Abstract: The present invention provides low-cost formaldehyde-free curable aqueous compositions comprising 100 weight parts of one or more than one binder chosen from (i) mixtures of one or more than one polycarboxylic acid or polymeric polyacid and one or more than one polyol compound comprising at least two hydroxyl or epoxy groups, (ii) copolymers or copolymeric polyacids bearing carboxylic acid groups or anhydride groups and hydroxyl groups, and (iii) mixtures thereof, and 10 to 40 weight parts of one or more than one extender having an average particle size ranging from 0.5 ?m or more and as high as 45 ?m or less, preferably chosen from microcrystalline silica, diatomaceous silica, kaolin, bentonite, and anhydrous aluminosilicate clay delaminated. In the inventive binder compositions, the ratio of the wet over dry tensile strength of said composition is about 0.5 or greater.

Abstract: The present invention relates to a process for preparing dry polymer granules having increased minimum ignition energy, lowered to unchanged maximum explosion pressure, lowered explosion strength (Kst) coupled with reduced dusting levels by drying a mixture including one or more emulsion polymers and one or more surfactants having HLB values between 10 and 25.

Abstract: The present invention provides a system and method for performing speaker verification on a spoken utterance. The present invention includes a verification template generator (40) which generates speaker-dependent verification templates for each possible spoken item that may be in the spoken utterance. A speech recognizer (42) performs speech recognition functions on the spoken utterance. A frame mapper (44) marks the beginning and ending of each spoken item within the spoken utterance. Verification module (46) generates a verification signal in response to verifying a minimum number of the spoken items within the spoken utterance being matched with the speaker dependent verification templates.