Processed Rice in Hawaii: Nutritive Value, Susceptibility to Insect Infestation and Consumer Acceptance as Compared with White and Brown Rice

Factors affecting the nutritive value and use of processed rice In Hawaii have been studied. Twenty-two samples of processed rice have been found to have an average thiamine content of 193 micrograms per 100 grams. Processed rice has higher thiamine, niacin, calcium, phosphorus, and iron contents than does white rice, but has lower thiamine and iron contents than does brown rice. Processed rice has a lower moisture content than brown or white. During 16 weeks of storage in two Honolulu warehouses, processed rice was found to have slightly less insect infestation than white rice and much less than brown rice. During storage, the processed rice lost 17 percent of its thiamine content; brown rice lost 33 percent, and white rice 34 percent. Losses of niacin were less than those of thiamine - approximately 15 percent of the niacin content of all the rices. The same rices stored 18 months under laboratory conditions also decreased in thiamine content. Processed rice lost 34 percent, brown rice 38 percent, and white rice 15 percent. The thiamine of processed rice has been shown to be available to human beings by studies of the thiamine excretion of human subjects on a diet containing 375 grams of rice, raw weight, daily. Washing processed rice seven times removes 22 percent of the thiamine and about 50 percent of the minerals. Washed processed rice contains an insignificant percentage of the daily requirement for calcium, phosphorus, and iron. Brown rice retains its nutrients better during washing than either white or processed. Losses of thiamine in cooking processed rice vary according to the method used from 18 to 54 percent. Discarding the cooking water results in large losses of thiamine. Brown and white rice cooked in small amounts of water lose 18 and 9 percent of their thiamine content. A study of plate waste in school cafeterias indicates that processed rice is eaten readily by customers of such cafeterias. Interviews with 200 Honolulu families who tried the rice indicate that 12 percent of them prefer processed or mixed processed and white to other kinds of rice. It may be concluded from these studies that processed rice stores as well as or better than white rice and has a higher nutritive value. It is lower in nutritive value than brown rice but is not as subject to insect infestation and deterioration

Can the Crowd Tell How I Feel? Trait Empathy and Ethnic Background in a Visual Pain Judgment Task.

Many advocate for artificial agents to be empathic. Crowdsourc- ing could help, by facilitating human-in-the-loop approaches and dataset crea- tion for visual emotion recognition algorithms. Although crowdsourcing has been employed successfully for a range of tasks, it is not clear how effective crowdsourcing is when the task involves subjective rating of emotions. We ex- amined relationships between demographics, empathy and ethnic identity in pain emotion recognition tasks. Amazon MTurkers viewed images of strangers in painful settings, and tagged subjects’ emotions. They rated their level of pain arousal and confidence in their responses, and completed tests to gauge trait empathy and ethnic identity. We found that Caucasian participants were less confident than others, even when viewing other Caucasians in pain. Gender cor- related to word choices for describing images, though not to pain arousal or confidence. The results underscore the need for verified information on crowdworkers, to harness diversity effectively for metadata generation tasks