Riding

Riding is a homonym of two distinct English words:

From the word ride:

From Old English *þriðing:

Other uses

Riding (country subdivision)

A riding is an administrative jurisdiction or electoral district, particularly in several current or former Commonwealth countries.

Etymology

The word riding is descended from late Old English *þriðing or *þriding (recorded only in Latin contexts or forms, e.g., trehing, treding, trithing, with Latin initial t here representing the Old English letter thorn). It came into Old English as a loanword from Old Norse þriðjungr, meaning a third part (especially of a county), cf. farthing. The modern form riding was the result of initial th being absorbed in the final th or t of the words north, south, east and west, by which it was normally preceded.

A common misconception holds that the term arose from some association between the size of the district and the distance that can be covered or encircled on horseback in a certain amount of time (cf. the Walking Purchase).

Scandinavia

Ridings are originally Scandinavian institutions.

In Iceland the third part of a thing which corresponded roughly to an English county was called þrithjungr. The island of Gotland and the Swedish province Närke were also divided into þrithjungar instead of hundreds.

Electoral district (Canada)

An electoral district in Canada, also known as a "constituency" or a "riding", is a geographical constituency upon which Canada's representative democracy is based. It is officially known in Canadian French as a circonscription, but frequently called a comté (county).

Each federal electoral districts returns one Member of Parliament (MP) to the Canadian House of Commons; each provincial or territorial electoral district returns one representative — called, depending on the province or territory, Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), Member of the National Assembly (MNA), Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) or Member of the House of Assembly (MHA) — to the provincial or territorial legislature.

While electoral districts in Canada are now exclusively single-member districts, multiple-member districts have been used at the federal and provincial levels. Alberta has had a few districts that returned from two to seven members: see Calgary, Edmonton and Medicine Hat. British Columbia had a mix of multiple-member districts in Vancouver and single-member districts elsewhere until the 1991 election, and Prince Edward Island had dual-member districts until the 1996 election.

Field

Field may refer to:

Expanses of open ground

People

Places

Settlements in Canada

Settlements in the United States

Science and mathematics

Field (video)

In video, a field is one of the many still images which are displayed sequentially to create the impression of motion on the screen. Two fields comprise one video frame. When the fields are displayed on a video monitor they are "interlaced" so that the content of one field will be used on all of the odd-numbered lines on the screen and the other field will be displayed on the even lines. Converting fields to a still frame image requires a process called deinterlacing, in which the missing lines are duplicated or interpolated to recreate the information that would have been contained in the discarded field. Since each field contains only half of the information of a full frame, however, deinterlaced images do not have the resolution of a full frame.

In order to increase the resolution of video images, therefore, new schemes have been created that capture full-frame images for each frame. Video composed of such frames is called progressive scan video.

Video shot with a standard video camera format such as S-VHS or Mini-DV is often interlaced when created, whereas video shot with a film-based camera is almost always progressive. Free-to-air analog TV was mostly broadcast as interlaced material because the trade-off of spatial resolution for frame-rate reduced flickering on Cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions. High-definition digital television (see: HDTV) today can be broadcast terrestrially or distributed through cable system in either interlaced (1080i) or progressive scan formats (720p or 1080p). Most prosumer camcorders can record in progressive scan formats.

Field (mathematics)

In mathematics, a field is one of the fundamental algebraic structures used in abstract algebra. It is a nonzero commutative division ring, or equivalently a ring whose nonzero elements form an abelian group under multiplication. As such it is an algebraic structure with notions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division satisfying the appropriate abelian group equations and distributive law. The most commonly used fields are the field of real numbers, the field of complex numbers, and the field of rational numbers, but there are also finite fields, algebraic function fields, algebraic number fields, p-adic fields, and so forth.

Any field may be used as the scalars for a vector space, which is the standard general context for linear algebra. The theory of field extensions (including Galois theory) involves the roots of polynomials with coefficients in a field; among other results, this theory leads to impossibility proofs for the classical problems of angle trisection and squaring the circle with a compass and straightedge, as well as a proof of the Abel–Ruffini theorem on the algebraic insolubility of quintic equations. In modern mathematics, the theory of fields (or field theory) plays an essential role in number theory and algebraic geometry.