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: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] 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 <[email protected]> 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 _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
