[LEAPSECS] final report of the UK leap seconds dialog

[Peter Vince]

Hi Stephen,

     Yes, I took part in the initial meeting of "professionals" (so-called
"stakeholders"), where the issues were indeed thoroughly discussed, and
well understood (apart from some unfortunate absences - no-one from the
military was there, for example).  But on the video on the linked page
below, nine members of the public gave their views, one of them said "If
it's not broke, don't fix it", and two others said they didn't understand
what the fuss was all about - it's been working OK for the last 25 times.
 (And none of the nine people were in favour of changing the system.)  I
would sympathise with both those views, but they seem ill-informed: I
believe this discussion has come about exactly because it *is* broken, and
*hasn't* been working perfectly for the last 25 times.

     None of the people interviewed had even heard of leap-seconds -
clearly the stories about the long delays at Sydney(?) last time because of
the Quantas problem were too far away to register with them.  That's all
fine, *we* were busy managing the problem so the rest of the world didn't
have to worry - as it should be.

     But as I said before, I am disappointed that those members of the
public were left with the impression that there is nothing wrong, and we
timekeepers just want to change things for the sake of it.

     Peter



On 5 February 2015 at 10:14, Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne at joda.org>
wrote:

> 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)
> >> UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB   Natural Sciences II, Room 165    Lat
> >> +36.99855
> >> 1156 High Street            Voice: +1 831 459 3046           Lng
> >> -122.06015
> >> Santa Cruz, CA 95064        http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/     Hgt +250 m
>
>
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