An evil has descended upon the small town of Bedford, Virginia. Grisly murders on the nearby Blue Ridge Parkway are being blamed on a rogue bear.Only one man understands the true nature of the beast that haunts the parkway.And, he knows the only thing that can stop a werewolf is another werewolf.

"The first full-length biography of British-born poet Denise Levertov (1923-1997) brings to life a major voice in American poetry during the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing on exhaustive archival research of Levertov's entire opus and on interviews with dozens of the poet's friends, Donna Krolik Hollenberg's authoritative biography captures the full complexity of Levertov's entire opus and on interviews with dozens of the poet's friends, Donna Korlik Hollenberg's authoritative biography captures the full complexity of Levertov as both a woman and an artist, and the dynamic world she inhabited"--Front jacket flap.

Biometrics such as fingerprint, face, gait, iris, voice and signature, recognizes one's identity using his/her physiological or behavioral characteristics. Among these biometric signs, fingerprint has been researched the longest period of time, and shows the most promising future in real-world applications. However, because of the complex distortions among the different impressions of the same finger, fingerprint recognition is still a challenging problem. Computational Algorithms for Fingerprint Recognition presents an entire range of novel computational algorithms for fingerprint recognition. These include feature extraction, indexing, matching, classification, and performance prediction/validation methods, which have been compared with state-of-art algorithms and found to be effective and efficient on real-world data. All the algorithms have been evaluated on NIST-4 database from National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Specific algorithms addressed include: -Learned template based minutiae extraction algorithm, -Triplets of minutiae based fingerprint indexing algorithm, -Genetic algorithm based fingerprint matching algorithm, -Genetic programming based feature learning algorithm for fingerprint classification, -Comparison of classification and indexing based approaches for identification, -Fundamental fingerprint matching performance prediction analysis and its validation. Computational Algorithms for Fingerprint Recognition is designed for a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level students in computer science and engineering.

A boxing bildungsroman - a collage of memories, love, resistance, and the spectacle of Muhammed Ali in Apartheid South Africa. In the spring of 1970, a Pretoria schoolboy, Joe, becomes obsessed with Muhammad Ali. He begins collecting daily newspaper clippings about him, a passion that grows into an archive of scrapbooks. Forty years later, when Joe has become a writer, these scrapbooks become the foundation for a memoir of his childhood. When he calls upon his brother, Branko, for help uncovering their shared past, meaning comes into view in the spaces between then and now, growing up and growing old, speaking out and keeping silent.

In this collision between art and science, history and pop culture, the acclaimed art historian Angus Trumble examines the finger from every possible angle. His inquiries into its representation in art take us from Buddhist statues in Kyoto to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, from cave art to Picasso's Guernica, from Van Dyck's and Rubens's winning ways with gloves to the longstanding French taste for tapering digits. But Trumble also asks intriguing questions about the finger in general: How do fingers work, and why do most of us have five on each hand? Why do we bite our nails? This witty, odd, and fascinating book is filled with diverse anecdotes about cow-milking, the fingerprint of a grave robber in King Tut's tomb, and a woman in Trumble's local bank whose immensely long, coiled fingernails do not prevent her from signing a check. Side by side with historical discussions of rings and gloves and nail varnish are meditations on the finger's essential role in writing, speech, sports, crime, law, sex, and, of course, the eponymous show of contempt.

Monthly magazine devoted to topics of general scientific interest.

Rhythm of the Heart is a compelling memoir about Kim Heacox’s 30+ year relationship with the most iconic landscape in Alaska, a sister book to his 2005 Lyons book The Only Kayak, a PEN USA Literary Award finalist now in its seventh printing. Woven throughout the personal narrative will be stories on the human and natural histories of the Denali National Park, garnished with a conservation polemic, much as Edward Abbey did with Desert Solitaire, and Rick Bass has done with any number of books (that continue to sell well). Heacox will write of Denali through an inspirational arc; to show how a place can touch a life, even save a life, quietly, profoundly, day after day, year after year, and how that saving multiplied by millions of lives over a century makes the world a better place. Heacox makes the argument, through his beautiful and impassioned prose, that we must save these places so they in turn will save us. Denali National Park is the most accessible subarctic sanctuary in the world, and has awakened millions of people to what’s authentic, priceless and true. Any serious student of spirituality and the American landscape must one day address his relationship with Alaska, and once in Alaska, he must confront Denali, the heart of the state, the state of the heart.

Meet Ricky! A cute little boy that just can't seem to figure out that stealing is wrong: When I see something that I really want, I think, "Hey, that could be mine!" So I look both ways, reach out my hand, and take it at just the right time. If I ever get caught, I just pretend that it wasn't me that took it. A quick little lie is just what I need, and lying helps me get through it! Taking things that I want to have at times can be very tricky. But there's no way that I can help myself, because all of my fingers are sticky! Ricky learns first-hand what it feels like to have something stolen from him. Then he uses the "GOOD" inside of himself to overtake the "BAD" and returns the items that he took from others. Finally, a book that confronts the issue of stealing and offers a strategy to curb the desire to steal! Through a fun and whimsical story, children will learn the concept of ownership and how it feels when someone doesn't respect what is yours. This book uses empathy in a powerful way to teach children that stealing is wrong.