scholarly journals The shifting psychology of food safety: from sensory evaluation to a cognitive assessment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhuvanesh Awasthi

Understanding the psychological basis of food safety assessment in an era of infectious diseases becomes paramount. Functioning within a globalized food supply chain, there is a shift from sensory assessment to cognitive assessment of food safety. This short essay assesses the sensory versus cognitive evaluation of food safety. As a result of such a shift, a crucial aspect in food safety perception is the outstanding question of whether the public understands modern food safety systems. Despite an effort to reduce consumer uncertainty when buying routine and exotic food items, there has been a significant shift from a direct safety assessment to an indirect information processing paradigm. Moving away from sensory to cognitive assessment leads to higher information load that may not serve to ensure consumer confidence in food safety.

Author(s):  
Yong Li ◽  
Xiaojun Yang ◽  
Min Zuo ◽  
Qingyu Jin ◽  
Haisheng Li ◽  
...  

The real-time and dissemination characteristics of network information make net-mediated public opinion become more and more important food safety early warning resources, but the data of petabyte (PB) scale growth also bring great difficulties to the research and judgment of network public opinion, especially how to extract the event role of network public opinion from these data and analyze the sentiment tendency of public opinion comment. First, this article takes the public opinion of food safety network as the research point, and a BLSTM-CRF model for automatically marking the role of event is proposed by combining BLSTM and conditional random field organically. Second, the Attention mechanism based on vocabulary in the field of food safety is introduced, the distance-related sequence semantic features are extracted by BLSTM, and the emotional classification of sequence semantic features is realized by using CNN. A kind of Att-BLSTM-CNN model for the analysis of public opinion and emotional tendency in the field of food safety is proposed. Finally, based on the time series, this article combines the role extraction of food safety events and the analysis of emotional tendency and constructs a net-mediated public opinion early warning model in the field of food safety according to the heat of the event and the emotional intensity of the public to food safety public opinion events.


2020 ◽  
pp. 107554702098137
Author(s):  
Leticia Bode ◽  
Emily K. Vraga ◽  
Melissa Tully

We experimentally test whether expert organizations on social media can correct misperceptions of the scientific consensus on the safety of genetically modified (GM) food for human consumption, as well as what role social media cues, in the form of “likes,” play in that process. We find expert organizations highlighting scientific consensus on GM food safety reduces consensus misperceptions among the public, leading to lower GM misperceptions and boosting related consumption behaviors in line with the gateway belief model. Expert organizations’ credibility may increase as a result of correction, but popularity cues do not seem to affect misperceptions or credibility.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Efe Akyurek ◽  
Pelin Bolat

Abstract Introduction The merchant marine fleet is under inspection by several parties to ensure maritime regulation compliance. International Maritime Organization mainly regulates the industry, and the most effective defender is indeed Port StateControl run by the regional memorandum of understandings. Objective This article aims to analyze all detention remarks of Paris Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) from 2013 to 2019 for EU15 countries (except Luxemburg and Austria) to guide marine industry on detainable Port State Control remarks and country risk profile. Methods The data of the detained vessels taken from the public website of Paris MOU and each report considered as a professional judgment that causes detention. Analytical Hierarchy Process Approach has been utilized to indicate the ranking of basic maritime regulations from the perspective of the Port State Control, and Geographic Information System (GIS) helps us to demonstrate the regional dispersion amongst EU15. Results Through an approach based on Analytical Hierarchy Process and demonstrating the results on GIS has been shown that almost all the country’s top priorities for regulation are Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) and Fire Safety Systems (FSS). Moreover, a comparative demonstration of the detention percentage of each regulation to AHP results demonstrates a better understanding of EU15 countries' detention profile. Conclusion The results of the study can assist Port State Officers, ship crew, ship owners, and managers in presenting the facts of their inspection and able to improve themselves. The spatial analysis is also expected to guide ship owners and managers to focus their vessel’s deficiencies on preventing sub-standardization. Policymakers also utilize these reports to evaluate their inspection practices.


Author(s):  
NG Mowbray ◽  
L Hurt ◽  
A Powell-Chandler ◽  
N Reeves ◽  
S Chandler ◽  
...  

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic stimulated a national lockdown in the UK. The public were advised to avoid unnecessary hospital attendances and health professionals were advised to avoid aerosol-generating procedures wherever possible. The authors hypothesised that these measures would result in a reduction in the number of patients presenting to hospital with acute appendicitis and alter treatment choices. Methods A multicentred, prospective observational study was undertaken during April 2020 to identify adults treated for acute appendicitis. Searches of operative and radiological records were performed to identify patients treated during April 2018 and April 2019 for comparison. Results A total of 190 patients were treated for acute appendicitis pre-lockdown compared with 64 patients treated during lockdown. Patients treated during the pandemic were more likely to have a higher American Society of Anesthesiology (ASA) score (p = 0.049) and to have delayed their presentation to hospital (2 versus 3 days, p = 0.03). During the lockdown, the use of computed tomography (CT) increased from 36.3% to 85.9% (p < 0.001), the use of an antibiotic-only approach increased from 6.2% to 40.6% (p < 0.001) and the rate of laparoscopic appendicectomy reduced from 85.3% to 17.2% (p < 0.001). The negative appendicectomy rate decreased from 21.7% to 7.1% during lockdown (p < 0.001). Conclusions The COVID-19 lockdown was associated with a decreased incidence of acute appendicitis and a significant shift in the management approach. The increased use of CT allows the identification of simple appendicitis for conservative treatment and decreases the negative appendicectomy rate.


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