He’s talking about inside the UK not outside though, so in context he’s correct. Though he seems to have gone with the 81.3% of all quoted statistics being fabricated when the quote is written.
Hi Andy,
My mother used to send food parcels to a family near Ayr in the 1940s and early 1950s. Should I be looking at restarting after Jan 1?
BTW I think you underestimate the numbers of statistics compiled on the run.
73
Ron
VK3AFW
2 Likes
Go figure this one!! The Beeb, reporting on the US election is showing poll closure times in GMT. US Election 2020 Results - BBC News
1 Like
Oh,
You guys having an election?
I guess the BBC is catering for its audience.
73
Ron
VK3AFW
1 Like
Clearly GMT is more Universal than we thought …trending global…
Paul
Which alternative time zone should they use?
They’ve used GMT for transmission and programme times for 98 years not just for domestic broadcasts but also the BBC World Service to all parts of the world
Indeed. UTC is a relatively recent invention. I was a broadcast band SWL around the time UTC was being implemented (1972) and at that time practically every international shortwave broadcaster published schedules and announced times in GMT. In the years that followed, most of them switched over to calling it UTC, but the BBC World Service stuck with GMT. Presumably they knew that they would be inundated with “Disgusted Tunbridge Wells” letters if they changed.
As has been quite rightly pointed out earlier in this thread, UTC and GMT are different things if you look at their formal scientific definitions. But in practice all civil timezones are nowadays based on a fixed offset (usually an exact number of hours) from UTC. In the UK in winter, the offset is zero, and we call it GMT. In this context it is simply the name of a timezone and has lost its association with mean solar time at Greenwich. So for practical everyday purposes in colloquial usage, UTC and GMT are the same thing.
Martyn M1MAJ
5 Likes
A note of clarification before I answer the specific question. I, for better or worse, redirected the thread by claiming the GMT, UTC and Zulu time are for some/many “colloquially” equivalent and used interchangeably. I get the science argument but my comment was more about everyday thinking and usage.
While I’m thrilled to see the Beeb cover our local elections and in so doing use GMT it seems odd to report closing times in anything but local US timezones. The landing page I get at the Beeb when in the US is different from when I am in the UK and that sort of makes sense. Maybe the world is interested in our elections but I just don’t know and assume the principle audience is in the US who might not exactly know what GMT is.
Paul
Perhaps they want to emphasize that the polls close at different times in different places. If they used local timezones, the times would presumably all be the same and the international audience would have to know or look up several different conversions. It wouldn’t be instantly obvious which times were earlier or later (I speak as one who tends to have to think very hard about east and west).
I would assume that people in the US would know what local time their polls close, so telling them the local time wouldn’t really be useful.
There’s probably no ideal solution to this, but using a universal time standard to describe international affairs seems rather helpful to me. Obviously it is extraordinarily convenient for those of us who happen to live in the UK, but whereever you are, you only need to know your own offset and not those of other places.
Martyn
1 Like
Only if the broadcaster was trying to tell US voters what time the polling stations close which the BBC is not - the broadcasts and website are aimed at a worldwide audience.
Perhaps US citizens don’t realize but the rest of the world is also on tender hooks awaiting the outcome of the US election because - although we don’t get to vote - we will also be greatly affected by the outcome.
I would rather say, some people in the rest of the World…
Cheers,
Guru
1 Like
Ah, the newsmakers business. Not mine definitely…