Polylactic acid (PLA) is a bio-based, compostable plastic that is comparable in cost to petroleum-based plastics. This study aims to evaluate the effects of UV treatment and mechanical chopping on the degradation of PLA. Based on their findings, the authors propose an alternative PLA degradation process that may be more time and energy efficient than current processes.
Although there has been great progress in the field of Natural language processing (NLP) over the last few years, particularly with the development of attention-based models, less research has contributed towards modeling keystroke log data. State of the art methods handle textual data directly and while this has produced excellent results, the time complexity and resource usage are quite high for such methods. Additionally, these methods fail to incorporate the actual writing process when assessing text and instead solely focus on the content. Therefore, we proposed a framework for modeling textual data using keystroke-based features. Such methods pay attention to how a document or response was written, rather than the final text that was produced. These features are vastly different from the kind of features extracted from raw text but reveal information that is otherwise hidden. We hypothesized that pairing efficient machine learning techniques with keystroke log information should produce results comparable to transformer techniques, models which pay more or less attention to the different components of a text sequence in a far quicker time. Transformer-based methods dominate the field of NLP currently due to the strong understanding they display of natural language. We showed that models trained on keystroke log data are capable of effectively evaluating the quality of writing and do it in a significantly shorter amount of time compared to traditional methods. This is significant as it provides a necessary fast and cheap alternative to increasingly larger and slower LLMs.
The authors designed a system that runs off of body heat to track body temperature that could help prevent injuries that result from elevated body temperature.
Consumption of non-alcoholic beverages, like non-alcoholic beer, is growing in popularity in the United States. These beverages raise important societal questions, such as whether minors should be allowed to purchase or consume non-alcoholic beer. An and An investigate this issue by surveying adults to see if they support minors purchasing and consuming non-alcoholic beer.
In this study, locally produced fall and spring honeys were tested to determine whether there was a significant difference in their abilities to limit or prevent bacterial growth of E. coli, S. aureus, P. aeruginosa, and S. epidermidis.
This manuscript describes a new method of on-the-go passwords using typing characteristics. The authors developed a keyboard and keystroke recording setup and tested it with 30 participants. The results indicated the five chosen parameters are distinct across participants yet consistent across time for each participant, making it a plausible candidate for a behavior-based password system.
There is a need for safe and effective therapies to prevent platelet aggregation associated with cardiovascular diseases. Prabhakar and Prabhakar test to see whether dietary supplements claiming to reduce cardiovascular disease risk will affect aggregation of human platelets.