Alphagram Super Flash Cards

Finally, alphabet flash cards you can spell words with. Colorful, fun, emoji-style drawings cue the letter-sounds on these ABC flash cards that are more than decorative. With these cards, your student or child is learning much more than how to recognize the letters of the alphabet. Perfect for preschoolers, kids in pre-school, kindergarten or first grade; older children with learning differences; or kids who are learning their letters. The letters are set in a custom typeface that makes it easy to point out the similarities and differences between each letter and between lower- and upper-case letters.Each card features a big, clear lower-case alphabet letter. (We recommend teaching lower-case letters first - they make up more than 95% of the text we read.) The upper-case (capital) letters are shown in the bands at the bottom of the cards, so children can compare the letter shapes and see the same word spelled both in lower- and upper-case.You'll receive seven letter-size (8 1/2 x 11 inch) pages printed on high-quality cover stock, each with four cards 3 5/8" x 5 1/8" ready for you to cut out and start working with right away. Consonants are red, vowels are blue, which makes making the words, and reading them, easy.Includes suggestions for learning games- including our favorite "match the emoji to the letter." There's a dashed line along the center of each card, making it easy to cut apart the top, emoji, section and the bottom, letter, section. Mix them up in two piles and have your student or child choose the correct emoji for each letter.

Alphagram Big Letter-Sound Cards are the only flash cards you can spell words with. The deck consists of 46 cards, 6 x 11.5", printed on heavy coated paperboard, one card for each of the 44 phonemes (letter-sounds) in the English language, plus "magic e" (to turn the vowel long), and a cover card with helpful suggestions for teaching exercises and games. On the front of each card is a large lower-case letter -- in our custom-designed font that makes it easy to differentiate letters that are sometimes confused -- the corresponding Alphagram pictogram, the key word, and the upper-case letter.The back of each card lists other spellings for the same letter-sound (phoneme). For example, the sound of long 'i' as in 'ice cream' can be spelled five different ways: 'ie' as in 'pie,' 'e-consonant-e' as in 'bike,' 'y' as in 'cry,' and 'igh' as in 'light.' The sound of long 'a' as in 'acorn' can be spelled eight different ways. This is one of the things that makes English challenging, and is so important for young students to learn. Designed for kids' room walls and classroom bulletin boards, these cards make spelling challenges interesting and fun.

Are you looking for a deeper understanding of the JavaTM programming language so that you can write code that is clearer, more correct, more robust, and more reusable? Look no further! Effective JavaTM, Second Edition, brings together seventy-eight indispensable programmer’s rules of thumb: working, best-practice solutions for the programming challenges you encounter every day. This highly anticipated new edition of the classic, Jolt Award-winning work has been thoroughly updated to cover Java SE 5 and Java SE 6 features introduced since the first edition. Bloch explores new design patterns and language idioms, showing you how to make the most of features ranging from generics to enums, annotations to autoboxing. Each chapter in the book consists of several “items” presented in the form of a short, standalone essay that provides specific advice, insight into Java platform subtleties, and outstanding code examples. The comprehensive descriptions and explanations for each item illuminate what to do, what not to do, and why. Highlights include: New coverage of generics, enums, annotations, autoboxing, the for-each loop, varargs, concurrency utilities, and much more Updated techniques and best practices on classic topics, including objects, classes, libraries, methods, and serialization How to avoid the traps and pitfalls of commonly misunderstood subtleties of the language Focus on the language and its most fundamental libraries: java.lang, java.util, and, to a lesser extent, java.util.concurrent and java.io Simply put, Effective JavaTM, Second Edition, presents the most practical, authoritative guidelines available for writing efficient, well-designed programs.

This “marvelously absorbing” book is “a walk on the wild side of words and ventures into the zone where language and mathematics intersect” (San Jose Mercury News). A former Wall Street Journal reporter and NPR regular, Stefan Fatsis recounts his remarkable rise through the ranks of elite Scrabble players while exploring the game’s strange, potent hold over them—and him. At least thirty million American homes have a Scrabble set—but the game’s most talented competitors inhabit a sphere far removed from the masses of “living room players.” Theirs is a surprisingly diverse subculture whose stars include a vitamin-popping standup comic; a former bank teller whose intestinal troubles earned him the nickname “G.I. Joel”; a burly, unemployed African American from Baltimore’s inner city; the three-time national champion who plays according to Zen principles; and the author himself, who over the course of the book is transformed from a curious reporter to a confirmed Scrabble nut. Fatsis begins by haunting the gritty corner of a Greenwich Village park where pickup Scrabble games can be found whenever weather permits. His curiosity soon morphs into compulsion, as he sets about memorizing thousands of obscure words and fills his evenings with solo Scrabble played on his living room floor. Before long he finds himself at tournaments, socializing—and competing—with Scrabble’s elite. But this book is about more than hardcore Scrabblers, for the game yields insights into realms as disparate as linguistics, psychology, and mathematics. Word Freak extends its reach even farther, pondering the light Scrabble throws on such notions as brilliance, memory, competition, failure, and hope. It is a geography of obsession that celebrates the uncanny powers locked in all of us, “a can’t-put-it-down narrative that dances between memoir and reportage” (Los Angeles Times). “Funny, thoughtful, character-rich, unchallengeably winning writing.” —The Atlantic Monthly This edition includes a new afterword by the author.

Now in its third edition, Optical Document Security has transformed from a compilation of related topics on the subject, to a comprehensive and cohesive treatment of all aspects of optical document security written by a leading expert with decades of experience. This completely revised and updated edition brings you to the cutting-edge of this field, with new coverage of paper-based security, printed security, security evaluation and features, and biometrics.

Documents of high value, such as passports, tickets and banknotes, facilitate means for authentication. Authentication processes aim at mitigating counterfeit “passable products”. The arsenal of “security features” in the business is abundant but an effective and reliable counterfeit mitigating system need an architectural approach rather than either relying on one feature only, or vaguely motivated aggregated security features. Optically variable device (OVD) is a concept in the industry, including costefficient and unique authentication functionality. OVD based features may serve as the main counterfeit mitigating functionality, as in banknotes. For higher value documents, such as passports, security architectural design may include multimodal (combined) features in which OVD is one characterizing and necessary aspect. Thereby a successful counterfeit need not only to simulate (“hack”) electronic based security features, such as radio frequency based identifier combined with public key infrastructure based cryptography (PKI) but also simulate OVD functionality. Combined feature authentication, based e.g. on PKI and OVD that relies on principally different physics and hence technology competences is of especial interest. Well-architectured and implemented, such multimodal counterfeit mitigating systems are effective to the degree that producing passable products requiring more resources than potentially illegitimately gained by the counterfeiter. Irrespective of level of ambition and efforts spent on counterfeit mitigation, OVD remains critically important as a security concept. One feature of OVD is the possibility to include a human inspector in the authentication procedure. Including such “man-in-the-loop” reduces the risk of successful and unnoticed simulations of algorithms, such as PKI. One challenge of OVD is a lack of standards or even measurements characterizing the significant aspects influencing a human based inspection. This thesis introduces a system able to measure, characterize and visualize the significant aspects influencing a human based inspection of OVD features. The contribution includes the development of a multidimensional and high-dynamic range (HDR) color measurement system of spatial and angular resolution. The capturing of HDR images is particularly demanding for certain high contrast OVD features and require innovative algorithms to achieve the necessary high contrast sensitivity function of the imaging sensor. Representing the significant aspects influencing a human based inspection of OVD requires a considerable amount of data. The development of an appropriate information protocol is therefore of importance, to facilitate further analysis, data processing and visualization. The information protocol transforming the measurement data into characterizing information is a second significant achievement of the presented work in this thesis. To prove the applicability measurements, visualizations and statistically based analyses have been developed for a selection of previously unsolved problems, as defined by senior scientists and representatives of central banks. Characterization and measurements of the degree to which OVD deteriorate with circulation is one such problem. One particular benefit of the implemented suggested solution is the characterization and measurement aim at aspects influencing human based (“first line”) inspection. The principally difference in the problems treated indicates the generality of the system, which is a third significant project achievement. The system developed achieves the accuracy and precision including a resolution, dynamic range and contrast sensitivity function required for a technology independent standard protocol of “optical document security” OVDs. These abilities facilitate the definition and verification of program of requirements for the development of new security documents. Adding also the capability of interlinking first, second and third line inspection based characterizations may prove a particular valuable combination, which is a fourth significant project achievement. The information content (Entropy) of characterized OVDs and OVD production limitations in combination opens for OVD based novel applications of “physically unclonable functions” (PUF). This is of significance as it would generalize the established OVDs to facilitate multimodal verification, including PUF verification. The OVDs would thereby transform into a combined PUF first line inspection facilitating security feature.

A guide for game preview and rules: history, definitions, classification, theory, video game consoles, cheating, links, etc. While many different subdivisions have been proposed, anthropologists classify games under three major headings, and have drawn some conclusions as to the social bases that each sort of game requires. They divide games broadly into, games of pure skill, such as hopscotch and target shooting; games of pure strategy, such as checkers, go, or tic-tac-toe; and games of chance, such as craps and snakes and ladders. A guide for game preview and rules: history, definitions, classification, theory, video game consoles, cheating, links, etc.

This ebook is the complete reproduction of the preserved Voynich Manuscript, formatted for high resolution color ebook reader displays. The Voynich manuscript, also known as "the world's most mysterious manuscript", is a work which dates to the early 15th century, possibly from northern Italy. It is named after the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it in 1912. Much of the manuscript resembles herbal manuscripts of the time period, seeming to present illustrations and information about plants and their possible uses for medical purposes. However, most of the plants do not match known species, and the manuscript's script and language remain unknown and unreadable. Possibly some form of encrypted ciphertext, the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. As yet, it has defied all decipherment attempts, becoming a cause célèbre of historical cryptology. The mystery surrounding it has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript a subject of both fanciful theories and novels. None of the many speculative solutions proposed over the last hundred years has yet been independently verified. Illustrations: The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on the precise nature of its text but imply that the book consists of six "sections", with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. Following are the sections and their conventional names: Herbal: Each page displays one plant (sometimes two) and a few paragraphs of text—a format typical of European herbals of the time. Some parts of these drawings are larger and cleaner copies of sketches seen in the "pharmaceutical" section. None of the plants depicted is unambiguously identifiable. Astronomical: Contains circular diagrams, some of them with suns, moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy or astrology. One series of 12 diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the zodiacal constellations (two fish for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a hunter with crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each of these has 30 female figures arranged in two or more concentric bands. Most of the females are at least partly naked, and each holds what appears to be a labeled star or is shown with the star attached by what could be a tether or cord of some kind to either arm. The last two pages of this section (Aquarius and Capricornus, roughly January and February) were lost, while Aries and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15 women and 15 stars each. Some of these diagrams are on fold-out pages. Biological: A dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small naked women, some wearing crowns, bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them strongly reminiscent of body organs. Cosmological: More circular diagrams, but of an obscure nature. This section also has foldouts; one of them spans six pages and contains a map or diagram, with nine "islands" or "rosettes" connected by "causeways" and containing castles, as well as what may possibly be a volcano. Pharmaceutical: Many labeled drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.); objects resembling apothecary jars, ranging in style from the mundane to the fantastical; and a few text paragraphs. Recipes: Many short paragraphs, each marked with a flower- or star-like "bullet".