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Use of yogurt bacteria as a model surrogate to compare household cleaning solutions

Shukla et al. | May 07, 2023

Use of yogurt bacteria as a model surrogate to compare household cleaning solutions
Image credit: CDC

While resources on the safety of household cleaning products are plentiful, measures of efficacy of these cleaning chemicals against bacteria and viruses remain without standardization in the consumer market. The COVID pandemic has exasperated this knowledge gap, stoking the growth of misinformation and misuse surrounding household cleaning chemicals. Arriving at a time dire for sanitization standardization, the authors of this paper have created a quantifying framework for consumers by comparing a wide range of household cleaning products in their efficacy against bacteria generated by a safe and easily replicable yogurt model.

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Rhythmic lyrics translation: Customizing a pre-trained language model using stacked fine-tuning

Chong et al. | May 01, 2023

Rhythmic lyrics translation: Customizing a pre-trained language model using stacked fine-tuning
Image credit: Pixabay

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a software that uses neural network techniques to translate text from one language to another. However, one of the most famous NMT models—Google Translate—failed to give an accurate English translation of a famous Korean nursery rhyme, "Airplane" (비행기). The authors fine-tuned a pre-trained model first with a dataset from the lyrics domain, and then with a smaller dataset containing the rhythmical properties, to teach the model to translate rhythmically accurate lyrics. This stacked fine-tuning method resulted in an NMT model that could maintain the rhythmical characteristics of lyrics during translation while single fine-tuned models failed to do so.

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Linearity of piezoelectric response of electrospun polymer-based (PVDF) fibers with barium titanate nanoparticles

Nichitiu et al. | Feb 13, 2023

Linearity of piezoelectric response of electrospun polymer-based (PVDF) fibers with barium titanate nanoparticles

Here, seeking to develop an understanding of the properties that determine the viability of piezoelectric flexible materials for applications in electro-mechanical sensors, the authors investigated the effects of the inclusion BaTiO3 nanoparticles in electrospun Polyvinyledene Fluoride. They found the voltage generated had a piecewise linear dependence on the applied force at a few temperatures.

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More efficient sources of water distribution for agricultural and general usage

Jung et al. | Nov 11, 2022

More efficient sources of water distribution for agricultural and general usage

Here, the authors investigated alternative methods to irrigate plants based on the their identification that current irrigation systems waste a large amount of fresh water. They compared three different delivery methods for water: conventional sprinkler, underground cloth, and a perforated pipe embedded in the soil. They found the cloth method to save the most water, although plant growth was slightly less in comparison to plants watered with the sprinkler method or pipe method.

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The influence of purpose-of-use on information overload in online social networking

Agarkar et al. | Nov 01, 2022

The influence of purpose-of-use on information overload in online social networking

Here, seeking to understand the effects of social media in relation to social media fatigue and/or overload in recent years, the authors used various linear models to assess the results of a survey of 27 respondents. Their results showed that increased duration of use of social media did not necessarily lead to fatigue, suggesting that quality may be more important than quantity. They also considered the purpose of an individual's social media usage as well as their engagement behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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