[LEAPSECS] presentations from AAS Future of Time sessions

[Gerard Ashton]

I read a study from several years back that clocks and watches in hospitals
were not very well synchronized. Tomorrow I will be taking training as a
volunteer emergency medical technician on some new treatment protocols. One
of them is that if CPR has been in progress for 30 minutes, there are no
vital signs,  and an automatic defibrillator does not advise any shock, the
person can be declared dead in the field and need not be transported to the
hospital. So synchronization of watches takes on new importance.

Gerard Ashton

-----Original Message-----
From: leapsecs-bounces at leapsecond.com
[mailto:leapsecs-bounces at leapsecond.com] On Behalf Of Steve Allen
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2014 2:52 AM
To: Leap Second Discussion List
Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] presentations from AAS Future of Time sessions

On Thu 2014-01-16T01:33:53 -0800, Tom Van Baak hath writ:

> What is a typical example of the legal definition of a day?  Would 

> that definition be affected if DUT1 were allowed to grow to 2 s or 10 

> s or 60 s instead of 0.9 s?


In the United States one legal definition with significant financial
consequences is whether a child is born in one calendar year or another, and
the boundary is understood to be midnight.  It would be interesting to know
whether there is statute or case law saying anything about how midnight
shall be determined, but for the IRS they are stuck relying on what the
birth certificate says.

In practice the birth team has far more important things to do than watch
the clock.  I would not be surprised if in close cases the birth
certificates show more variation than the apparent solar day.  Taking this
toward reductio ad absurdum one could imagine fathers driving prepartum
mothers west across a time zone boundary.

That second question was basically one of the elements of Question
236/7 when the ITU-R got into this redefinition effort, and one of the
questions that the national delegates to the 2012 RA did not believe was
adequately answered by the draft TF.460.

I think the 2015 RA vote is also not going to depend on whether any local
jurisdictions have such a legal framework.  It's more likely to depend on
whether the national delegations believe that their constituencies will
tolerate a day being defined by cesium atoms instead of earth rotation.

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB   Natural Sciences II, Room 165    Lat  +36.99855
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