Scoville scale Scoville scale The Scoville scale is a measurement of the pungency (spiciness or "heat") of chili peppers and other spicy foods, as recorded in Scoville Heat Units (SHU) based on the concentration of capsaicinoids, among which capsaicin is the predominant component. The scale is named after its creator, American pharmacist Wilbur Scoville, whose 1912 method is known as the Scoville organoleptic test. In the 21st century, high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is used to quantify the capsaicinoid content as an indicator of pungency. The most expedient method for estimating SHU is a subjective assessment derived from the capsaicinoid sensitivity by people
Robust measures of scale used. Another familiar robust measure of scale is the "median absolute deviation" (MAD), the median of the absolute values of the differences between the data values and the overall median of the data set; for a Gaussian distribution, MAD is related to formula_1 as formula_2 (the derivation can be found here). Robust measures of scale can be used as estimators of properties of the population, either for parameter estimation or as estimators of their own expected value. For example, robust estimators of scale are used to estimate the population variance or population standard deviation, generally by multiplying by a scale