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2000
Week 36
Week 37
Week 38
Week 39
Week 40
Week 41
Week 42
Week 43
Week 44
Week 45
Week 46
Week 47
Week 48
Week 49
Week 50
2001
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Week 9
Week 10
Week 11
Week 12
Week 13
Weeks 14-20

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September 4^th was the official start of the exam project. However, the paper work (exam project form) and the main objectives of the project had been agreed upon in the spring semester of this year. The aim of the project is to "test whether people at thermal comfort become more productive when subjected to lowered air temperature and elevated radiant temperature". This hypothesis was to be tested in the field laboratory at the Centre of Indoor Climate and Energy by the end of October over a period of six weeks.

Much of the week was reviewing our initial ideas from the spring semester as both of us had been busy doing other things over the entire summer. We outlined a project plan with dead-lines for the individual weeks until New Years and discussed it with Jørn. The field laboratory will be in use until the fall break; thus, we agreed to move our 1 week fall vacation to Christmas as we will surely be very busy up till the experiments commence.

We were given an office in the "student" room in building 402, i.e. room no. 9. We share the office with two Bulgarians, Kiril and George, and with Yan, who is Polish; all of them seem to be nice persons. The office and the entire lower floor were rather messy because new floors are being laid in the offices. We spent some time arranging ourselves in the office and tidying up the room. To our great satisfaction we had been given two computers. They both are connected to the internet, but they are not new. However, they will surely fulfil our needs for this project, as we do not expect to do simulation work that requires much computational power. Unfortunately, the computers had previously been used by Czech students, who had installed Czech-versions of different software. Thus, it has been necessary to reinstall programs and/or format the computers.

Our office only has one phone line, which is shared by all the students in the room. We found this to be a dissatisfactory situation because everybody is on the alert whenever the phone rings. We therefore tried to investigate whether it would be possible to get our own phone line. There were apparently no technical hindrances to this solution, however, our request for an individual phone line was rejected with the argumentation that the employees at the institute were so accustomed to dialling 4009 to the student room that this could not be changed. The suggestion of having one phone with different ringing signals for the individual students was also rejected. We intend, however, to continue the battle to get our own phone line as the rejections we have receive so far seem to originate from old fashioned stubbornness rather than from sound reasoning. And isn’t it true that ringing phones is one of the major nuisance factors in office environments?