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

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, @04:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:45PM (#218634)

    I find the european whiners funny. The non-scientists get their knickers in a bunch because they're not using scientific units. The scientists, on the other hand, don't really give a rat's ass in these type of articles because they know what units are for, the importance of using units that naturally go with the scale of what you're talking about, and they don't find it too challenging to multiply by a scale factor to convert (if they really cared about the numbers). In any event, it doesn't take away from the point of the article. If you're so worried about whether it is in C or F, then you are losing the forest for the trees.

    If you're one of those SI zealots who want to force that on everyone, then you clearly don't understand what units are and why we use them. For instance, insisting all volumetric values expressed in liters is stupid for everyday life. You don't go down to the pub and ask for for 568 ml of beer, you say you want a pint. Or a half pint. There was some jackass here a while back who bitched that the article that said the ISS was such-and-such many football fields big should have used SI. Do you really think expressing the size of the ISS in square meters gives one a better intuitive feel than relating it to something they are well familiar with?

    In any event, I find it surprising that someone who reads articles posted on a "scientific news outlet" (though I would point out that based upon the types of articles posted here, I would call this more a political site than a science or technical site) would have such a large conceptual issue dealing with F anyway. I would have expected their grasp of math to be a bit better than that.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 05 2015, @07:27PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @07:27PM (#218727) Journal

    I would have expected their grasp of math to be a bit better than that.
    What does knowing the definition of an unit that is not in use in your country (and in the majority of the world) to do with grasp of math?

    What's the problem with adding the Celsius value, and thus saving lots of readers unnecessary work?

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.