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Your Office Thermostat is Set for Men's Comfort. Here's the Scientific Proof.

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @12:18PM   Printer-friendly

Phoenix666 writes:

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?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:05PM (#218566)

    Number of comments is a pretty terrible metric really.

    I read all of those submissions you listed, just didn't really have anything to say about them. They don't feature opinions.
    "Sex With Robots to Be 'the Norm' in 50 Years, Expert Claims" is entirely opinion based, so it's easy to comment on/disagree with/bitch about.

    I honestly think it might be nice, besides "n comments", to also have a "n views".

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:14PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:14PM (#218576) Journal

    Is it, though? Anyone who wants straight science news can use RSS or some similar service. Slashdot, and Soylent, have always been about the conversation. I know I have relied on it heavily over the years in forming opinions about tech issues that I don't have personal experience or expertise in. So, if there's not a lot of commentary on a given article, obviously there's not much chance to learn from people who know a lot more about a given issue than I do.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.

    • (Score: 2) by fleg on Thursday August 06 2015, @04:46AM

      by fleg (128) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 06 2015, @04:46AM (#218955)

      >Is it, though?

      yeah it is :)
      i read them too. just didnt have anything to say, which is why its good to
      throw in an article like this one every now and again, gives everyone a chance
      to sound off.