Technologies for manufacturing hard disks are driven by the demand to increase magnetic storage capacity. However, the rate of increasing storage capacity is being slowed by the inability to produce ever closer flying heights between the sliders and disk surfaces. One of important requirements for flying height is to control the surface of substrates of hard disks to a super-smooth level to all...

The images of the sea surface roughness observed by PALSAR on ALOS over the Philippine Archipelagos were studied with other opportunities of satellite observations including MODIS and other measurement to understand an imaging mechanism by SAR. The Tabulas Strait and the Mindanao Sea, which are connecting the Pacific and the South China Sea and blocking the North Equatorial Current, were select...

Spatial and temporal variation in soil moisture plays a significant role in establishing efficient irrigation scheduling, climate change prediction, and sustainable land and water management. Passive microwave remote sensing at L-band is widely recognised as the preferred technique to measure surface soil moisture globally, with spatial resolution ranging from 40-100km. However, passive microwa...

A new procedure to determine simultaneously a horizontal descriptor of the surface the autocorrelation width and the most important vertical descriptor the root-mean-square roughness is presented. It is based on the inversion of an analytic contrast formula. After a short introduction to white light random phase contrast measurement we describe the elimination process and show fist experimental...

We describe the current state of ACME, the UBC Active Measurement facility, a telerobotic facility designed for building computational models of everyday physical objects. We show how ACME is being used to acquire models of contact texture (including friction and roughness), contact sounds, and contact deformation.

A virtual reality machine shop environment was developed for the determination of critical quantitative and qualitative machining process parameters. Material removal and milling machine axes kinematics are simulated in real time. The G-Code program serves as the input to the system. A graphical model for the calculation of quantitative data affecting the machined surface roughness was develope...

A new method for measuring waveguide propagation loss in silicon nanowires is presented. This method, based on the interplay between traveling ring modes and standing wave modes due to back-scattering from edge roughness, is accurate and can be used for on wafer measurement of test structures. Examples of loss measurements and fitting are reported.