Surface lift

A surface lift is a means of cable transport and is a transportation system used to transport skiers and snowboarders where riders remain on the ground as they are pulled uphill.

Once prevalent, they have gradually been overtaken in popularity by higher capacity aerial lifts like chairlifts and the gondola lift. Today, surface lifts are most often found on beginner slopes and very small ski areas. Surface lifts have many disadvantages compared to aerial lifts: they require more passenger skills, surface must be continuous, they impede skiable terrain, slow speed, and limited capacity. With the increase in snowboarding, surface lifts are replaced by chairlifts. They are often utilized at glacier skiing resorts because their supports can be anchored in glacier ice due to the lower forces.

History

A steam-powered toboggan tow, 950 feet (290 m) in length, was built in Truckee, California, in 1910. The first skier-specific tow in North America was apparently installed in 1933 by Alec Foster at Shawbridge in the Laurentians outside Montreal, Quebec.

Rope

A rope is a group of yarns, plies, or strands that are twisted or braided together into a larger and stronger form. Ropes have tensile strength and so can be used for dragging and lifting, but are too flexible to provide compressive strength. As a result, they cannot be used for pushing or similar compressive applications. Rope is thicker and stronger than similarly constructed cord, line, string, and twine. Ropes made from metal strands are called wire rope.

Construction

Rope may be constructed of any long, stringy, fibrous material, but generally is constructed of certain natural or synthetic fibres. Synthetic fibre ropes are significantly stronger than their natural fibre counterparts, but also possess certain disadvantages, including slipperiness.

Common natural fibres for rope are manila hemp, hemp, linen, cotton, coir, jute, straw, and sisal. Synthetic fibres in use for rope-making include polypropylene, nylon, polyesters (e.g. PET, LCP, HDPE, Vectran), polyethylene (e.g. Dyneema and Spectra), Aramids (e.g. Twaron, Technora and Kevlar) and acrylics (e.g. Dralon). Some ropes are constructed of mixtures of several fibres or use co-polymer fibres. Wire rope is made of steel or other metal alloys. Ropes have been constructed of other fibrous materials such as silk, wool, and hair, but such ropes are not generally available. Rayon is a regenerated fibre used to make decorative rope.

Rope (data structure)

In computer programming, a rope, or cord, is a data structure composed of smaller strings that is used for efficiently storing and manipulating a very long string. For example, a text editing program may use a rope to represent the text being edited, so that operations such as insertion, deletion, and random access can be done efficiently.

Description

A rope is a binary tree having leaf nodes that contain a short string. Each node has a weight value equal to the length of its string plus the sum of all leaf nodes' weight in its left subtree, namely the weight of a node is the total string length in its left subtree for a non-leaf node, or the string length of itself for a leaf node. Thus a node with two children divides the whole string into two parts: the left subtree stores the first part of the string. The right subtree stores the second part and its weight is the sum of the left child's weight and the length of its contained string.

The binary tree can be seen as several levels of nodes. The bottom level contains all the nodes that contain a string. Higher levels have fewer and fewer nodes. The top level consists of a single "root" node. The rope is built by putting the nodes with short strings in the bottom level, then attaching a random half of the nodes to parent nodes in the next level.

Rope (rhythmic gymnastics)

Rope (rhythmic gymnastics) may be made of hemp or a synthetic material which retains the qualities of lightness and suppleness. Its length is in proportion to the size of the gymnast. The rope should, when held down by the feet, reach both of the gymnasts' armpits. One or two knots at each end are for keeping hold of the rope while doing the routine. At the ends (to the exclusion of all other parts of the rope) an anti-slip material, either coloured or neutral may cover a maximum of 10 cm (3.94 in). The rope must be coloured, either all or partially. It may be either of a uniform diameter or be progressively thicker in the center provided that this thickening is of the same material as the rope.

The fundamental requirements of a rope routine include leaps and skipping. Other elements include swings, throws, circles, rotations and figures of eight.

Tow

In the composites industry, a tow is an untwisted bundle of continuous filaments, and it refers to man-made fibres, particularly carbon fibres (also called graphite).

Tows are designated by the number of fibers they contain. For example, a 12K tow contains about 12,000 fibres.

In the textile industry, a tow (rhymes with cow, unless referring to cellulose acetate which sounds like toe) is a coarse, broken fibre, removed during processing flax, hemp, or jute. Flax tows are often used as upholstery stuffing, and tows in general are frequently cut up to produce staple fibre.

Notes

Towé

Towé is an arrondissement in the Plateau department of Benin. It is an administrative division under the jurisdiction of the commune of Pobè. According to the population census conducted by the Institut National de la Statistique Benin on February 15, 2002, the arrondissement had a total population of 11,712.

References

Coordinates: 7°03′59″N 2°39′55″E / 7.0664°N 2.6652°E / 7.0664; 2.6652

TOW

TOW may refer to:

Tow may refer to: