Fish or Foul?
Fish or Foul?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/opinion/02dolnick.html?pagewanted=print
Recently, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, two recent high school graduates in Manhattan, undertook a science project of DNA testing 60 seafood samples from 4 restaurants and 2 stores around the city. The results showed that 2 of the 4 restaurants and 6 of the 10 stores sold mislabled fish.
Tasters often misclassify foods in taste tests. Expecations for taste influence many tasters’ judgment about what they have tasted. As an example, in a taste test in which testers are asked to classify wines, testers are often led astray by white wines dyed red, failing to classify them as white
Related Buzzwords:
Semantics
Taxonomy
Categorization
Classification
Compliance
Standardization
Precision
Related Lectures:
5; Concepts and Categories
7: Controlled names and Vocabularies
14: Social/Distributed Categorization
Bob Glushko Said,
September 5, 2008 @ 6:20 pm
I’m not sure this is about misclassification based on expectations. I think it is about fraud – selling less expensive fish as if they were more expensive varieties. But it is very cool that a couple of high school kids are doing DNA testing – the technology must be getting a lot more manageable.