[LEAPSECS] a big week for leaps at SG7 and WP7A

[Kevin Birth]

As a social scientist who watched the British process from the outside, I
had some concerns about it.  In particular, I was bothered by Minister
Willets announcing his feelings and THEN hiring the outside consulting
group to write a report.

Social and cultural dimensions do matter, but if researched in a way that
can be labelled as biased, then the results are easily dismissed.  A
report by a consulting group hired by a Minister with a clear and
passionately stated position will not be taken seriously.

I was also concerned that the methodology involved workshops that seemed
to educate participants on the leap second debate--that can too easily
push responses in a particular direction. Moreover, the consulting group
that was hired had no experience in researching something like social and
cultural aspects of time.  It is a difficult subject for which to develop
research protocols that do not lead people to particular responses.

I would love there to be more sound social scientific research on this
topic, but most social scientists who study time do not even know that
this debate is happening, and with slow publishing cycles, by the time the
researchers who are working on it get their work out, there is a good
chance that a decision will have been made.

Cheers,

Kevin


Kevin K. Birth, Professor
Department of Anthropology
Queens College, City University of New York
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Flushing, NY 11367
telephone: 718/997-5518

"We may live longer but we may be subject to peculiar contagion and
spiritual torpor or illiteracies of the imagination" --Wilson Harris

"Tempus est mundi instabilis motus, rerumque labentium cursus." --Hrabanus
Maurus





On 9/30/14 10:05 AM, "Stephen Colebourne" <scolebourne at joda.org> wrote:

>On 30 September 2014 11:43, Tony Finch <dot at dotat.at> wrote:
>> Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne at joda.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> I can safely say from my experience there, that if leap seconds are
>>> abolished it will not be with the British peoples approval.
>>
>> I got the impression from the emphasis on non-technical aspects that the
>> consultation was designed to get that answer. It's easy to persuate the
>> British public to vote no.
>>
>> And I seem to remember from reading the materials that they also ignored
>> the cultural damage that was done by the introduction of leap seconds in
>> the first place, breaking a multi-thousand-year tradition of base 60
>> fractions, making all mechanical clocks obsolete, and so on.
>
>The consultation seemed to be based on a fair and reasonable setup. I
>can well understand that the proponents of change think non-scientific
>issues shouldn't matter, but IMO its the lack of consideration of
>those that has been a big flaw in the whole process. One could
>definitely say that participants value the meaning of a day as defined
>by the Sun more highly than any second based clock, atomic or
>otherwise.
>
>There was also incredulity that the smart people who they rely on to
>run complex machines like atomic clocks can't manage to get every NTP
>server in the world to send out the same piece of information that
>actually tells everyone it is a leap second. After all the process of
>updating NTP is best described as "some bloke sends out an email and
>everyone has to manually update their NTP servers". The participants
>expected this kind of stuff to be automated and just work, not for the
>smart people to be spending all their time trying to weasel out of
>fixing what we have and in the meantime destroying the notion of a
>solar day.
>
>(I'm using a little hyperbole, but basically even after it being
>explained in detail, the participants pretty much all agreed that
>while the removal of leap seconds wouldn't make much difference to
>them personally, they did not support the change. And yes, there was
>astonishment that the smart people can't get the current system right,
>particularly around NTP leap second broadcasts.)
>
>Stephen
>_______________________________________________
>LEAPSECS mailing list
>LEAPSECS at leapsecond.com
>https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs