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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:31PM
Well, about every digital thermometer I've seen, as well as every clinical thermometer, no matter whether analogue or digital, does give the temperature to one digit after the number.
Anyway, apart from body temperature I've never felt the need for less than one degree Celsius accuracy. Not to mention that even digital thermometers are generally not more exact than that, despite their precision (that is, if you put two digital thermometers side by side, don't be surprised to see a difference of about one degree Celsius). The exception are, of course, clinical thermometers.
Also, Celsius temperatures have a very convenient zero point. The freezing point of water is the single most important temperature in everyday life (at least if you live in areas where it is frequently reached).
I also think the fact that Celsius temperatures go below zero on a regular basis give Celsius-based countries in areas with a cold winter a head-start in mathematics: I've once read, in a book by an American, that people frequently have troubles with negative numbers. Which at that time really confused me because I've never met anyone who had trouble with the concept. Which is not because I've never met people who had trouble with mathematics in general; I definitely know people who never really understood fractions, for example. And then, it struck me: Here, Children come into contact with negative numbers even before they can really calculate even with positive numbers: Through temperature. They know that lower temperatures mean it gets colder, and when it gets really cold, the temperatures go negative. On analogue thermometers (which at the time I grew up were basically the only thermometers around) you see the numbers going down, and then continuing to the negative numbers. In short, you've learned to feel how negative numbers work long before you actually leaned them as numbers in school maths.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @06:13PM
Ahh, there's the problem. No need to read the rest.