Nanoscale Fabrication of the Ferroelectric Polymer Poly(vinylidene Fluoride with Trifluoroethylene) P(VDF‐TrFE) 75:25 Thin Films by Atomic Force Microscope Nanolithography

Thin films of an organic ferroelectric system, poly(vinylidene fluoride with trifluoroethylene) P(VDF‐TrFE, Kureha Corporation, Tokyo, Japan) 75:25 layers, have been deposited on highly ordered pyrolytic graphite and silicon dioxide by the horizontal Schaefer method of Langmuir–Blodgett techniques. It is possible to “shave” or mechanically displace small regions of the polymer film by using atomic force microscope nanolithography techniques such as nanoshaving, leaving swaths of the surface cut to a depth of 4 nm and 12 nm exposing the substrate. The results of fabricating stripes by nanoshaving two holes close to each other show a limit to the material “stripe” widths of an average of 153.29 nm and 177.67 nm that can be produced. Due to the lack of adhesion between the substrates and the polymer P(VDF‐TrFE) film, smaller “stripes” of P(VDF‐TrFE) cannot be produced, and it can be shown by the sequencing of nanoshaved regions that “stripes” of thin films can be removed. SCANNING 34: 404‐409, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

HCI down under: reflecting on a decade of the OzCHI conference

In this study we present a scientometric analysis of the Australian Conference on Human–Computer Interaction (OzCHI) proceedings over the period of a decade (2006–2015). Conference proceedings were manually extracted from the ACM Digital Library and analysed. We observed OzCHI to be a popular conference attracting both submissions and citations. A group of leading researchers dominated the publication count followed by a long list of mid career academics. We observed the themes of Design, Health and Well-being and Education to be growing in importance. We also observed that full papers were cited significantly more than short papers. We conclude with a reflection on our methodology and a proposal of recommendations for the HCI/OzCHI community in Australia.     

Traces of ternary relations

In this paper, we generalize the notion of traces of a binary relation to the setting of ternary relations. With a given ternary relation, we associate three binary relations: its left, middle and right trace. As in the binary case, these traces facilitate the study and characterization of properties of a ternary relation. Interestingly, the traces themselves turn out to be the greatest solutions of relational inequalities associated with newly introduced compositions of a ternary relation with a binary relation (and vice versa).