Everyone in the islands of O’Ceea has a magical ability: whatever they imagine can be brought into existence. Whoever becomes a master over these powers is granted the title of magician and is given fame, power, riches, and glory. This volume of books follows the journey of a group of kids as they strive to rise to the top and become members of the Magician’s Workshop.Layauna desperately wants to create beautiful things with her magical powers, but all she can seem to do is make ho...

Return to the world of The Magician’s Workshop: Where Dreams Become Reality.In Volume Two, the Festival of Stars has finally arrived, and the Color Ceremony is about to commence. As children from all over the islands gather to stand before a puller, one question remains: who will have a Color, and who will be found void?Rejoin your favorite characters as they step forward and receive a label that will have the power to dramatically alter the course of their lives forever.

Migration is the most volatile sociopolitical issue of our time, as the current escalation of discourse and action in the United States and Europe concerning walls, border security, refugee camps, and deportations indicates. The essays by the international and interdisciplinary group of scholars assembled in this volume offer critical filters suggesting that this escalation and its historical precedents do not preclude redemptive counterstrategies. Encoded in narratives of affiliation and ...

Have you ever wanted to escape to a distant island? When Rosie Trethewey, a disillusioned doctor turned market researcher, unexpectedly inherits a shack on the remote northern tip of Great Barrier Island, she decides it's time to begin a new life. Arriving at her new home, Rosie finds she has two neighbors sharing the wilderness: Red O'Hara, a refugee from horrific wartime experiences on the Burma Railway, and Angus McLeod, a retired policeman who's abandoned a society he sees as soft and ...

Hold on tight and go along for the ride as Austin Hansen takes you on a wild journey navigating life with a brain that has a mind of its own. With stories full of unplanned escapades and spur-of-the-moment adventures, By the Seat of My Pants with an Uncontrolled Mind captures the essence of living unpredictably.In this series of candid, humorous, and often poignant reflections, Hansen shares what it's like to barrel through life with your cerebellum calling the shots inste...

Majoritarian State traces the ascendance of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India. Led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP administration has established an ethno-religious and populist style of rule since 2014. Its agenda is also pursued beyond the formal branches of government, as the new dispensation portrays conventional social hierarchies as intrinsic to Indian culture while condoning communal and caste- and gender-based violence. The contributors explore how Hindutva ...

Based on the seminar that took place in Dagstuhl, Germany in June 2011, this contributed volume studies the four important topics within the scientific visualization field: uncertainty visualization, multifield visualization, biomedical visualization and scalable visualization.• Uncertainty visualization deals with uncertain data from simulations or sampled data, uncertainty due to the mathematical processes operating on the data, and uncertainty in the visual representation,...

Every victory begins with a sacrifice.Major Levi Cohen readies to retire after twenty years of peacetime service to the Terran Coalition. With mere weeks remaining, he allows the luxury of imagining days alongside his wife and eight-year-old son instead of separated by duty. He promised that this year he wouldn’t miss another one of David’s birthdays – and he intends to keep his word.His plans are cut short when the League of Sol sends a massive force of wa...

This book focuses on computational intelligence techniques and their applications — fast-growing and promising research topics that have drawn a great deal of attention from researchers over the years. It brings together many different aspects of the current research on intelligence technologies such as neural networks, support vector machines, fuzzy logic and evolutionary computation, and covers a wide range of applications from pattern recognition and system modeling, to intelligent cont...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Medical Computer Vision, MCV 2013, held in Nagoya, Japan, in September 2013 in conjunction with the 16th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2013. The 7 revised full papers and 12 poster papers presented were selected from 25 submissions. They have been organized in topical sections on registration and visualization, segme...

This book contains thirteen contributions from invited experts of international recognition addressing important issues in shape analysis in medical image analysis, including techniques for image segmentation, registration, modelling and classification and applications in biology, as well as in cardiac, brain, spine, chest, lung and clinical practice.This volume treats topics such as for example, anatomic and functional shape representation and matching; shape-based medical image s...

This comprehensive guide provides a uniquely practical, application-focused introduction to medical image analysis. This fully updated new edition has been enhanced with material on the latest developments in the field, whilst retaining the original focus on segmentation, classification and registration. Topics and features: presents learning objectives, exercises and concluding remarks in each chapter; describes a range of common imaging techniques, reconstruction techniques and image art...