Go Ape

Go Ape Ltd. is an outdoor adventure company which runs Tree Top Adventures, Forest Segways, Tree Top Junior Adventures and Zip Trekking Adventures.

History

The company was founded in 2001 by Rebecca and Tristram Mayhew, after they were inspired by a tree-top adventure course in France, and has a contract with the Forestry Commission for courses on multiple sites. The first course opened in March 2002 in Thetford Forest, on the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk; it was the first self-belay tree top ropes course in Britain. The company's motto is "creating adventures, encouraging others to live life more adventurously." In 2003, the company won a Best Tourist Attraction award and has also won a number of other awards. In 2007, it was shortlisted for the Best Norfolk Attraction award at the Tourism In Norfolk Awards. In 2008 the company opened five new courses in Kent, Cumbria, Devon, Buckinghamshire and Staffordshire. On May 8, 2010, Go Ape opened their first course in the United States at Rock Creek Regional Park in Rockville, Maryland. In March 2015, a "Treetop adventure course" was opened in Wake County.

Ape

Apes (Hominoidea) are a branch of Old World tailless anthropoid catarrhine primates native to Africa and Southeast Asia. They are distinguished from other primates by a wider degree of freedom of motion at the shoulder joint as evolved by the influence of brachiation. There are two extant branches of the superfamily Hominoidea: the gibbons, or lesser apes; and the hominids, or great apes.

Xanthosoma

Xanthosoma is a genus of flowering plants in the arum family, Araceae. The genus is native to tropical America but widely cultivated and naturalized in other tropical regions. Several are grown for their starchy corms, an important food staple of tropical regions, known variously as malanga, otoy, otoe, cocoyam (or new cocoyam), tannia, tannier, yautía, macabo, ocumo, macal, taioba, dasheen, quequisque, ʻape and (in Papua New Guinea) as Singapore taro (taro kongkong). Many other species (including especially X. roseum) are used as ornamental plants, and in popular horticultural literature are known as ‘ape or elephant ear (from the purported resemblance of the leaf to an elephant's ear), although the latter name is sometimes also applied to members with similar appearance and uses in the closely related genera Caladium, Colocasia (i.e., taro), and Alocasia. The leaves of most Xanthosoma species are 40-200 cm long, sagittate (arrowhead-shaped) or subdivided into three or as many as 18 segments. Unlike the leaves of Colocasia, those of Xanthosoma are usually not peltate- the upper v-notch extends into the point of attachment of the leaf petiole to the blade.

Monkey's Audio

Monkey's Audio is an algorithm and file format for lossless audio data compression. Monkey's Audio does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as AAC, MP3, Vorbis and Musepack.

Data file compression is employed in order to reduce bandwidth, file transfer time, or storage requirements. A digital recording (such as a CD) encoded to the Monkey's Audio format can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original audio data. As with the FLAC and Apple Lossless format, files encoded to Monkey's Audio are typically reduced to about half of the original size, with data transfer rates and bandwidth requirements being reduced accordingly.

Monkey's Audio's advantages are better compression rates compared to FLAC and WavPack, as well as multithreading/multicore support. Monkey's Audio main drawbacks are the fact that it employs a symmetric algorithm, meaning the decoding takes comparable resources to encoding, which makes it unsuitable for all but the fastest portable players (via Rockbox firmware), and that it has limited support on software platforms other than Windows; on other platforms only decoding is officially supported by third-party programs. Although the original source code is freely available, the license is not considered to be an open source one. A GPL version of the decoder has been independently written for Rockbox and then included in ffmpeg.