[LEAPSECS] final report of the UK leap seconds dialog

[Stephen Colebourne]

Having taken part as an expert, I can say that the sessions were well
run and lots of data was presented to people. Where the sessions
differ from this list is that *everything* was considered (religion,
culture, astronomy), not the incredibly narrow technical arguments.

The general sentiment from people is well captured by the report and
video. That people feel extremely comfortable with the notion that
there is a mechanism to keep time in track with the Sun, irrespective
of day-to-day accuracy (cf DST). The vast majority saw the leap second
issue as a small number of technical/computer professionals being too
lazy to fix their code to actually work.

I feel I can safely say that if leap seconds are abandoned, it will be
against 98%+ of public opinion in the UK.

Stephen


On 5 February 2015 at 09:55, Peter Vince <petervince1952 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Watching the video interviews on that site, with the members of the public,
> I was disappointed that most of them seemed unaware of any technical
> problems the leap-seconds cause.  I think the team running those sessions
> did the whole idea a dis-service by not making those problems clearer :-(
>
> On 5 February 2015 at 08:22, <mike at lumieresimaginaire.com> wrote:
>>
>> Le 04.02.2015 15:49, Steve Allen a écrit :
>>
>> Thanks for this and your previous mail. Are you aware of any other
>> countries which have 'polled' their populations?  On first scan it is clear
>> that the British are concerned more about social/cultural issues than with
>> cost/technical arguments, even mentioning, and I find this encouraging, that
>> the UK deciders think out of the national box, taking into account
>> international cultural points of view.
>>
>> Keep 'em coming.
>>
>> Mike
>>
>>
>>
>> The final report of the UK leap seconds dialog is at
>> http://leapseconds.co.uk/reports-findings-dialogue/
>>
>> Search for the word "congestion" where it looks as if it once had a
>> footnote mentioning a system which has avoided leap second problems by
>> adopting a purely atomic time scale.
>>
>> --
>> Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
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