Take your playing to the stratosphere with the most advanced lead book by this proven heavy metal author. Speed Mechanics is the ultimate technique book for developing the kind of speed and precision in today's explosive playing styles. Learn the fastest ways to achieve speed and control, secrets to make your practice time really count, and how to open your ears and make your musical ideas more solid and tangible. Packed with over 200 vicious exercises including Troy's scorching version of "Flight of the Bumblebee." Music and examples demonstrated on CD. 89-minute audio.

    Born to a family of artists known for their literary interests, Fairouz, an English Literature student from Syria was well known for her work in Arabic poetry, theatre, short stories, performance and local journalism long before the Syrian war began. As the Arab Spring reaches her town, she realises her life is transforming into a blockbuster movie before her very eyes, and so decides to document it with an unflinching honesty and rawness. Frequently described as the Syrian Anne Frank by pan Arab media, Fairouz Abdalla’s diary Lipsticks and Bullets takes us on an exclusive trip into her politically-charged world, from the hipsters on the historic roads of Hama to the upper class circles in the bourgeoisie private clubs of Damascus. Inspired by revolts in Tunisia and emboldened by Libya’s dissidents, Fairouz and her activist friends dream of a revolution and a Syria free from the rule of the tyrannical Bashar al-Assad and his minions. But revolutions are not so easily achieved, as she soon discovers.The spirited young beauty, the daughter of a Christian and a Muslim only has eyes for a handsome bachelor from the esteemed and well-connected Atassi family. The pastel-eyed engineer and member of the Arab student movement who stole her heart is swiftly torn away from her, seemingly forever. Fairouz faces losing all that she loves – Syria is a dangerous place for an activist ­– and especially for a woman. Fairouz must fight not just for a Syrian revolution, but also for the lives of her loved ones, herself, and against the growing nightmare that are western Jihadists.As the Arab spring turns to winter, Syria’s citizens will learn that nothing—not war, not politics, not even religion—can tear them apart. Together, they remain defiant and insist on keeping humour and hope alive. From Syria to Sweden, Istanbul, and Damascus, Lipsticks and Bullets is an intimate tale of love and adventure, by a celebrated Arab author who is a powerful witness to the terror and horror wrought by Assad, Iran and Russia on the lives and souls of Syrians. It is a vivid exploration of Middle Eastern culture, Romance, Islamic extremism, class conflict, and social activism. Syria's story is her story.

    The book that finally cracks the case. Ben Smart. Olivia Hope. Scott Watson. Unmissable. Undeniable. Unprecedented. Unexpected. Note from author: "This book contains quotes from original police witness statements. No two witnesses ever see the crime from exactly the same angle, so differences between statements are expected. Sometimes one statement can have a crucial detail that others have missed. That's why I included what appear to be 'repetitive' statements by a number of witnesses. So you can see the overall similarities and weight of evidence, but also any unique details. Sometimes witness statements are relevant to different parts of the story, so just as in a murder trial, readers may find a statement being referred to more than once.In a crime story, the devil can be in the detail. The statements are quoted in the authentic spelling of the witness - as important legal records they don't get 'proofed'. The court trial lasted 12 weeks and involved 30,000 pages of documents. I have distilled that down to 372 pages but it is still a complex story. Think of yourself as a juror, sifting the evidence."Previous books on this case have concentrated on picking apart the police version of events given in Court. That's a legalistic technique of creating 'doubt'. I ask a different question: Forget about the court case, do the original witness statements including ones never used in court show us what happened? The answer, I suggest, is "Yes", and you are about to find out for yourself..."

    Embassy offers an up-close and personal look into the lives of the diplomats and specialists who make up the U.S. Foreign Service, taking readers inside embassies and consulates in more than fifty countries, providing detailed descriptions of Foreign Service jobs and first-hand accounts of diplomacy in action. Gain a sense of the key role played by each member of an embassy team from Paris to Kabul, from Bogota to Beijing, and places in between. Travel into the rainforests of Thailand with an environmental affairs officer, face rampaging militias with a political officer in East Timor, and join an ambassador on a midnight trip into a Macedonian refugee camp to quell a riot. The book includes profiles of diplomats and specialists around the world serving in Foreign Service positions -- from the ambassador to the security officer, the consular officer to the IT specialist. Also included is a selection of day-in-the-life accounts from seventeen different countries, each describing an actual day on the job. The story section includes twenty-six tales from the field that give a sense of the extraordinary: the coups, the evacuations, the civil wars, the hardships and rewards of representing America to the world.Inside a U.S. Embassy was published by the American Foreign Service Association in 2003, and updated and revised in 2005. Over 70,000 copies have sold.

    Victory, after all, could come down to choosing between the supposed sleeper and the overrated prospects who won't be able to fool people in the Show like they have down on the farm.    Nearly every major-league team has sought the advice of current or former Prospectus writers, and readers of Baseball Prospectus 2014 will understand what all those fans have been raving about. "If you're a baseball fan and you don't know what BP is, you're working in a mine without one of those helmets with the lights on it."—Keith Olbermann "The first time I saw the PECOTA projections, I realized that someone out there understood." —Jeff Luhnow, General Manager, Houston Astros "For me, every year baseball begins with the big, brilliant, beautiful book you are holding in your hands right now."—Joe PosnanskiBaseball Prospectus 2013 correctly predicted:*Disappointing performances by Albert Pujols, Dan Haren, Michael Bourn, Justin Upton, and Tommy Hanson.*Breakouts by Paul Goldschmidt, Freddie Freeman, Kyle Seager, Matt Moore, Shelby Miller, and Jason Kipnis, as well as bounceback seasons from Jayson Werth and Shin-Soo Choo.*That Max Scherzer would be a Cy Young contender and Michael Wacha ace-in-waiting for the Cardinals.*That Wil Myers would be a middle-of-the-order bat for Tampa Bay and Josh Donaldson would finally win the Rich Harden trade for the A's.*That CC Sabathia's velocity drop could be a problem, but Felix Hernandez's would not be. *That Joaquin Benoit, Kenley Jansen, and Koji Uehara were better bullpen bets than pre-season closer picks Bruce Rondon, Brandon League, and Joel Hanrahan.

    

    VIDEO TRAINING. 12+ HOURS of searchable video training (requires Internet access). If you learn better from videos, watch the videos and use the ebook only for quick reference. If you learn better from books, read the ebook and refer to the videos to see the author demonstrate real world editing techniques. This much video training usually costs over $100 or requires a monthly subscription. 2. 150+ PRESETS. Jump-start your creativity by using the included presets to give your pictures a unique look. Others charge over $200 for this many presets! 3. 50+ RAW PICTURE FILES. Work alongside many of the book's examples, or just learn by experimenting with professional photos. 4. TEACHER & PEER SUPPORT. After buying the book, you get access to the private group on Facebook where you can ask the questions and post pictures for feedback from Tony, Chelsea, and other readers. It’s like being able to raise your hand in class and ask a question! Instructions are in the introduction. With this video book, you ll learn how to instantly find any picture in your library, fix common photography problems, clean up your images, add pop to boring pictures, retouch portraits, make gorgeous prints, create photo books, and even edit your home videos. Tony goes beyond teaching you how to use Lightroom. Tony shows you why and when to use each feature to create stunning, natural photos. When Lightroom is not the best tool, Tony suggests better alternatives. Tony covers every aspect of Lightroom in-depth, but structures his teaching so that both beginner and advanced photographers can learn as efficiently as possible. If you just want a quick start, you can watch the first video or read the first chapter and you'll be organizing and editing your pictures in less than an hour. If you want to know more about a specific feature, switch to that video or jump to that chapter in the ebook. If you want to know everything about Lightroom, watch the videos and read the book from start to finish.

    From teaching you the basics to exploring the stages of the cycle of photography, Silber makes it easy for you to master the art form and create stunning pictures.Valuable photography tips from thousands of hours of interviews with professional photography masters: "What makes this book so powerful is that I have been able to distill from my 1,000s of hours of interviews with top photographers high level knowledge, that would take decades to acquire ― but I have presented this knowledge in a way that even a new photographer can grasp and put right to work. If someone applies themselves and rolls up their sleeves, with this handbook, they can become an excellent photographer and make photographs that they and others will love." You will learn valuable insights from the professional photography masters: • beginner photography tips • amateur photography tips • landscape photography tips • wedding photography tips • lifestyle photography tips • sports photography tips • animal photography tips • portrait photography tips • still life photography tips • iPhone photography tips Photography and the technology associated with it is constantly evolving, but the fundamentals remain the same. Advancing Your Photography will help to bring you the joy and satisfaction of a lifetime of pursuing the art of photography.Advancing Your Photography features: • Top tips for making outstanding photographs from iconic photographers and many other leading professional photography masters of today. • Numerous step-by-step examples • Guidance on training your eye to see composition with emotional impact • Tips on mastering the key points of operating your camera like a pro • Secrets to processing your images to professional standards • Compact design that will easily fit in your camera bag

    If you're like most players, you struggle with nearly every aspect of the game: offense, defense, execution and combos, and generally having a game plan that is more complex than just mashing buttons at every opportunity. A Road Map Toward Improvement Street Fighter is a game that requires practice, finesse, and knowledge. Unfortunately, most players don't have any guidance on where to begin when learning the game which leads to lots of frustration and losses. This guide is designed to give you a road map for improving your skills so that when SF5 drops you can hit the ground running!Lots of players are under the misconception that since SF5 is a brand new game, there's no point in playing SF4 and improving. While it is true that there will be lots to learn in SF5 such as new engines and characters, this is not a reason not to improve on your Street Fighter fundamentals in the meantime. The Importance of a Solid Foundation Like anything else worth doing in life, developing a foundation of solid fundamentals is the key to improving. Even though SF5 will have brand new characters and mechanics, the core elements of Street Fighter remain the same throughout the franchise. Execution, footsies and space control, combos, punishing, and resource management are important in all Street Fighter games and this guide will show you how to use SF4 to improve on these aspects of your game. Who is gootecks and why should I bother? I've played Street Fighter competitively since 2003, starting with Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike and continuing with Street Fighter 4. I've traveled to compete in tournaments around the world, including places like Japan, Singapore, Australia, Canada, and Europe.A lot of people may know me as the co-host of Excellent Adventures of gootecks & Mike Ross, or perhaps from my work on Cross Counter TV, the entertainment network for fighting game fans.Recently, I've begun training players just like yourself through Cross Counter Training, where players like EG.Justin Wong, EG.K-Brad, Alex Myers are available for helping players of all skill levels improve. Through working with my students, I've developed what I believe to be an extremely effective method of learning how to play Street Fighter. This method is based on the idea of learning one tiny aspect of the game at a time through the eyes of the poster boy of Street Fighter, Ryu. "But Ryu is boring, gootecks!" I know, I know, you think Ryu is boring and everybody plays him and you want to play a cool, flashy character so you can style on people on stage at Evo someday. Unfortunately, you'll need to learn how to walk before you can run and there is no better investment of time as a new player than to learn Ryu in order to build a strong foundation.Taking this time now to develop your fundamentals will serve you well as you transition to Street Fighter 5. Ryu is definitely different in SF5, but the tools and concepts you'll learn in this guide will give you a leg up on the competition when SF5 drops.

    We currently see no evidence of any kind indicating that extraterrestrials exist outside of our solar system. But at this moment, millions of engineers, scientists, corporations, universities and entrepreneurs are racing to create the second intelligent species right here on planet earth. And we can see the second intelligent species coming from all directions in the form of self-driving cars, automated call centers, chess-playing and Jeopardy-playing computers that beat all human players, airport kiosks, restaurant tablet systems, etc. The frightening thing is that these robots will soon be eliminating human jobs in startling numbers. The first wave of unemployed workers is likely to be a million truck drivers who are replaced by self-driving trucks. Pilots will be eliminated soon as well. Then, as new computer vision systems come online, we will see tens of millions of workers in retail stores, fast food restaurants and construction sites replaced by robots. Unless we take steps now to change the economy, we will soon have tens of millions of workers who are unemployed and seeking welfare because they will have no other choice. Marshall Brain's new book "The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches" explores how the future will unfold as the second intelligent species emerges. The book answers questions like: - How will new computer vision systems affect the job market? - How many people will become unemployed by the second intelligent species? - What will happen to millions of newly unemployed workers? - How can modern society and modern economies cope with run-away unemployment caused by robots? - What will happen when the first sentient, conscious computer appears? - What moral and ethical principles will guide the second intelligent species? - Why do we see no extraterrestrials in our universe? "The Second Intelligent Species" offers a unique and fascinating look at the future of the human race, and the choices we will need to make to avoid massive unemployment and poverty worldwide as intelligent machines start eliminating millions of jobs.

    Many pilots, including Douglas Bader, thought it was superior to the Spit--but together they saved Britain from Nazi invasion and possible defeat.Adrian Stewart has produced a gloriously atmospheric and nostalgic book capturing the spirit of these great aircraft and the pilots who flew them. It tracks the aircraft as it was developed and improved, and follows it to the many theaters of the war where it saw service. Among the lesser-known are Burma and hazardous convoy protection in the Arctic and Mediterranean, flying from makeshift carriers. This book will fascinate specialist aviation historians and those who enjoy a rattling good war story, and includes a superb selection of rare photographs.

     If you have ever found yourself lost halfway through other introductory materials on this topic, this is the book for you. If you don't understand set terminology such as vectors, hyperplanes, and centroids, then this is also the book for you. This starter course isn't a picture story book but does include many visual examples that break algorithms down into a digestible and practical format. As a starter course, this book connects the dots and offers the crash course I wish I had when I first started. The kind of guide I wish had before I started taking on introductory courses that presume you’re two days away from an advanced mathematics exam. That’s why this introductory course doesn’t go further on the subject than other introductory books, but rather, goes a step back. A half-step back in order to help everyone make his or her first strides in machine learning and is an ideal study companion for the visual learner. In this step-by-step guide you will learn: - How to download free datasets - What tools and software packages you need - Data scrubbing techniques, including one-hot encoding, binning and dealing with missing data - Preparing data for analysis, including k-fold Validation - Regression analysis to create trend lines - Clustering, including k-means and k-nearest Neighbors - Naive Bayes Classifier to predict new classes - Anomaly detection and SVM algorithms to combat anomalies and outliers - The basics of Neural Networks - Bias/Variance to improve your machine learning model - Decision Trees to decode classification Please feel welcome to join this starter course by buying a copy, or sending a free sample to your preferred device.

    Book content includes:Getting started with MVC 3, including a rundown of the new project dialog, directory structure and an introduction to NuGet (PowerShell inside Visual Studio 2010)Controllers and Actions View and ViewModelsModels and Databases, including using NuGet to install Entity Framework Code FirstForms and HTML HelpersValidation and Data AnnotationsMembership, Authorization and SecurityAjaxRouting, including routing to Http HandlersNuGet, including using it from the Dialog 'and Package Console, creating a package, custom PowerShell actions and running from both a local repository and the WebDependency InjectionUnit testingExtending ASP.NET MVC with filters and Extensibility pointsWhat's new in MVC 3

     There is more to Hamer’s story than the ambush of the two outlaws. His career spanned the times of western law enforcement from horseback and Winchester days to the invention of the telephone and automobile. During that time, he built a reputation as an incorruptible lawman, fearless, a good man with a gun whether on horseback or behind the wheel of a Ford V8, or facing a violent mob. He survived 52 gunfights and 23 bullet wounds.

    He continued to make great music while slowly returning to his Catholic roots. His hard-won wisdom filters through his stories whether he's recalling how he went shopping with John Lennon and ended up on the cover of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band or what it was like to travel in the Jim Crow South with Sam Cooke.Praise for Dion... "To this day nobody, nobody can rock like Dion."—Lou Reed "He always had the name that said it all...Dion."—Bruce Springsteen "If you want to hear a great singer, listen to Dion. His genius has never deserted him."—Bob DylanThe audio edition of this book can be downloaded via Audible.