SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Temperatures are set based on formulas that aimed to optimize employees' thermal comfort, a neutral condition of the body when it doesn't have to shiver to produce heat because it's too cold or sweat because it's too hot. It's based on four environmental factors: air temperature, radiant temperature, air velocity and humidity. And two personal factors: clothing and metabolic rate, the amount of energy required by the body to function.
The problem, according to a study in Nature Climate Change on Monday, is that metabolic rates can vary widely across humans based on a number of factors -- size, weight, age, fitness level and the type of work being done -- and today's standards are based on the assumption that every worker is, you guessed it, a man.
Or if you want to be really specific, a 40-year-old, 154-pound man.
...
Kingma and van Marken Lictenbelt's work builds on research out of Japan which found that the neutral temperature for Japanese women was 77.36 degrees (Fahrenheit) while it was 71.78 for European and North American males.
5.58 degrees is a significant difference. Is it better for half the people in the office to be sweaty than half the people in the office to be chilly?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday August 05 2015, @01:59PM
Kingma and van Marken Lictenbelt's work builds on research out of Japan which found that the neutral temperature for Japanese women was 77.36 degrees (Fahrenheit) while it was 71.78 for European and North American males.
5.58 degrees is a significant difference.
In that particular case the two groups being compared not only have different genders, but also different ethnicities.
It reads like a more-or-less throwaway bit of trivia in the context of the article, so I'm not sure why it warranted a graph (which is "zeroed" at the essentially arbitrary 0 Fahrenheit)
Also:
The current standards for office settings assume a metabolic rate that produces a resting heat of 60 to 70 watts per square meter. The researchers estimated that this model overestimated the heat production of women by up to 35 percent.
There's nothing in the article about whether they checked whether the model was also overestimating the heat production of men. Shouldn't they have tested both groups, instead of just women?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:21PM
In that particular case the two groups being compared not only have different genders, but also different ethnicities.
It reads like a more-or-less throwaway bit of trivia in the context of the article,
Because we segregate office buildings by ethnicity.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:29PM
Yes I picked up on that too, and noted that we're talking about two different diets, and regions with two very different obesity indices as well. But you can't make up what the original article didn't report in order to have a more rigorous comparison.
Still, we've all had a good chat, eh?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by danomac on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:24PM
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Wednesday August 05 2015, @05:08PM
That about the Japanese is some weird statement thrown in by the WP. Unless I missed it, the Japanese study is not even cited in the linked article (though it is cited in another work they cited), and is a not so very well done (IMHO) study in some office in Japan. Also, there was no mention of European and NA males, just "non-Japanese" of varying ethnic origin. Glancing through Japanese study it seems most of the women actually had most problems with the dryness of the air (eye/skin irritation). Furthermore the authors note that the clothing, type of work, and the fact that the non-Japanese may have been used to different (cooler) office temperatures may all be factors explaining the differences.
Remembering my own time in Japan, I always thought they overdid it with the aircons. It was terrible to feel the water condensing on your under-cooled skin after leaving the subway or most buildings. But then, I do not go to an office wearing a 3 piece suit :)
Also, when I visited again briefly in 2012 or so they seemed to have become much more concerned with energy saving as a fallout of the whole Fukushima thing.