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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: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday August 05 2015, @05:51PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @05:51PM (#218672) Journal

    ...the implication is that white men are using their hegemony/privilege/whatever to not only make everyone else uncomfortable and waste energy in the process, wrecking the environment,
     
    I think it's pretty common knowledge that keeping the thermostat lowers actually saves energy. But hey, don't let basic thermodynamics get in the way of your persecution complex.

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  • (Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday August 05 2015, @07:07PM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @07:07PM (#218715) Journal

    Yes, that's true in the winter. I should have been more clear. My apologies. I was mostly reacting to this:

    Any female worker who spends time sitting at a desk can tell you that that makes for a wretched day, especially in the summer when air conditioners are on high, and they have to wear wool clothes and run space heaters even when it's 90 degrees outside.

    I tried to imagine being one of these women who gets frostbite at 68°F. It must be a tough choice: either dress for winter and then get heatstroke after entering the car at end of the day, or dress for summer and get hypothermia after entering office!

    I can only assume the freeze-to-death problem doesn't exist or isn't as severe in winter, since one would need to be insane to wear, say, a sundress while negotiating the two feet of snow that fell overnight and the −20°F wind chill.

    As far a persecution complex goes, I'm mostly angry that they'd presume I'd be comfortable at 75°F–77°F without giving me a standard deviation or error bars or some other statistics I might be able to use to determine just how strange of a girl I am! (May also lead to follow-up studies about the effects of Amazon training.)