Electric fan use for cooling during hot weather: a biophysical modelling study
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: In hot weather, electric fans can potentially provide effective cooling for people, with lower greenhouse gas emissions and cost than air conditioning. However, international public health organisations regularly discourage fan use in temperatures higher than 35°C, despite little evidence. We aimed to determine humidity-dependent temperature thresholds at which electric fans would become detrimental in different age groups. METHODS: We used biophysical modelling to determine the upper humidity-dependent temperature thresholds at which fan use would become detrimental (ie, worsen heat stress) for healthy young adults (aged 18-40 years), healthy older adults (aged ≥65 years), and older adults taking anticholinergic medication. We also obtained hourly environmental data for the period Jan 1, 2007, to Dec 31, 2019, for 108 populous cities to determine the number of days fan use would be effective for cooling, standardised to a 31-day hot weather month. We established simplified temperature thresholds for future fan use recommendations on the basis of temperatures below which fan use would never have been detrimental between Jan 1, 2007, and Dec 31, 2019, across all prevailing levels of ambient humidity. FINDINGS: According to our model, fan use would have been beneficial on 30·0 (96·6%) of 31 hot weather days for healthy young adults and 29·4 (94·9%) of 31 hot weather days for both older adults and older adults taking anticholinergic medication between Jan 1, 2007, and Dec 31, 2019. Adherence to the current WHO recommendation of fan use below temperatures of 35°C only, fan use would have been recommended on 27·2 days (87·7%) of 31 hot weather days. According to our simplified thresholds for fan use (at temperatures <39·0°C for healthy young adults, <38·0°C for healthy older adults, and <37·0°C for older adults taking anticholinergic medication), fan use would have been recommended on 29·6 (95·5%) of 31 hot weather days in healthy young adults, 29·4 (94·8%) days in healthy older adults, and 28·8 (93·0%) days in older adults taking anticholinergic medication between Jan 1, 2007, and Dec 31, 2019. INTERPRETATION: Electric fan use, particularly for healthy young adults, would not have worsened heat stress on the majority of study days between 2007 and 2019. Our newly proposed thresholds for fan use provide simple guidelines that improve future heatwave fan use recommendations. FUNDING: None.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it