Slider Bar Research Articles

Vision System for Reading Serial Numbers of Hard Disk Drive Slider Bar and Barcode on Its Fixture

Part traceability is one of the inevitable requirements in most modern manufacturing processes. In a hard disk drive (HDD), magnetic head dictates the performance of read/write operations. A number of manufacturing processes are involved to transform a wafer disc to slider bars and finally gliding sliders of the head. In this work, we concentrate on reading serial numbers of slider bar and its attached fixture prior to a bar-lapping process. Since the serial numbers on a bar are in the scale of 18x30 microns and their reflectance nature is rather poor, special optics and lighting components are required. As nature of high optical magnification with limited depth of focus (DOF), conventional image acquisition system can not cover the bar attachment position variation due to wide tolerance of the slider bar fixture. We proposed a serial number reading system using autofocus module to cope with it. Liquid lens and image processing algorithms are introduced to evaluate and adjust the focus automatically. Since our system has to be augmented to an existing machine, footprint is also another main concern. We therefore designed a special rig so the system meets all the fore-mentioned requirements. The system was tested in the production line and had 98% and 90% accuracy for serial number and barcode decoding, respectively. The main cause of barcode reading inaccuracy was from many cycles of the fixture reuse and cleaning in the production line.

Are Narrative Letters of Recommendation for Medical Students Interpreted as Intended by Orthopaedic Surgery Residency Programs?

Narrative letters of recommendation are an important component of the residency application process. However, because narrative letters of recommendation are almost always positive, it is unclear whether those reviewing the letters understand the writer's intended strength of support for a given applicant. (1) Is the perception of letter readers for narrative letters of recommendation consistent with the intention of the letter's author? (2) Is there inter-reviewer consistency in selection committee members' perceptions of the narrative letters of recommendation? Letter writers who wrote two or more narrative letters of recommendation for applicants to one university-based orthopaedic residency program for the 2014 to 2015 application cycle were sent a survey linked to a specific letter of recommendation they authored to assess the intended meaning regarding the strength of an applicant. A total of 247 unstructured letters of recommendation and accompanying surveys were sent to their authors, and 157 surveys were returned and form the basis of this study (response percentage 64%). The seven core members of the admissions committee (of 22 total reviewers) at a university-based residency program were sent a similar survey regarding their perception of the letter. To answer our research question about whether letter readers' perceptions about a candidate were consistent with the letter writer's intention, we used kappa values to determine agreement for survey questions involving discrete variables and Spearman correlation coefficients (SCCs) to determine agreement for survey questions involving continuous variables. To answer our research question regarding inter-reviewer consistency among the seven faculty members, we compared the letter readers' responses to each survey question using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs). There was a negligible to moderate correlation between the intended and perceived strength of the letters (SCC 0.26 to 0.57), with only one of seven letter readers scoring in the moderate correlation category. When stratifying the applicants into thirds, there was only slight agreement (kappa 0.07 to 0.19) between the writers and reviewers. There were similarly low kappa values for agreement about how the writers and readers felt regarding the candidate matching into their program (kappa 0.14 to 0.30). The ICC for each question among the seven faculty reviewers ranged from poor to moderate (ICC 0.42 to 0.52). Our results demonstrate that the reader's perception of narrative letters of recommendation did not correlate well with the letter writer's intended meaning and was not consistent between letter readers at a single university-based urban orthopaedic surgery residency program. Given the low correlation between the intended strength of the letter writers and the perceived strength of those letters, we believe that other options such as a slider bar or agreed-upon wording as is used in many dean's letters may be helpful.

Timing it right: Tips for planning remote meetings across time zones

Timing it right: Tips for planning remote meetings across time zones

A Comparative Assessment of Graphic and 0–10 Rating Scales Used to Measure Entrepreneurial Competences

This article presents an empirical comparative assessment of the measurement quality of two instruments commonly used to measure fuzzy characteristics in computer-assisted questionnaires: a graphic scale (a line production scale using a slider bar) and an endecanary scale (a 0–10 rating scale using radio buttons). Data are analyzed by means of multitrait–multimethod models estimated as structural equation models with a mean and covariance structure. For the first time in such research, the results include bias, valid variance, method variance, and random error variance. The data are taken from a program that assesses entrepreneurial competences in undergraduate Economics and Business students by means of questionnaires administered on desktop computers. Neither of the measurement instruments was found to be biased with respect to the other, meaning that their scores are comparable. While both instruments achieve valid and reliable measurements, the reliability and validity are higher for the endecanary scale. This study contributes to the still scarce literature on fuzzy measurement instruments and on the comparability and relative merits of graphic and discrete rating scales on computer-assisted questionnaires.

The Archival Impulse and the Editorial Impulse

There is no firm, outside vantage-point from which to survey and thus to define archive and edition as securely differentiated categories. As readers we inhabit the same textual field as the approaches to documents and texts that we seek to define. To record is first to read and analyse sufficiently for the archival purpose; to interpret is first to read and to analyse sufficiently for the editorial purpose. In practice, the archival impulse anticipates the editorial, and the editorial rests on the archival. We may envisage the relationship of archive and edition as a horizontal slider or scroll bar running from archive on the left to edition on the right. In this model every position on the slider involves interpretative judgement appropriate to its purpose. Every position along the slider involves a report on the documents, but the archival impulse is more document-facing and the editorial is, relatively speaking, more audience-facing. Yet each activity, if it be a scholarly one, depends upon or anticipates the need for its complementary or co-dependent Other. The archival impulse aims to satisfy the shared need for a reliable record of the documentary evidence; the editorial impulse to further interpret it, with the aim of orienting it towards known or envisaged audiences and by taking their anticipated needs into account. The sliding scroll-bar model dispenses with recently expressed anxiety about digital literary archives (special-purpose collections) replacing editions. The latter will continue to be prepared as long as there are readers whose requirements need to be served. The slider model helps us to survey the full range of archival and editorial possibilities. The term “representation” embraces the archival impulse. The editor’s aim, on the other hand, is less to represent something that is pre-existing than to present something (the text of a version, the text of a work, a process of writing) that typically has not existed in precisely this form before, together with the critically analysed materials necessary to defend the presentation.

Validation of an online questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies for ESL learners

This article reports on the updating and validation of a questionnaire for vocabulary learning strategies. An English as a second language (ESL) version of the Vocabulary Learning Questionnaire (VLQ), first published in Gu and Johnson (1996), was created based on its latest version. Two response formats were piloted, that is, a paper version with a 7-point Likert scale and an online version with a 100-point slider bar. A series of validation procedures resulted in a 62-item instrument which was then administered online among 682 English language learners at the tertiary level in China. The paper presents evidence of content validity, construct validity, internal consistency reliability, and predictive validity. It also provides suggestions for interpreting and using the questionnaire for both research and instructional purposes.

Association Between Facial Rejuvenation and Observer Ratings of Youth, Attractiveness, Success, and Health.

Surgical procedures for the aging face-including face-lift, blepharoplasty, and brow-lift-consistently rank among the most popular cosmetic services sought by patients. Although these surgical procedures are broadly classified as procedures that restore a youthful appearance, they may improve societal perceptions of attractiveness, success, and health, conferring an even larger social benefit than just restoring a youthful appearance to the face. To determine if face-lift and upper facial rejuvenation surgery improve observer ratings of age, attractiveness, success, and health and to quantify the effect of facial rejuvenation surgery on each individual domain. A randomized clinical experiment was performed from August 30 to September 18, 2016, using web-based surveys featuring photographs of patients before and after facial rejuvenation surgery. Observers were randomly shown independent images of the 12 patients; within a given survey, observers saw either the preoperative or postoperative photograph of each patient to reduce the possibility of priming. Observers evaluated patient age using a slider bar ranging from 30 to 80 years that could be moved up or down in 1-year increments, and they ranked perceived attractiveness, success, and health using a 100-point visual analog scale. The bar on the 100-point scale began at 50; moving the bar to the right corresponded to a more positive rating in these measures and moving the bar to the left, a more negative rating. A multivariate mixed-effects regression model was used to understand the effect of face-lift and upper facial rejuvenation surgery on observer perceptions while accounting for individual biases of the participants. Ordinal rank change was calculated to understand the clinical effect size of changes across the various domains after surgery. A total of 504 participants (333 women, 165 men, and 6 unspecified; mean age, 29 [range, 18-70] years) successfully completed the survey. A multivariate mixed-effects regression model revealed a statistically significant change in age (-4.61 years; 95% CI, -4.97 to -4.25) and attractiveness (6.72; 95% CI, 5.96-7.47) following facial rejuvenation surgery. Observer-perceived success (3.85; 95% CI, 3.12-4.57) and health (7.65; 95% CI; 6.87-8.42) also increased significantly as a result of facial rejuvenation surgery. The data presented in this study demonstrate that patients are perceived as younger and more attractive by the casual observer after undergoing face-lift and upper facial rejuvenation surgery. These procedures also improved ratings of perceived success and health in our patient population. These findings suggest that facial rejuvenation surgery conveys an even larger societal benefit than merely restoring a youthful appearance to the face. NA.

Emotional Expression in Simple Line Drawings of a Robot's Face Leads to Higher Offers in the Ultimatum Game.

In the present study, we investigated whether expressing emotional states using a simple line drawing to represent a robot's face can serve to elicit altruistic behavior from humans. An experimental investigation was conducted in which human participants interacted with a humanoid robot whose facial expression was shown on an LCD monitor that was mounted as its head (Study 1). Participants were asked to play the ultimatum game, which is usually used to measure human altruistic behavior. All participants were assigned to be the proposer and were instructed to decide their offer within 1 min by controlling a slider bar. The corners of the robot's mouth, as indicated by the line drawing, simply moved upward, or downward depending on the position of the slider bar. The results suggest that the change in the facial expression depicted by a simple line drawing of a face significantly affected the participant's final offer in the ultimatum game. The offers were increased by 13% when subjects were shown contingent changes of facial expression. The results were compared with an experiment in a teleoperation setting in which participants interacted with another person through a computer display showing the same line drawings used in Study 1 (Study 2). The results showed that offers were 15% higher if participants were shown a contingent facial expression change. Together, Studies 1 and 2 indicate that emotional expression in simple line drawings of a robot's face elicits the same higher offer from humans as a human telepresence does.

AI framework to arrange audio objects according to listener preferences

We propose a framework for arranging audio objects in recorded music using artificial intelligence (AI) to anticipate the preferences of individual listeners. The signals of audio objects, such as the tracks of guitars and drums in a piece of music, are re-synthesizes in order to provide the preferred spatial arrangements of each listener. Deep learning-based noise suppression ratio estimation is utilized as a technique for enhancing audio objects from mixed signals. Neural networks are tuned for each audio object in advance, and noise suppression ratios are estimated for each frequency band and time frame. After enhancing each audio object, the objects are re-synthesized as stereo sound using the positions of the audio objects and the listener as synthesizing parameters. Each listener supplies simple feedback regarding his/her preferred audio object arrangement using graphical user interface (GUI). Using this listener feedback, the synthesizing parameters are then stochastically optimized in accordance with each listener’s preferences. The system recommends dozens of customized synthesizing parameters, and these parameters can then be adjusted by the listener using a single-dimensional slider bar. Several tests were conducted and the proposed framework scored high marks in subjective evaluations as to whether or not the recommended arrangements were indeed preferable.

Validity of a tablet computer version of the Japanese Orthopaedic Association hip disease evaluation questionnaire: a pilot study.

The Japanese Orthopaedic Association hip disease evaluation questionnaire (JHEQ) was established as a new patient-reported outcome for patients with hip disease. We developed a JHEQ application beta version for tablet computers. The application has a slider system to input visual analogue scale (VAS) measurements. The purposes of this study were 1) to test whether the VAS that was acquired from this slider system was equal to the value recorded on paper and 2) to evaluate the validity and agreement of the JHEQ tablet version. A total of 57 patients were analyzed in the study (mean age, 60.2 years; range, 29-81 years). They received either the paper-and-pencil version (paper version) or the tablet computer version (tablet version). To evaluate the validity of the tablet version, we analyzed differences in the VAS and total scores between the paper version and tablet computer version. In addition, we calculated Cronbach's alpha, the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and the Pearson's correlation coefficient (CC). The VAS scores in the tablet version were significantly lower than those in the paper version (22.3 ± 5.4 vs. 17.0 ± 4.5 and 28.1 ± 6.1 vs. 23.5 ± 5.3, respectively; all P < 0.05). Values of Cronbach's alpha, the ICC, and the CC among subscales ranged from 0.90 to 0.95. In conclusion, the total JHEQ score on the tablet computer beta version was in agreement with the score on the paper version. However, the VAS on the tablet version, which used a slider bar system, proved unreliable.

Automatic Hard Disk Drive Slider Bar Auditing with Spatial Light Modulator based Imaging System

In Hard Disk Drive (HDD) slider fabrication process, the slider bar auditing is required to verify if the slider bars in the tray are sorted correctly as indicated by the serial numbers printed on sliders. In this paper, we present a machine vision system for automated reading of the serial numbers. Since the sizes of slider bars are very small, an imaging system (CCD camera) with high magnification lens is usually exploited to acquire the slide bar images. For such high magnification vision system, an autofocus module is indispensable. Unlike conventional autofocus modules which perform using mechanical zoom lens, we develop an autofocus module based on Spatial Light Modulator (SLM) where the SLM will act as phase mask filter for focus adjustment. The key contribution of our work is that we perform non-mechanical autofocus approach by adjusting the pixel-based phase mask pattern sending through the SLM. The main advantage of our system is that there is no macromechanical movement part involved in Z-axis focus adjustment. We propose a machine vision algorithm that consists of 3 major steps including coarse localization of slider bar, Autofocus and optical character recognition (OCR). To our best knowledge, our developed system is the first system that uses the SLM based autofocus in machine vision for HDD slider manufacturing. From the experiment, our system can accomplish the task with very high accuracy. By using our system, we can improve the machine vision applications by replacing conventional mechanical zoom lens based autofocus modules that generally cause machine vibrations and increasing maintenance costs related to mechanical movement issues.

Making Mobile Browser Surveys Smarter

With nearly 50% of U.S. mobile phone subscribers using smartphones, survey researchers are beginning to explore their use as a data collection tool. The Got Healthy Apps Study (GHAS) conducted a randomized experiment to compare mode effects for a survey completed via iPhone mobile browser and online via desktop/laptop computer web browser. Mode effects were assessed for three types of outcomes: randomization/recruitment, survey process/completion, and survey items. In short, the distribution of survey completion times and the distribution of the number of apps owned were significantly different across survey mode after accounting for block group. Other key mode effects outcomes (including open-ended items, slider bar questions, and missing item rates) showed no significant differences across survey mode. Some interesting qualitative findings suggest that iPhone respondents enter more characters and omit fewer items than originally thought.

Simulation of Intraoperative Pacemaker Failure

Simulation of Intraoperative Pacemaker Failure

Sustainability, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Photons

Walk into any household appliance superstore and you will notice that each stainless steel refrigerator door is highlighted by a yellow EnergyGuide label, as required by the US Department of Energy. The annual operating cost of the refrigerator is in bold type at the top of the label, and just below is a slider bar that shows the range of operating costs for similar refrigerators. Some may disregard the annual energy consumption described in kilowatt-hours, but because cost varies with energy consumption, most prospective customers will (at least indirectly) factor energy efficiency into their purchase decision.

Experimental Investigation of Contamination Removal from Slider Bar Surface by Using Various Cleaning Methods

The rapid advancements in various current technologies and the constant trend in miniaturizing of components have created a need for higher cleanliness levels. Contamination in the level of monolayers can drastically alter surface properties such as wettability, adhesion, optical or electrical characteristics. To select an effective cleaning method the three essential factors to be considered such as cleaning chemistry, the scrubbing method and other process parameters. This study investigates the effectiveness of brush cleaning, ultrasonic cleaning and combination of brush and ultrasonic cleaning on removal of contamination, surface defects and brush life time. In this study, the cleaning efficiency was compared for the parts cleaned with ultrasonics, nylon brush, Poly Vinyl Alcohol (PVA) brush and combination of ultrasonics and nylon brush. The life time of brush was studied for both nylon and PVA brush. The techniques used to identify the contamination are SEM, EDX and optical microscope. The microscopic result indicates that the removal efficiency was high for the parts cleaned with ultrasonics (90.5%) and PVA brush (90.2%) as compared to Nylon brush (77.4%). This is due to the fact that for PVA brush the fluid was being pumped in and out of brush pores (during compression and elastic recovery of the brush), carries the contamination away from the surface and also the contact area between the contamination surface and brush was more. From Liquid Particle Count (LPC) analysis, the >0.3 mic particle counts is almost two times lower for parts cleaned with ultrasonics as compared to parts cleaned with brushes. This indicates that 58/132 kHz washing followed by 470 kHz DI rinsing effectively removes sub- micron particles from the surface compared to brush cleaning. The defects caused by brushes on the surface of the slider bar is almost 1% for nylon brush cleaning, 0.4% for PVA brush cleaning and 0% for ultrasonic cleaning. From experimental study, it can be seen that the life time of PVA brush was shorter than Nylon brush by 75 times. The contamination increased after 50th run for PVA brush and after 700th run for nylon brush. This is due to the fact that after brush damage (after 50th run for PVA and 700th run for nylon) the brush can not effectively remove the contamination and also re-deposition of contamination from brush.

The pH ruler: A Java applet for developing interactive exercises on acids and bases

In introductory biochemistry courses, it is often a struggle to teach the basic concepts of acid-base chemistry in a manner that is relevant to biological systems. To help students gain a more intuitive and visual understanding of abstract acid-base concepts, a simple graphical construct called the pH ruler Java applet was developed. The applet allows students to visualize the abundance of different protonation states of diprotic and triprotic amino acids at different pH values. Using the applet, the student can drag a widget on a slider bar to change the pH and observe in real time changes in the abundance of different ionization states of this amino acid. This tool provides a means for developing more complex inquiry-based, active-learning exercises to teach more advanced topics of biochemistry, such as protein purification, protein structure and enzyme mechanism.

Slider-adjusted softcopy ruler for calibrated image quality assessment

ISO 20462 part 3 standardized the hardcopy quality ruler and a softcopy quality ruler based on a binary sort approach involving paired comparisons. The new softcopy ruler method described here utilizes a slider bar to match the quality of the ruler to that of the test image, which is found to substantially reduce the time required per assessment (30 to 15.5 s), with only a modest loss of precision (standard deviations of 2.5 to 2.9 just noticeable differences). In combination, these metrics implied a 20% improvement in the standard error of the mean achievable in a fixed amount of judging time. Ruler images calibrated against the standard quality scale of ISO 20462 are generated for 21 scenes, at 31 quality levels each, achieved through variation of sharpness, while other attributes are held near their preferred positions. The images are bundled with documentation and a MATLAB source code for a graphical user interface that administers softcopy ruler experiments, and these materials are donated to the International Imaging Industry Association for distribution. In conjunction with a specified large flat panel display, these materials should enable users to conduct softcopy quality ruler experiments with minimum effort, and should reduce the barriers to performing calibrated psychophysical measurements.