Shares insights into the teen transgender experience, tracing six individual's emotional and physical journey as it was shaped by family dynamics, living situations, and the transition each teen made during the personal journey.

THE STORY: The setting is a remote mountain lodge where Dr. Polyantha Vashti Cassandra (Cassie), a world-famous anthropologist, has come to recover from a back injury. Confined to a wheelchair, Cassie is to be looked after by Grace Hollis, a fellow

An inside look at the obsessive, secretive, and often bizarre world of high-profile stamp collecting, told through the journey of the world’s most sought-after stamp. When it was issued in 1856, it cost a penny. In 2014, this tiny square of faded red paper sold at Sotheby’s for nearly $9.5 million, the largest amount ever paid for a postage stamp at auction. Through the stories of the eccentric characters who have bought, owned, and sold the one-cent magenta in the years in between, James Barron delivers a fascinating tale of global history and immense wealth, and of the human desire to collect. One-cent magentas were provisional stamps, printed quickly in what was then British Guiana when a shipment of official stamps from London did not arrive. They were intended for periodicals, and most were thrown out with the newspapers. But one stamp survived. The singular one-cent magenta has had only nine owners since a twelve-year-old boy discovered it in 1873 as he sorted through papers in his uncle’s house. He soon sold it for what would be $17 today. (That’s been called the worst stamp deal in history.) Among later owners was a fabulously wealthy Frenchman who hid the stamp from almost everyone (even King George V of England couldn’t get a peek); a businessman who traveled with the stamp in a briefcase he handcuffed to his wrist; and John E. du Pont, an heir to the chemical fortune, who died while serving a thirty-year sentence for the murder of Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz. Recommended for fans of Nicholas A. Basbanes, Susan Orlean, and Simon Winchester, The One-Cent Magenta explores the intersection of obsessive pursuits and great affluence and asks why we want most what is most rare.

Raymond C. Wood resides in Lakeville, MA, with his wife Kathleen of 51 years. He always had a passion for reading and writing. He has also written a science fiction satire novel called, A Cops Outer Space Odyssey, as well as a childrens fable titled Peppermint Valley. In addition to the other novels, he has also invented a board game named Joust, which revolves around medieval times. In his spare time Ray also enjoys going to old car shows and taking out his modified 54 Ford Skyliner on weekend rides with his wife.

Magenta is a harrowing journey into war-torn Sarajevo, and into the blackest reaches of the human condition. The novel follows a journalist, Silva, as she and her team make their way deep into a city under siege, in order to recover the body of Thierry, an award-winning filmmaker who has been killed there. But the postmodern odyssey that follows is beyond anything Silva could have expected, as she must make her way through a world in which good and evil lose their meaning, where survival is the only remaining value, and where there is always greater terror lurking around the next corner of the dark and broken labyrinth that a once great city has become. Even if Silva herself survives the city, the abyss she has stared into will have stared back into her - and changed everything.

Design and use machine learning models for music generation using Magenta and make them interact with existing music creation tools Key FeaturesLearn how machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning are used in music generationGenerate new content by manipulating the source data using Magenta utilities, and train machine learning models with itExplore various Magenta projects such as Magenta Studio, MusicVAE, and NSynthBook Description The importance of machine learning (ML) in art is growing at a rapid pace due to recent advancements in the field, and Magenta is at the forefront of this innovation. With this book, you’ll follow a hands-on approach to using ML models for music generation, learning how to integrate them into an existing music production workflow. Complete with practical examples and explanations of the theoretical background required to understand the underlying technologies, this book is the perfect starting point to begin exploring music generation. The book will help you learn how to use the models in Magenta for generating percussion sequences, monophonic and polyphonic melodies in MIDI, and instrument sounds in raw audio. Through practical examples and in-depth explanations, you’ll understand ML models such as RNNs, VAEs, and GANs. Using this knowledge, you’ll create and train your own models for advanced music generation use cases, along with preparing new datasets. Finally, you’ll get to grips with integrating Magenta with other technologies, such as digital audio workstations (DAWs), and using Magenta.js to distribute music generation apps in the browser. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with Magenta and have developed the skills you need to use ML models for music generation in your own style. What you will learnUse RNN models in Magenta to generate MIDI percussion, and monophonic and polyphonic sequencesUse WaveNet and GAN models to generate instrument notes in the form of raw audioEmploy Variational Autoencoder models like MusicVAE and GrooVAE to sample, interpolate, and humanize existing sequencesPrepare and create your dataset on specific styles and instrumentsTrain your network on your personal datasets and fix problems when training networksApply MIDI to synchronize Magenta with existing music production tools like DAWsWho this book is for This book is for technically inclined artists and musically inclined computer scientists. Readers who want to get hands-on with building generative music applications that use deep learning will also find this book useful. Although prior musical or technical competence is not required, basic knowledge of the Python programming language is assumed.