The pantograph current collector-catenary contact has been recognized as an established cause of permanent electromagnetic perturbation in a railway environment. In this paper the problems due to pantograph-catenary crawling are addressed. Introducing a suitable model for the radiating contacts, results in agreement with classical fields theory and with experimental measurements may be deduced.

We present a novel replication technique for parallel applications where instances of the replicated application are active on different group of processors called replicas. The replication technique is based on the FTAG (Fault Tolerant Attribute Grammar) computation model. FTAG is a functional and attribute based model. The developed replication technique implements "active parallel replication," that is, all replicas are active and compute concurrently a different piece of the application parallel code. In our model replicas cooperate not only to detect and mask failures but also to perform parallel computation. The replication mechanisms are supported by FTAG run time system and are fully application-transparent. Different novel mechanisms for checkpointing and recovery are developed. In our model during rollback recovery only that part of the computation that was detected faulty is discarded. The replication technique takes full advantage of parallel computing to reduce overall computation time.

Two method to predict targets which a user is about to point with a mouse on the basis of the trajectory of the mouse cursor were proposed. The effects of the interval between targets, the position of targets, the sampling interval and the number of sampling on the pointing time and the prediction accuracy were investigated. In both methods, the distance between targets had little effects on the pointing time. The prediction accuracy was found to be affected by the position of targets. In both prediction methods, the angle between the cursor movement vector and the vector which connects the current cursor position and the center of each target is calculated every st. As for Prediction Method1 that regards the target which correspond to the minimum angle continuously 5 times as the candidate target, the optimal condition of the sampling interval was found to be 0.06 sec or 0.08 sec. Concerning Prediction Method2 that calculates the angle n times and determines the minimum cumulative value as the candidate, the optimal condition of the number of sampling was 8.

Checkpointing is one of the most powerful tools to operate a computer system with high reliability. We should execute the optimal checkpointing in some sense. This note shows the optimal checkpoint sequence minimizing the expected loss, Numerical examples are shown for illustration.