Evaluation of the level of contaminants, Mercury and Arsenic in fiddleheads, New Brunswick
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In spring 2010, Maliseet Nation Conservation Council (MNCC) has conducted a study to test fiddleheads for contaminants. As Fiddleheads are important traditional foods of Maliseet Indians of the Saint John River Valley and widely consumed veggie in the province of New Brunswick we decided to test fiddleheads for contaminants. Though it was initially planned to test fiddlehead samples from entire province of New Brunswick, due to unavoidable circumstances the study has to be restricted to the Fredericton and suburbs. In accordance with the revised experimental plan, twenty five fiddlehead samples collected from Jemseg, Sugar Island, Mactaquac and Nashwaaksis areas were analysed for Mercury, Arsenic, Nickel and Cadmium at the Research and Productive Council laboratory, Fredericton. According to the outcome of the study, our samples contained insignificant amounts of Mercury and Arsenic. However, estimated Nickel (0.4 – 3.8ppm) and Cadmium (0.013 – 0.195ppm) levels were slightly higher than the recommended levels by different international organizations such as CODEX, FAO etc. As the final leg of the current phase of the study, a workshop was held in Fredericton to collect traditional knowledge of fiddleheads and disseminate the outcome of the study. It was a well attended meeting and the views and inputs of participants to our traditional knowledge study were very useful especially to formulate future studies to test more traditional foods of aboriginals for contaminants.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".