[LEAPSECS] final report of the UK leap seconds dialog

[Michael Deckers]

    On 2015-02-05 11:16, Peter Vince wrote:

>       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.

   But where is the detailed list of the problems with the current version
   of UTC, where is the analysis of this list, and the exploration of the
   solution space?  Take for example the bad predictability of the current
   UTC, brought up repeatedly by Warner Losh. This could perhaps be
   alleviated by a long term specification of future leap seconds -- but
   this is apparently not even discussed by the ITU experts for Study
   Question ITU-R 236/7.

   It is exactly this lack of due engineering process that leads to the
   "if it ain't broke" position. And if the WRC votes for abandoning leap
   seconds, we would not know whether the IERS will continue to publish DUT1,
   or whether the BIPM will revoke TAI. I do not find it the least bit
   surprising that most average citizens oppose such a change.
	
   Michael Deckers.