A hydride battery electrode is coated with palladium or a palladium alloy to improve hydride storage properties and recycle characteristics. A paging message is formed, selectably including partial identities of access terminals that are to be paged by the paging message. The maintenance terminal also has eight light emitting diodes disposed in two rows and being capable of turning on and off in correspondence with a setting state of the disk array device in a network selectively changed through insertion of the conduction pin into the setting terminals. The information embedding unit embeds information to be embedded by adjusting a number of the contact portions between the pixel block and the circumscribed figure extracted by the extraction unit based on the number of contact portions counted by the counting unit and the information to be embedded. The coupler fitting is mounted to the fitting mount. After a collision with an object has been recognized, features are generated from the sensor data, which are analyzed for ascertaining an object mass andor an object hardness, the triggering signal for the pedestrian protection device being generated if the ascertained object mass andor the ascertained object hardness isare within a triggering range which represents a collision with a pedestrian.