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: 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.