thought long and hard about and the actions taken on both sides is something that I am both ashamed of and find totally Un-Australian. Whilst a percentage of the indigenous Australians do assimilate many do not wish to and forcing them to assimilate is really no better than genocide. The whole thing is one thumping great mess that has been terribly handled in the past and I have no idea what or even if there is a solution.

If some children of tribal were adopted by your advanced communities with consent with the tribal to see if they can perform as good as the advanced societies then I expect some good results. In matured age perhaps the new life will make the person better even though the feeling of not belonging to the new society and bias about the origin will always be a sensitive issue.

Change in my life from where I was born, got educated was almost tribal village life full of rituals, ghost theories and ancient agriculture methods. I looked up and decided to search beyond my village and then found shelter in higher education, took three masters level degrees in sciences and then Ph.D. in Physics. My children then went one step up and now they are in UK and USA and are counted very special highly educated. My daughter became youngest supper specialist doctor in UK. She was also born in the same village and in same house (not hospitals) where I was born. All this happened in 56 years of my life span and not 40,000 years. I learnt writing on wooden peace with clay and did not use paper and pen for many years. Later on changed to write on a gray stone slate with clay. Communication was Oral most of the time and I learnt from books much later. Computation I learned using my head. I still use it in that way and rarely touch calculator. Some of my teachers knew, how to make paper from wood and then some wooden pen and ink from flowers or carbon burnt in home oil lamps (used for lighting) was used as ink as well as for the eyes to decorate them to look great. There were about 4000 houses in the village. My house was having a deep 10m depth hidden place to hide in famine or was used for safety from attack from others in famine. This thing was closed for ever in my childhood and remained only a story for my children but I have seen that thing and asked my mother who experienced all that. My mother used to believe in superstitions for herself and used to call witchcraft like treatments for her deceases and for things like over bleeding, pain and fever. She will not go to a doctor easily. Only when I grew up a bit I insisted calling a doctor from far village. I think he was not a very good doctor either as he injected Arsenic injections to my mother which almost killed her. Treatment known at that time were very poor type. There was a old in the village with herbal knowledge and I learnt from him many things like identification of herbs in forest and its use in medical life. I often used to eat leaves of plant called Brahman which increases human memory considerably and perhaps was working well on me and my daughter who has supper memory. Some of my brother-sister born earlier to me died early even before I could know about them. I was hard core by birth so never fell sick. I lived like monkeys on the trees and was jumping from high trees and one day was having a wrist joint dislocated. That was when I was 10. I got painful treatment done over my hand. Then my brother also dislocated his had. I realized that I must discover life in a better way, so I learnt to set the dislocation of the bone joints from the village bone specialist (not a degree holder and perhaps he was not educated at all). I used this to help one of my scientist friend in emergency when he dislocated his elbow while paying volleyball when I was a nuclear scientist. I did not forget what I learnt when I was 10. I have written all this in details to let you understand that my life has been very close to the tribal life and only things that differed was my will power and my family willing to appreciate my will power and their small finance to my new life. I was eldest surviving son and happiness to my parents so they gave me whatever I asked for. I used to read through oil lamps till mid night and entire village was curious about my activities. They loved me a lot and even today they are like my parents and brother and sisters. I was special to all of them as I was different and used to love them all. I loved my parents a lot and to some extend I cared my parents up to their last day. They are no more now and I still remember them. My mother was 65 and father was 88 when they died. Mother died a bit early. My wife (not educated in any school) is very sensitive about her children and is almost like tribal women but I am for their total freedom. From what I learnt, the entire world is almost identical and perhaps doing much better these days and is sensitive towards those are different and apart in civilizations. Each country I go, I try to learn about the people, their feelings for life and I respect them. I have already travelled to few dozen countries and will like to go more place as I feel that all people belong to me and I belong to all of them.

In the last I only get left over with one question. Was Adam civilized? If he was civilized then all are civilized in their own way and only require freedom from others.

If you look at America where people from other countries become whatever they want to become after many years of poor history. Looks to me that your government is not doing enough for those tribal people. The very first thing to do is to give them houses, medical facility, women protection by all means, special project by which they can get dignified money exclusively for them and complete freedom to let them practice their culture, and perhaps create some easy script for them to express their culture on papers to become valuable information before it is all dead.

It is not a job of all Australian to do that, and the government should find dedicated people for the mission and should pay them for this research and development.

We do have some tribes in Andaman forest and no one is allowed to enter there as they are almost like monkeys in life style much below the level of development your tribes have. Houses may be cages for them and may kill them. Some wild animals do not survive in captivity. If we can communicate with then slowly then they may also change in time. I think there is no hurry and if your tribes accept houses and medical care then that is the first thing to be extended. In India basic medical care and basic education is free for all its citizens. Tribal society members are equal right citizens and also have special rights for protection.

Hi Shyam,

• If some children of tribal were adopted by your advanced communities with consent with the tribal to see if they can perform as good as the advanced societies then I expect some good results.

This was tried in the middle of the 20^th century and ended up being a total and complete disaster.

• I have written all this in details to let you understand that my life has been very close to the tribal life and only things that differed was my will power and my family willing to appreciate my will power and their small finance to my new life.

While it is true that there are a certain number of similarities there are a few very relevant and dramatic differences.

India has not been totally isolated from all contact with the rest of the world for the last 40,000 years. Australia and the indigenous people have lived in total isolation for the last 40 millennia and before the arrival of Europeans had no comprehension that there was anything outside Australia.

As a result they have not developed tolerance to many of the common diseases we see and have evolved both physically and socially in a completely different direction.

1. While you lived in a village that I assume was fixed in location and used fixed agricultural practices the indigenous Australians never developed any farming, cultivated crops, domesticated animals, permanent structures or any way of adapting or modifying their environment in ay way, shape or form.
• I learnt writing on wooden peace with clay and did not use paper and pen for many years.
2. You must take into account that we are talking about a true stone age culture that never developed any form of writing, numerology or scientific understanding of their environment. They also never moved on from a wandering hunter gathering subsistence life style and so did not have any fixed dwellings or centers of population like villages, towns etcetera.

We are truly talking about a society that didn't even get to the level of cave man. Whilst you relate to what would appear to be a very primitive society in your youth this is considerably more sophisticated than the indigenous Australians when European settlement started. Keep in mind they never developed any form of metal, pottery or anything that required an form of construction that required some form of refining or processing.

Yes, what you experienced in your youth was primitive in comparison with your current situation I am talking of something fare more primitive.

From the documentaries, I have seen, the Aborigine knew paintings, music and planned their life to some extent and they did worship and left impressions on the stones. I think, they did hunt animals and eat them or did they eat only vegetation roots and fruits? How did they survive so long doing nothing?

Hi Shyam,

They did hunt but only used weapons that were constructed from wood and other naturally occurring items. The never developed any form of manufacturing process or utilized and metal what so ever. Not long after European settlement began they found gold just lying on the ground and the biggest single nugget ever found was found was the "Welcome Stranger" nugget which was about 2 cm below the soil surface. There are also numerous other examples of large gold nuggets being found just lying on the ground.

Even a metal as soft as gold has a myriad of uses and I find it quiet strange that in the 50,000 years of indigenous inhabitation then never realized that they could use this shiny corrosion free metal that was just lying on the ground waiting to be picked up.

They also never developed anything like pottery or fired clay items and more importantly they never developed a written form of language. As a result the sum total of knowledge available to them was limited to what could be learnt an then taught to the next generation is the space of a single life span of 30 to 40 years. The closest they came to any form of language were rock and cave paintings.

They did develop a mythology that could be said is vaguely like that of the North American Indians, it was only ever handed down in the form of stories and dances.

While they did have music and dance the music was primarily simple percussion instruments like two sticks and I don't believe they never even developed along the lines of a drum or stringed instrument. The only other instrument was the didgeridoo which is normally only capable of producing 2 notes. The didgeridoo was constructed from a length of tree trunk that had been hollowed out by termites and the construction normally only comprised of cleaning out the termites, trimming the ends and decorating the outside with geometric patterns.

While they did have a calendar of sorts that broke the annual cycle into something like 10 to 15 seasons they never developed a method of breaking the day up into more than day or night and the counting system they had was along the lines of one, two and then many.

There really is a massive cultural, social and technological gap between the indigenous Australians and any of the developed nations

The Wikipedia article on Indigenous Australians has some interesting background material that you may find interesting. However, at the time of European settlement the were truly a stone age society that had remained stagnant for at leas 50,000 years and as a result had no way of comprehending let alone understanding or dealing with what was being thrust upon them.

The gulf between indigenous Australian society and the current 21^st century European Australian society is something that I find disturbing. However, even though I have thought hard and long on the subject the answer to how the two cultures can coexist or meld is one of the few things I and I expect nobody else, has an answer to.

How did they eat their food? If they killed animal and did not have knife then did they eat like Hyena or dogs? That musical instrument like flute is pretty good looking one.

Hi Shyam,

You asked,

• How did they eat their food? If they killed animal and did not have knife then did they eat like Hyena or dogs?

In a word, yes. Basically they cooked anything they caught whole and the tore off a piece and ate it that way. They did have small flint tools that were sharp enough to skin animals and use as arrow and spear heads but most often spears and arrows were just wood that had been singed in a fire and then sharpened. There is a type of tree called the Ironbark that produces a hardwood that is comparable in hardness to some metals. It is so hard that it is impossible to drive nails into and needs something like a hacksaw to cut it.

• That musical instrument like flute is pretty good looking one.

Sorry about this, I forgot to include something that would give you an idea of the scale. A didgeridoo is normally between 1,5 and 2.0 m long with a diameter of around 80 to 100 mm and is basically a hollow tree trunk or branch. You play it by covering you mouth with one end and then doing something very similar to blowing raspberries.

Here is a link to a YouTube video clip of a didgeridoo being played that will give you a perspective on the size and what they sound like.

That was nice peace of information. I looked into other links also and found that Aborigines were dreamers. They also had restrictions on who should do what and also rights to inheritance to few selected one. Some of the pictures show that women wear modern cloths now and that may be the effect of the current time. They more or less look like our people in India. The face of the girls is almost the phase of my daughter.

India is very funny country. Here people live extremely different types of life and there are some who do not put up dress (Naga or naked body) and do nothing physically to survive but are highly knowledgeable lots, and always talk Devin things and perhaps their knowledge has come out of tough teaching and learning under their own kind of education.

There are some who prevent even smallest insect to enter their body and cover mouth and nose with cloth (Jains) and there are people who eat dead man's body called Aghori Saints.

There are extreme practices also. Many places people believed that if women paraded necked then the rain God will be pleased. Such practices are now banned. In one place people used to believe in stopping the rain by funny practice of parading a girl naked and then thronging her alive in the flooded river as sacrifice item.

We often come across human sacrifice in India done by Tantrik (witchcraft) who make people believe that human sacrifice can be rewarding to their life.

There were many stories in which sacrifice of life was glorified and it was told that the dead person will come alive. Nothing that short ever happens and people end up serving in Jails for killing innocent people.

Hi Shyam,

• there are people who eat dead man's body called Aghori Saints.

There is an interesting custom in Papua New Guinea that is very similar where they eat the brains of their dead in an effort to gain their knowledge and wisdom.

Obviously it doesn't work but more importantly it transmits a disease called Kuru which is caused by being infected with prions. It is uncertain but given the history of the disease in PNG and the know participating in the ritual by missionaries it could be the original source of CJD.

I hope you have the opportunity to visit Australia as I think you will find it fascinating. One of the places that is worth visiting is the Kakadu National Park. It's like stepping back in time to Jurassic Park, dinosaurs included as there are very big and nasty crocodiles there. Most people visit it between April and November but I find the most interesting time is at the end of the wet season around March, but you run the risk of not being able to get there due to flooding. The bird life is absolutely mind blowing and you might be interested to see what is referred to in Australia as the jabiru which should not be confused with the South American bird that has the same name. The interesting part is that they are migratory and are know to fly between Australia and India, so, next time you see one just follow it, sooner or later you will end up in Australia.

I think those migratory birds may be in estuaries of Sundarban. I have seen this one in my farms and is called "Saras or Crane" which comes to India from Siberia.

http://www.wcn.org.np/protected_animals.php?anid=40

http://www.pbase.com/vikasmal/image/34002510

Gypsy were once like others in houses and now they never build their houses and travellers. I do not know how they went back in civilization. Perhaps tribes are also with similar determination to live what they are living.

Dead man eater Aghori Saints are those who want power from witchcraft by all dirty means. hey do not practice anything that is called civilization, so they also do not live in public.

To my surprise there is one highly civilized business community in India which on a day in an year goes to burial ground and eats all dead buried there. It was reported in a news paper when they found the burial place in shattered form and the local community revealed all that they did.

Hi Shyam,

I am not sure that the crane in your links the link for is the same as the Jabiru but there are a massive number of migratory birds that stop over in the Kakadu National Park area at some time during their migration. I have heard that they believe as many of 80% of the migratory birds from the Australasian region pass through the area during their migrations. It is very had to tell because most of them stop over there during the wet season when access can be completely cut off for weeks or months at a time.

The Australian Jabiru is I believe, the largest of the cranes and the male stands about 1.5 m tall and has a wingspan of 2.3 m, so it is a really big bird.

One of the most majestic Australian birds is the Wedge Tailed Eagle. While most of them are smaller than the Jabiru you can find the occasional one with wings spans approaching 3 m. I have actually had the privilege of soaring within a couple of meters of a wedge tailed eagle. I was flying in my glider in a thermal in the usual circling pattern when I was joined by a wedge tailed eagle doing the same. When we reached the top of the thermal he broke off and I followed him At first he was startled as he didn't realize I was following him but he soon realized I was no threat and came up alongside the canopy to apparently have a look at what idiot was trying to follow him. Unfortunately eagles don't respect air space boundaries and shortly after this he entered restricted airspace and I was forced to break of the pursuit. Even though I managed to fly with him for about 10 minutes and was close enough to see the mottling of his feathers and have direct eye to eye contact. A truly amazing and memorable experience.

However, you need to be very careful when approaching any large bird in flight as they can see you as a threat, particularly if they have chick in the nest or are teaching juveniles, and you only have a piece of Perspex that is 3 mm thick protecting you. Another thing to watch out for is birds, like pelicans, that are flying in formation. Basically the only bird that is paying attention is the one in the lead and the following birds will not take evasive actions to avoid a collision so you need to give the whole formation a wide birth.

You would be surprised at how easy it is to hit something else in the air. If both you and the other bird, aircraft, glider or whatever are both flying on a constant heading and speed they both remain in the same position relative to each other and there is no apparent motion. All you see is a stationary object that suddenly grows in size from a spec to something that fills your field of view about 500 ms before impact. The faster the aircraft are going the less time you have and when you get to near sonic speeds you will not see the other aircraft before the collision. I met a pilot that survived such a collision and he confirmed that he did not see the other aircraft till after the collision and there was no way either pilot could have taken avoiding action.

You would also be surprised what gets picked up by thermals and I think the most bizarre things I have seen is a page from a newspaper that was floating along at about 5,000 feet.

Black headed crane is the habitat of Chilka Lake in the Sundarban Estuaries of eastern part of India. I located that bird. I have not seen it in the mid India and perhaps it loves water and bushes within water. We also have Estuaries in the western portion of India in Gujarat. Estuaries are formed where fresh water get mixed with sea water and it is mildly salty. Tigers and Panthers in Sundarban Estuaries are man eaters and kill many people who go there for honey collection from trees or bushes.

• Tigers and Panthers in Sundarban Estuaries are man eaters and kill many people who go there for honey collection from trees or bushes.

I remember seeing a program about tigers stalking and killing people but they said that Tigers would only ever attack from behind as that if you wore a mask on the back of your head they would not attack. I don't know if this actually works but it is a good story.

While we don't have any larger predators like tigers or even leopards in Australia we do have more than a fair share of things that can kill you. Of the 20 most poisonous snakes in the world 18 are native to Australia and the 10 most poisonous are all found in Australia. Then we have the box jelly fish, irukandji, sea snakes, blue ringed octopuses and numerous other nasties in the ocean. When it comes to crawling things you have the likes of the funnel web spider and a whole myriad of insects that can cause a nasty sting or bite.

Interestingly however is the creature responsible for more hospitalizations than any other is the bull ant. While its sting is rarely fatal it is a large, territorial and very aggressive ant that will not hesitate at stalking you and causing a very painful sting.

I used to spend a fair amount of time in Darwin and we used to wind up the tourists when they asked if there were any sharks in the water around Darwin by saying,

"No, there are no sharks here, the crocs ate all of them, then the box jelly fish killed the crocs!"

Population of Orissa state is very poor and the local Government did nothing for them to uplift. There is Bangladesh near by with lot poor population. People do small things for living in this zone, have almost no resources for technology. Panthers love muddy wet land and live on trees. They can attack any time and are not afraid of men. They are also more powerful capable to kill almost instantaneously in one jump. Tigers are less offensive and fear men so attack from behind. People were given masks but slowly these animals learnt that they were being fooled. Neck collier with sharp nail prevents then to kill anything as they kill only by biting on neck and making person to suffocate to death. Any one having neck Collier prevents that as it makes biting on neck impossible. Panthers can hurt by hitting by their claws but can not find ways to kill the person with collar. They have not yet learnt to kill by other means. May be one day they will.

Cause of animals turning man eater was associated with large death in flesh floods and many corpses floating in the area, as free food. Once these animal taste human blood they tend to become man eater.

Both Tigers and Dolphins as food is banned world over. If we do not respect world community then some country may also start eating men and women and others who are evil may simply start packing and exporting human as food. This was done in world war II so it is not an impossible thing at all. There are discrete cases of cannibalism in India even though we do not have any known human group active in such activity. What if some one thinks of harvesting human crop. Once any country makes a law then that becomes a legal thing.

• Both Tigers and Dolphins as food is banned world over.

Dolphins are most certainly hunted and eaten in Japan and they also come to the Southern Ocean and kill a few thousand whales each year for so called scientific purposes. Regardless of the reason the whales still end up getting sold in Japan as food.

Just an addendum to my last post about crushing grapes. Grape juice is fairly acidic and it can easily dissolve you finger and toe nails if you are in contact with it for too long. By the end of each vintage I helped out on my fingernails were completely stuffed and it took nearly the whole year for then to recover and that's not with then immersed in it for hours on end. If you tried crushing grapes with your feet you would more than likely have no toe nails and probably no skin left after a day or so.

Food processing workers often have wet hands and legs so also suffer from fungus infections. They keep working there and no one really sends them for medical check up before giving employment. Many times they work in hidden areas from public and what you eat comes from a dirty place to a clean table. Bird Flue has been one such problem and people do not dispose off the birds as they are poor and sometime sell them. In India, now Government does the monitoring and also compensates for loses such that once the decease is detected, it is also separated and eliminated. There are many areas where things are not yet in good shape.

I took an international company through the ISO9000 certification process.

I was greatly disillusioned.

Sure, everything was traceable, but ISO certification did not mean it even passed code. The other huge draw back was that defective design was all documented and the procedure documented, and it now became a huge problem to change anything. Reams of paper work and committee meetings trying to decide if the expense was justified. Before ISO it just was done as a foot note.

I would sooner work with equipment that was certified it met STANDARDS of QUALITY and SAFETY --------NOT standards of DOCUMENTED PROCEDURES.

For something documentation is such an essential thing that it is the only way to look at problem that became disaster. One of them is avionics and air flights. People document and write wrong things. When inspected, then found that it was done in wrong way using inferior material.

Engineers first must have good brain as that can not be documented in ISO-9000. Now a bad engineer with certified material can do all wrong job. They can fit in smaller nut and bolts than hole size, they can use ISO-9000 certified material not meant for the purpose etc. If documented, then one can sure go back and look into problem.

I think this talk of patents and buy outs is mainly for the North American peeps....

I have been happily running my own business since 1982 so that's errrrmmmm 25 years now...

Most startups do fail within a few years, but once you get going the buzz keeps you in line...

Forget patents! they are hellishly expensive and are just there to give others a sneak look at what you're making so they can alter and copy it!! Just pot the intriguing bits in epoxy resin!

As for the late payers, with the new (ish) law in the UK for late payment and charging interest as a right, you will find it much easier than I did to get payment on time, especially from the big companies, its the small companies you want to watch closely!!

Most importantly though is to join a trade body that gives legal protection and an advice line etc... In the UK the FSB is superb and cheap at only £70 a year!

One word of advice though is never mention to anyone that you run a business.... In the UK its just not the done thing to be a business owner, chatting about it to friends will soon leave you out in the cold. Just mention that you've just completed a £100,000 order and people will think you have that much in your back pocket, so don't!! Ordinary people don't realise that in business there is such a thing as profit margin, tax, VAT and material costs to have been paid out along with maybe a few months before you get paid!!

But most of all enjoy it..... if you don't there is no point in running your own business, unless you can make a fortune of course...

John.

I have been very fortunate in that all (well, almost all) of my customers are large corporations. I have only had 1 bad account, and that was from another engineering firm. My lawyer looked at the amounts owing (about $1500) and asked if I wanted to fight it for costs of $1500 or more, or just accept the loss and know the other company was a thief. (I didn't fight.)

Large corporations are notorious for slow payments. It is often a cash flow issue, stocks are down, we make customers pay on receipt, but don't pay for 90 days. That way the suppliers finance the corporation for 90 days. (Yes, I have been on both sides of the fence.) Corporations are also notoriously slow at moving the mail from one desk to the next, you have to have your invoice in before the first of the month to make next months cheque run (30 days, right?). So if you invoice on the 2nd, it does not get processed until the 1st of next month, and it takes 30 days from there before the money is paid. Other companies state if you want our business, it is net 90. You learn to live with it. Just keep track and send late notices every 30 days anyways.

Dear John

25 years in manufacturing business is a lot of time. I am sure it might have given you all inside out experience,

Many of my friends those were in atomic energy, slowly moved to their own start up businesses and now I can see how each have moved on the ladder of success with time. Early bird is often seen on top. Perhaps, as you said, that it takes time for one to have a foot hold in business and that people start believing in the person or team. Finally one finds in demand.

I can also see that some made a fortune in shorter time.

People moved to different directions - not because they had that kind of education but due to their inner feelings and belief in their ability to perceive future for themselves in specific product line by looking at the market products that were making money and they wanted to take over by their own ideas, by breaking designs codes etc. It is something like finding the chemical construct and remaking it. They succeeded.

I started in 1998 and took few years to travel abroad and then returned to India, constructed the work place of about 3000 sq. ft. for my electronics facility and from 2004 I started the research activity with about 4 new product design per year bases, conducted two national conferences, one in March 1-5, 2004 and another in December 27-28, 2004 to let people know that I am in India doing something here. I then presented over 20 research papers in national conferences to give greater exposure of technology to others, I displayed the technology, and asked people to see what I made and was useful for their research. People took interest, they bought with hesitation, they found good, they recommended to others, then many started buying and now there is more demand than I can make and this all happened in just 3 years. You can say that, from idea to production, I took 5-years as I did not have business back ground and infrastructure. Now I have it so I am in business.

The early 5-years were not waste. I was a professor in Singapore, consultant in USA, and became Professor in India. This has given me lot exposure to meet many organizations. I always participated in national and International conferences. I came to knew, what people want and I just did that and also discovered new things and educated people to use. I was innovation from very early stage and was publishing large number of design ideas in many USA and UK magazines. I was trainer for electronics engineers all the time. None of this was really pointed to business initially. Now I am mainly concentrating in business and partially concentrating in education and training.

What can be the future of working like this? I think, I have much greater future in manufacturing and ultimately will reach the top level in about 10-years. I sure will like to have company assets reaching few billion dollars. I think that is possible with current growth rate projections and the amount to R&D based product line I have to meet the local demand without exporting to any other country. India is a much bigger market for me.

My current product line is mainly for environmental sensors and lowest level chemical detection technology. My clients are often Government agencies. I am not yet in industrial products and will like to do that now in volume after involving other investors for profit sharing. Right now it is 100% privately owned company by me and my wife. I will like few more big investors to join in next few years.

In India about 150,000 people become educated to undergraduate level in electronics. This is a very large number. They are not seen working in electronics profession and this is what was my concern to voice out here.

Excellent post....

Many years ago I worked on production test in Uk for a subsidiary of Raytheon.

They were shipping parts from US, we were building/testing monitors and shipping them back (sounds crazy but it was something to do with £ vs $ at the time.)

Our quality was better than the US monitors, we had less scrap, and our efficiency based on their times was 300% !

So...they sent a guy to see how we did it....

His attitude was that I was doing it 'wrong' !!! It took a lot of explaining to show him where the test proceedures were a series of duplications. ...

(e.g. No need to move the scope probe to test/measure the line scan, just look at the line noise on the frame scan and measure that!)

Interesting, Del. For years a friend of mine worked at Raytheon in Massachusetts. His story is much the same. But it goes much farther than that. With significant support of the Bush Administration, Raytheon, the manufacturer of the Patriot missile, produced a deceptive picture of the performance of the Patriot missile. In doing so, the company created a smear campaign against the Israeli Air Force and its officers who operated the Patriot missile batteries during the war. At the time Raytheon's statements were made senior Raytheon officials were fully aware of the true data about the performance of their missiles and the valuable information that had been collected and shared by Israeli missile experts was being acknowledged in private meetings.

If I remember correctly the problem with the patriot missile batteries was to do with the real time clocks getting out of whack with each other. It transpired that the system had only ever been run for short periods of time and the clocks that were synchronized at start up, never got far enough out to cause a problem. However when they were run non stop for days on end as is the norm in battle conditions, the problem compounded with the end result of the missile missing its target.

Were not talking about much, but even a millisecond at the speeds you are talking about when interception a sub orbital ballistic missile means missing the target by a long way.

However, that doesn't excuse Raytheon's behavior of blaming the Israeli operators for what was a problem in their equipment that they had failed to notice because of their inadequate test regime.

You'd think that when compared with the overall cost of a single Patriot missile (several million$), they could afford to use a miniature and generally available rubidium clock as a timebase. Or an embedded GPS time-code receiver (even cheaper). GPS was available even during the first Gulf War.

A good friend of mine and excellent electrical engineer did time in Vietnam. His job was to mow down the Cong from a helicopter gunship. His 'copter got shot, and as it was falling out of the sky he could hear the electronic chirp-chirp of an alarm in his headset. He recognized the circuit used right away. He was livid that the best they could come up was a UJT (unijunction transistor) oscillator - the cheapest kind available - to let him know he was about to die. So I asked him (he survived, obviously) what he would have preferred instead? John said, "I dunno. Maybe a recording of some sexy woman's voice telling me my ass was toast."

Hmm, seems to be yet another CRIMINAL use of acronyms.

I've just caught up with this discussion after being away from work for a week & it raises lots of interesting points. My experience has been that engineers of all disciplines can stagnate, especially in large companies where there is a large inertia resisting change. Companies will also take the safe route of using tried & tested solutions to problems because the cost of innovation is excessive.

My own employer is a small (30+ employees) company & many of our products use technology which is 50 years old because it is still the best way to do the job. We also take on development work for the likes of NASA & CERN who ask us to produce detectors where nobody knows at the outset how the detector can be made.

The use of the innovative solutions is always a trade off between the perceived value of the 'new' solution, the cost of getting the product made (especially if the quantities are small) & the risk of failure. None of this stops us considering the wilder solutions to problems but the more 'off the wall' the solution is, the more hoops you will have to jump through to push it through to fruition.

Dear Nigh

Not much has changed from that early time except for smaller semiconductor chips and greater integration. Microchannel Plate did drastic change in current time and development by Hamamatsu of Position Sensitive Photomultiplier tube went into history. PSD using wire sensors in 1D and 2D were worth giving Nobel Prize and MCP have gone step ahead due to their <100ps rise time and <10ps signal jitter. I design in this zone most of my electronics. My electronics now designed to handle greater than billion events per second. When we work with such a high speed signal, we simply can not afford to take them to longer distances and signal processing is done as piggy back electronics. I left PHOSWICH design in the self as they have become history for me. I will like to work on fastest scintillators and charge amplifiers and signal processing electronics. Ion mass spectroscopy is my basic work area. To some level many in this forum members have done some good work in that area. I am doing it myself for my own company. I also manufacture x-ray detectors and gamma ray detectors for radiation safety.

What kind of detectors you design now?

I think there is lots of money in the high technology area that takes us to detection of atoms and molecules. Each design I develop gives me more money than the salary of an engineer and also bring me technology to multiply in shorter time to any level. My industry is growing at the rate of 1000% or becoming 10 times in assets each year. Partially this is because there are not many who wants to do this type of developments and those big companies can not bring in 10 new products per year in the market. I am working very fast and I will hold about 100 technology items in hand in another 10 years and with small investment I can produce many of the items. I feel great I am in this zone. Industrial electronics is very competitive and there are many old players with bleeding bids to hold on to market. I have no one to compete with me in the country and people do not like import problems here. It is a great time for me. I think for another 10 years, nothing will change seriously from what it is today. Even if I place 50% price to any American Technology, I gain very high as prices abroad are real high. While in other countries people wasting time in thinking they are doing great job, I am running the industry much faster than the larger corporate houses. I will leave them far behind in my life time. I need only myself to get things done and I can decide in few seconds. Big industries need many people to run establishment and they all do small things..

I wonder how big you see your company getting before the speed of design slows, and the number of tasks you need to perform take from your design activities.

I have known a number of companies which have grown at such a rate that either the owners have been overwhelmed by the administration, or appointed managers who then put obstacles in the way of future development as thatr may risk the survival of the business (counter-productive or what?)

I do not fear and I have nothing great to lose. I need to trust people and it for them to take over and run. I am not going to be here forever and it is very much all right with me. Right now it is my time so I am doing it in whatever way I feel OK.

Have a look at www.photek.co.uk

I think their products are good one. I have used RCA Gallium Arsenide photocathode Type S20 in Photon Counting system some 25 years ago and that needed cooling down to -40C for low noise. I have worked on Vacuum UV effect in Inorganic Crystals in my Research for creating defects like F-centers and complex centers of F-center aggregates.

Combining optical fiber with S20 photonic sensor is a great idea. I will like to try this one. I get Photonics Spectra magazine from www.laurin.com/ or www.photonicsspectra.com/ and I think it is a wonderful magazine and covers many new optics developments. Thanks for information and it will be useful link.

In the 70s when I worked for Marconi Instruments, it was accepted practice for the design lab leader to assign tasks to us designers, but it was also encouraged by them for us to do 'homework' jobs...

i.e. they really did actively encorouge us to look into designs that we wanted to 'play' with and they would turn a blind eye to us as we spent time designing and building circuits with maybe nothing to do with our real tasks!!!

They would even sign requisitions for expensive components knowing that it wasn't directly work related!!!

But they did get a lot of work out of us, some of it quite innovative, I enjoyed my time spent there and I think today the same attitude would not be tolerated in a large company....

John.

I should add that the design lab leaders also spent a lot of time on their pet projects as well....

If anyone remembers Wireless World magazine, back in the 70s a regular contributor to the circuit ideas pages as well as projects was a well known designer called Damna Waddington - He was actually one of our design lab leaders! who did most of his designs at work!!

John.

Blimey...Blast from the Past!

I certainly do remember Wireless World ! Even got a tenner off 'em for a circuit idea!

Practical Wiress, Everyday Electronics, Parade...

Dear John

Yes, in that magazine was from UK and I used to publish good number of small articles in it and my best article was given Pounds 100 and that was special editor's prize. I must have few hundreds of old copies of it in my collection of about 20000 magazines. I think the magazine was called "Electronics World and Wireless World" and was from Reed Publications - which now may be Cahner's Publication which brings out EDN magazine.

My article was to double the signal communication distance for video signals using Maxim ICs. I designed first differential video transmission with +/-2.5V from 0-2.5V signal capable ICs. After that Maxim and others incorporated the idea in their initial design of differential signal communication.

I published more than dozen articles - design idea in that magazine.

This magazine was little longer in size and very glossy top cover. That was I think around 1985 or about that. Later on I tried to trace the magazine and perhaps it changed the title and then completely vanished.

There was another magazine called Electronics, which was USA based also vanished in thin air. The only magazine that survived are EDN and Electronics Design. I think there were few from Australia also but never got them in hand. EDN also made ASIA edition and they used to publish CD of the Design Ideas. I published large number of design ideas and these can be found by searching my name of the magazine home page. Only less than 10 years old may be listed and 100s of others might have gone in printed books now. I published few hundreds of them and then lost track of them.

I used to publish under club name "worldfriends". This name was coined by me and you can read in some of my early publications around 1980-1990. People then took this name and now misusing the name. My idea was to educate the world in special ideas.

One American friend Mr Ron, retired USA army officer also used to publish design ideas baned on PIC uC, and lots on music amplifiers, voltage stabilizers and used to write programs in ASM. He must be more than 70 now. He can be found at

http://www.tdl-tech.com/

In the 35 years I've read that magazine, first called Wireless World and then later Electronics and Wireless World... I can honestly say I haven't seen your name alongside the Jim Williams and Damna Waddingtons amongst other regular contributors in the ideas for design section....

Shyam, your amazing modesty sometimes has me speechless!

Perhaps you should start a thread just about how you single handedly designed an interocitor, but seeing how it could be used as a weapon you immediately patented it to stop anyone else building it!!

John </sarcasm >.

try looking for his worldfriends nom de plume under the regular guest column Delusions of Grandeur.

It has been a long way I started in this field.

I really do nor care much about others if they duplicate, learn to manufacture what I do. I feel all right with what I do and can manage myself easily as I keep learning myself and keep teaching others if I find time.

I love people of my world and their welfare is something good for me to feel.

I just want to continue in this way. At times I get hurt but I ignore all that as there is so much good that is waiting to happen and my life is belonging to that zone.

Out of your busy time you put up a bit to help others and that is all I love. It is sure not easy as there must be first some bread on the table for yourself.

I am going to burn my remaining energy now at much rapid rate as my industry become larger and larger and I will look for others who can take over and feel it as their dream and not my dream. I am not all that greedy.

I used to permit all my designs ideas to be used free of cost. Editor of Electronics world requested that I permit him to use it and I just allowed him. Many engineers all over the world used to send request letters as at that time email were not common. I have collection of several thousands of requests for design ideas to be used. I never said no. Even today, any one can walk to my place and can help help for free. I get money from Government by making special products and that is just great amount for me. I never needed more money.

I was only writing ideas for design and not full length articles. I may have some old copies and will try to scan and place them for others to read. I think only EDN and Electronics Design keep something on the net. EDN used to place ideas into CDROM and earlier to that they were having something like ISDN dial up down-loaders. You can search some of my designs in EDN and Electronics world, but that wireless world info vanished in thin air. I think my name was also at times reduced to SS Tiwari, Shyam Tiwari etc. Many articles carry my full name SHYAM SUNDER TIWARI and also my place of work of that time which was www.igcar.ernet.in or Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research. Earlier to that it was called Reactor Research Center only and place is Kalpakkam, 80km down south from Madras or Chennai City on sea coast. I lived within 100m from sea shore for nearly 22 years and always spent evening looking at sea waves for new thoughts. I used to do some morning jogging in sea beach sands. Before that I came from North India Ganges belt and 100km from Tajmahal, but I was actually born in a small village in farmer's family with no science or engineering background at all.

The lawyers are the only winners once courts are involved.

If it is not for the law to act upon then cheats are the winners in any way. What is a better choice? I agree that many people do not involve in small problems and problem creators get isolated after their first act. However, at times just leaving them scotch free is not a good idea and it is worth showing them a fist of muscle to scare them from acting further in that manner.