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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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The week was dedicated to the construction and completion of the set-up in the field lab.

Still, we started Monday by solving some problems in the Statistical Design and Planning of Experiments-course, that we take with Niels. Progress was slow, but steady. Everything seemed to be confounded, even when the underlying factorial structure was taken into consideration.

We had expected to spend the afternoon working on the project, but this should not be so. It had been decided to host the Christmas reception in our office, since all other rooms were occupied. Fine with us, but unfortunately it was a complete mess, since everyone considered this exact room their private dumping ground for whatever items they did not plan to use for a few years or more. We were encouraged to give a hand cleaning it up, which we did with Jan, the other student in the room. It took some hours but admittedly, the room looked somewhat nicer afterwards.

We then proceeded to the field lab. We built the remaining three panels for the tables, and installed them under the tables as planned. We removed two workstations from the lab, so that there was a total of four left. We installed the wires and the triac controls. All controls were installed in the room next door to the field lab, which also served as department library.

At the same time that we will be testing the set-up and running experiments, other experiments will be conducted in the surrounding rooms and the corridor. These require an air temperature of 23° C be maintained in the corridor. As the main air extract from the field lab is under the door to the corridor, we will be blowing up to 180 l/s of air at approximately 20° C into the corridor. Measures should be taken to solve this.

The accuracy of the temperature control in the field lab had not been tested yet. Accurate control is crucial for the experiments. We could only use the cooling on Tuesdays, Thursdays and weekends, which made it more difficult to test the system.

For temperature measurements we would use thermistors; the Centre, mainly due to the low price, used these. The calibration data for the thermistors that we had available was based on results from an earlier study, and these data could not be verified. We decided to calibrate the thermistors ourselves, a potentially time-consuming process. Ideally, each thermistor should be tested individually, and a regression formula for each should be used when analysing the data. We were short on time, and decided to test them all at one time. We did this using a simple set-up. This could cause a slightly reduced accuracy, but greatly sped up the process. It turned out that the results were good.

We had a meeting with Jørn Thursday, in order to give him a general update. We decided to use a thermographic camera and a thermal manikin to further evaluate the set-up.

Friday was spent mainly selecting subjects, which turned out to be very time-consuming. We had received roughly 130 enquiries, which was more than we had hoped for. Questionnaires were sent to each, and these had to be evaluated for us to select the subjects that we needed. Luckily we got what we needed. It even turned out that we had no problems recruiting for the groups that were to work in the weekends and on Friday night. A total of 28 healthy young men and women were selected, 14 of each sex.