smart education

Los Angeles school officials on Monday urged parents whose children attend chronically underperforming schools to apply for free tutoring in math and English, which begins in November.

The Los Angeles Unified School District mailed applications earlier this month to 186,000 students, from 104 schools, who are eligible for the extra assistance.

The federal No Child Left Behind education law requires school districts to pay for supplemental tutoring for low-income students whose schools repeatedly fail to meet testing improvement targets. To qualify, students must attend one of the targeted campuses and receive free or reduced-priced lunches because of low family income. Applications must be postmarked by Friday, Sept. 26.

"We want youngsters who participate in this program to get something that will improve their reading, math or language test scores," said John Liechty, associate superintendent in charge of extended-day programs for the school district.

L.A. Unified parents can choose from 26 public and private providers of tutoring services, including Sylvan Education Solutions, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Huntington Learning Centers. The school district also is providing free tutoring, on Saturdays, through its Beyond the Bell Learning Centers.

Students can get as much as 100 hours of free tutoring through next August, depending on the provider, officials said.

The school district has budgeted $47 million of federal Title I money for the initiative, enough to pay for about 47,000 students, at roughly $1,000 apiece, administrators said.

Last year, the first time the free service was offered, just 10,000 of 164,000 eligible students took advantage of it.

Families who miss Friday's deadline can apply again. Applications for a second round of tutoring are due by Dec. 5. Students in that stage will get free tutoring from February through next August.

Professional Proofreading Services have become the need of the hour with more and more companies, individuals and students getting their work edited to deliver nothing but the very best at the end. Content is the king and quite frankly, no matter what the audience you are writing the content for is, it is important to write content that is engaging and grammatically correct. Nobody likes to read typos and a number of mistakes might just let others form a view of the author that well, isn't really good. So, can one really classify the benefits of hiring a professional editor?
Some of the reasons for needing professional editing services have been mentioned below.
Make it perfect
The document that you have created contains your hard work and after having worked for months on it, you feel attached to it. This is the reason why it might be difficult for you to point out your own mistakes which a fresh pair of eyes can easily achieve, the eyes being that of a professional editor.
Save your time
Professional editing services is a time-taking job and handing over the job to someone else will help you save a lot of time which can be used to write another document or finish other important work. Also a professional is bound to finish the work within the promised time frame without you having to worry about it.
Correct the errors
A professional editor helps to correct all spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, wrong punctuation marks and all other mistakes in the entire document by looking into every sentence with great detail. He makes your work polished and up-to-the-mark to the last bit.
Trust the experts
Being versatile in nature, a professional editor has sound knowledge of various fields like liberal arts, business and science and can assist an individual with editing no matter what the subject is. This helps them correct your mistakes even more thoroughly. Remember, professional proofreading services is the need of the hour.
Improve your performance
Professional editing services help to make your work better than before. When you read the edited work, you get new ideas about improved style of writing and are able to refine your own style of writing that will be useful in the future. A professional editor will teach you a lot of things about writing if you just go through his work as he puts in years of experience and knowledge into it.

Of all the things that the 1970’s produced, there are few that made as big of a cultural impact as video games. There’s no question about it: video games have been a significant force in society and one of the most popular leisure pursuits. Chances are if you’re under the age of 40, you played them, some of us a lot. There was Atari, Intellivision and Colecovision. Don’t forget Sega and Nintendo. Today there are web sites that allow you to download free online games.

And if you remember those days of the late ‘70’s and early 80’s, you recall that the games relied on graphic improvements and better ways of shooting the enemy. It was more or less a solitary pursuit. With the rise of the Internet and online games however, lots of things changed, including the ability to download games and playing online games, making games a more social activity, with lots of players, or opponents playing each other from different countries. This may be the biggest change – and the latest benefit that games have offered the world.

But what about the early days? How did it all start and what were the video games that defined the era?

The Innovators

Many people think that Pong was the home game that started it all, but really it was Magnavox and their "Odyssey" system in 1972. Although it was very simple, it was still the first. It had twelve simple games with graphic overlays. However, there was lots of room for improvement, and that’s where Pong came into play.

Nolan Bushnell created Pong, along with Al Alcorn, the founder of Atari. Rumor has it that when the prototype was tested at a California bar, the machine broke down after two days, because it was so popular. The next logical step was to create a home version. So, one year later, Atari released Pong, complete with built in paddles, and a speaker. Of course, Pong was a huge success and represented a new stage in the evolution of gaming. Over sixty Pong knock-offs would be produced, but Atari dominated the market.

Next was the implementation of the microprocessor, which the entire industry adopted. As a result of this, more complicated systems could be developed. These systems produced groundbreaking and innovative graphical and auditory effects that had never been seen before. Consumers were eating it up. The industry was on fire. In 1981 alone, five billion dollars were spent on video arcade machines and another billion dollars was spent on home video game systems. Atari’s VCS/2600 system remained the dominant player through 1982, when the gaming market experienced a crash.

What were some of the great games? How about Pac Man? Pac Man, the yellow blob that ate up dots and avoided squid-like ghosts, was a worldwide sensation and probably the biggest game of all time.

Space Invaders was another incredibly popular game. In fact, it really marked a turning point for arcade games, bringing them out of bars and into family friendly places like shops and restaurants. The premise of Space Invaders was to stop an alien invasion. This simple formula went on to become the most successful arcade game of all time.

Then there was Super Mario, which was huge as well. It involved an Italian anti-hero who was deliberately designed as a character that everyone could relate to. Soon thereafter came Zelda, Metroid, and other classics.

Rise and Fall of Atari

Atari was the hottest thing in the gaming world in the early ‘80’s. Today, they are a relic of past glory. So what happened? Atari made some bad decisions, and although it’s a little complicated, it’s helpful to understand the situation. At that time in the computing world, magnetic mediums were implemented in the data storage used in Arcade machines. These mediums allowed for a higher memory capacity than ROM cartridges.

In 1982, Atari had the option to include a disk drive in their systems. The price difference would have been nominal, and the memory capacity would have been significant. Atari, however, thought that magnetic media was too “fragile” for the consumer to adequately handle. Atari's "concern" for the customer backfired on them. In the previous years, there had been a very fine line separating arcade game quality from home game quality. With arcades utilizing storage capacities ten to forty-five times larger than home systems that fine line became a chasm. Arcade games seemed to be evolving exponentially, while home systems seemed "stuck in a time warp.”

The public quickly became uninterested in video game specific consoles, and sales plummeted.
This would mark the end of Atari's reign of the video game market.

The Rise of the New

In 1984, everything changed. The reason? Two innovations: The reduction in cost of Dynamic RAM (DRAM) chips which allowed more memory, and the production of higher power 8-bit processors, which lowered the prices of the previous chips. Sega, a new player in home gaming systems, entered the console market with their Master System 2. The Sega Master system would sell very well, but its success would be limited.

The other key player was Nintendo of Japan. The genius of Nintendo was their marketing prowess, as they poured millions into advertisements. These advertisements hit consumers at the perfect time, as evidenced in their sales. In fact, Nintendo couldn’t manufacture enough systems to keep up with demand. After all was said and done, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) would become the highest selling system in history. They would also become the most notorious, as they were involved in the intimidation of retailers, competing companies, and other suppliers and partners.

Over the next five years Sega and Nintendo would battle for dominance, going back and forth. The consumer definitely benefited from this rivalry.

Today, it’s between PlayStation 2, the Xbox and the GameCube. Xbox has taken the step to merge the past and present, where Xbox "Live Arcade" is a console system that has a "download-like" characteristic where you can buy games via the console itself. One thing in the video game industry will always remain: the classic games of yesterday were great games, helped define an era, and will always be fun.

Tetris was the first computer game that involved falling tetromino pieces that the game player must align in order to create an unbroken line which subsequently disappears in order to free up more game play space. If the player is unable to make an unbroken line, the game play space quickly gets crowded until the point where no more space is available and the game is over.

The game of Tetris was first programmed in 1985 in the former Soviet Union by Alexey Pazhitnov. It ran on a machine called an Electronica 60 but was quickly ported to run on an IBM PC in the same month of its initial release. One month later and the game had been ported for use on the Apple II and the Commodore 64 by a programming team in Hungary.

The game quickly saw interest from a software house in the UK, Andromeda, who released it in the UK and USA in 1986 although the original programmer Pazhitnov had not agreed to any sale or licensing agreement. Nonetheless, Anromeda managed to copyright licensing for the game and marketed Tetris as ‘The first game from behind the iron curtain’. Tetris was an instant smash hit and had thousands of people hooked.

A new company, ELORG, took up negotiations on behalf of Pazhitnov and eventually the licensing rights were granted to Nintendo in 1989 for a sum of between 3 and 5 million dollars. Nintendo quickly exerted their corporate strength and forbid any other company to market the game that Andromeda had given license to, including Atari. However, Tetris had become the biggest selling game on all formats at that time.

Today Tetris is still hugely popular, with versions running on all formats, and still managing to get people hooked through its simple yet addictive game play.