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[Purpose] This study aimed to evaluate the kinematic characteristics at the start of lateral movement in the sitting position, for application in physical therapy. [Subjects and Methods] Eleven healthy male subjects (mean age, 24.8 ± 3.7 years) were included in the study after they provided informed consent. The electromyographic activities of the tensor fascia lata, gluteus medius, and rectus femoris, and the center of pressure (COP) displacement during lateral reach in the sitting position were measured. The task was recorded on video for analysis. [Results] In almost all subjects, before the beginning of the task, the electromyographic activity in the opposite side of each studied muscle was recorded, and the opposite and anterior displacement of the COP was observed. The video analysis revealed that all subjects showed lateral displacement of the thoracic part of the trunk after the start of the task. However, the lumbar region and pelvis maintained their starting positions. [Conclusion] COP displacement occurred in the reverse reaction before the task, and this involved the hip girdle muscles of the opposite side. A reverse reaction displaced the pelvis to the opposite side to ensure instability of posture through side tilting of the trunk at the beginning of the task.

For safe transmission of electricity, it is necessary to determine the separation between transmission lines and forests around steel transmission towers. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have low operational costs, and UAV image data are of high resolution that can be acquired at any arbitrary time. Therefore, to reduce the cost of determining the separation between transmission lines and forests, UAV data can be utilized for three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of the transmission lines and forests. In this study, we developed a method for measuring the separation between transmission lines and forests using such a 3D reconstruction.

Corrigendum: Ecto-domain phosphorylation promotes functional recovery from spinal cord injury

The Earth Simulator (ES) is a large scale, distributed memory, parallel computer system consisting of 640 processor nodes (PN) with shared memory vector multiprocessors (64GFLOPS/PN, 5120 APs in total, AP: arithmetic processor). All the nodes are connected via a high speed (16GB/s) single-stage crossbar network called the Interconnection Network (IN).The operating system for the Earth Simulator is based on SUPER-UX, the UNIX operating system for the SX series scientific supercomputers. In order to realize high-performance parallel processing on the highly parallel machine, the operating system is enhanced for scalability.The Earth Simulator system is managed as a two-level cluster system called the Super Cluster System. In the Super Cluster System, the Earth Simulator system is divided into 40 clusters (16PNs/cluster). A single controller called Super Cluster Control Station (SCCS) manages all these clusters. This management system provides Single System Image (SSI) operation, management and job control for the large scale multi-node system.The Job Scheduler (JS) and NQS running on the SCCS control all jobs of the system. They schedule the resources such as processing nodes and files which have not usually been treated as scheduling resources. This allows efficient scheduling of large scale jobs.The MPI library (MPI/ES) and the HPF compiler (HPF/ES) are available for distributed parallel programming on the Earth Simulator. MPI/ES conforms to the MPI 2.0 standard and is optimized to exploit the hardware features. HPF/ES conforms to the core part of HPF 2.0 and supports some features of the HPF 2.0 approved extensions and HPF/JA 1.0 extensions. HPF/ES suitably handles the 3-level parallelism of the Earth Simulator system, that is, vectorization, shared-memory parallelization, and distributed-memory parallelization. Moreover, HPF/ES extends the language to easily handle irregular problems.

Inhibition of Nogo-66 receptor (NgR) can promote recovery following spinal cord injury. The ecto-domain of NgR can be phosphorylated by protein kinase A (PKA), which blocks activation of the receptor. Here, we found that infusion of PKA plus ATP into the damaged spinal cord can promote recovery of locomotor function. While significant elongation of cortical-spinal axons was not detectable even in the rats showing enhanced recovery, neuronal precursor cells were observed in the region where PKA plus ATP were directly applied. NgR1 was expressed in neural stem/progenitor cells (NSPs) derived from the adult spinal cord. Both an NgR1 antagonist NEP1-40 and ecto-domain phosphorylation of NgR1 promote neuronal cell production of the NSPs, in vitro. Thus, inhibition of NgR1 in NSPs can promote neuronal cell production, which could contribute to the enhanced recovery of locomotor function following infusion of PKA and ATP.

We have developed the HPF (High Performance Fortran) compiler HPF/SX V2 as an interface for distributed memory parallel programming. HPF is a de facto standard language for parallel programs. It is possible to write parallel programs just by inserting comment directives into existing serial Fortran programs in HPF. This paper treats two parallelization methods in the HPF/SX V2 on an SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessor) cluster system, each node of which is built by connecting multiple vector PEs (Processor Elements) with a shared memory. The one is hybrid parallelization, which consists of vectorization on a PE, multi-thread parallelization within a node, and distributed memory parallelization across nodes. The other is flat parallelization, which consists of vectorization and distributed memory parallelization. We compare hybrid parallelization with flat parallelization by evaluating several typical codes. The result shows that hybrid parallelization is particularly beneficial, when reduction of memory is expected.

This paper presents methods for generating communication on compiling HPF programs for distributed-memory machines. We introduce the concept of an iteration template corresponding to an iteration space. Our HPF compiler performs the loop iteration mapping through the two-level mapping of the iteration template in the same way as the data mapping is performed in HPF. Making use of this unified mapping model of the data and the loops, communication for nonlocal accesses is handled based on data-realignment between the user-declared alignment and the optimal alignment, which ensures that only local accesses occur inside the loop. This strategy results in effective means of dealing with communication for arrays with undefined mapping, a simple manner for generating communication, and high portability of the HPF compiler. Experimental results on the NEC Cenju-3 distributed-memory machine demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: the execution time of the compiler-generated program was within 10% of that of the hand-parallelized program.

This paper presents a performance estimator, a prototype of which is implemented within the parallel programming environment PCASE. The estimation is based on static performance prediction, using not only the design information of target machines but also benchmarking results. Additionally, communication costs are estimated based on a hierarchical memory machine model, which enables users to understand all the underlying communication costs on distributed memory machines for each parallel loop. With this performance suggestion, it is possible to interactively optimize data distribution and appropriately select vectorized or parallelized loops. Moreover, the skeleton profiling method is presented. It makes high speed trace (execution count of each statement) generation possible by deleting statements which do not affect the execution path of a program.

An on-vehicle audio system reproducing bodily-sensible sounds is devised to rapidly eliminate masking of bodily-acoustic audio sounds caused by vibrations of a running vehicle and generate bodily-sensible sounds without giving an inharmonious feeling to the listener. The system has a low pass filter for extracting only low frequency band components of an input signal, an amplifier for amplifying the output of the low pass filter and delivering the amplified signal, a vibration unit disposed in a seat of the vehicle for converting the amplified signal to mechanical vibrations. To eliminate the masking, the system is provided with a vibration sensor for generating a vibration signal of a magnitude in accordance with vibrations of the vehicle, and a level adjusting unit for adjusting the level of the input signal in accordance with an average level of the vibration signal.