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http://www.npr.org/2009/04/06/102649267/i-am-still-the-greatest
He only believed in success and tried his best.

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This picture shows that Jay Allison learned how important was to have a job. Working hard makes you a better person and you provide better needs for the family.

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they basically are talking about how phones are taking over and stopping people from doing stuff I  personally don't play this but for example "Pokémon go" it to for people to create a game just so people would get out and lose weight

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Alex Guzman (B) (C)
You age doesn't matter, you can do anything as long as you never give up.

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Alex Guzman Task (A)
When I proclaimed that I was the "Greatest of All Time," I believed in myself. And I still do.Nothing in life has defeated me. I am still the "Greatest." This I believe.

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Leicester  city were the least likely to win the league as they had a 1 to 5000 odds of winning. They demonstrate that hard work and dedication is all you need to be successful. They also showed that nothing is impossible even when the odds are against you.

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Karishma Kapoor, 20, is a business student, and a fan of soccer - or football, as the game is known outside the U.S. She's also a betting woman. One day last August, she was at her grandmother's house.

"We just all sat 'round just talking, and then football came up. And we thought, 'Why not?'" Kapoor recalls. "It's only a pound, so we put 2 pounds on, at 5,000-to-one odds."

She placed her bet (about $3) online - with those 5,000-to-one odds - that her hometown soccer team, Leicester City, would win the title of England's Premier League - the richest and most-watched soccer league in the world. At the time, Leicester was in last place. Now Kapoor stands to win some $14,600.

And her team stands to make U.K. sports history.

Leicester City had a chance to clinch the league title Sunday, but the team tied 1-1 versus Manchester United. That leaves its fate hanging on a Tottenham-Chelsea game Monday (3 p.m. EDT). If Tottenham ties or loses, the championship is Leicester's.

"It hasn't sunk in. No one in this city at the moment knows how to deal with this," says Ashley Watson, 26, who works at a hospital in Leicester. "Everyone's obviously excited and happy."

Watson has three Leicester City tattoos - across his back, forearm and leg. He got the first one 10 years ago, when Leicester City wasn't even in the top division of English soccer. His forearm reads: "Leicester Till I Die."

"This season is the most remarkable season in the history of - not just football - but my life," he says, choking up. "Because you never thought Leicester could win the league - not without the money of [rival teams] Manchester City, Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal."

Leicester City paid about $24 million to acquire its squad's starting 11 players. The sports' biggest, richest teams - those Leicester has been up against in this competition - often spend that sum to acquire a single star player.

By contrast, Leicester City's lead goal-scorer, Jamie Vardy, was working in a factory a few years ago, playing soccer at night in the U.K.-equivalent of the minor leagues. Now, a biopic film is reportedly in the works about Vardy's life.

This week, the city is bedecked in blue and white - the colors of LCFC, the Leicester City Football Club. Shops and restaurants display "Backing the Blues" posters. Even the Church of England is flying the Leicester City soccer flag, atop the city's gothic cathedral.

Overshadowed by bigger Birmingham 45 miles away, Leicester is one of England's most diverse cities. On a Sunday stroll through the center, NPR spotted an African gospel choir, many Muslim women in headscarves and an entire soccer-crazed Vietnamese family all wearing curly clown wigs in blue and white.

One of Leicester's main thoroughfares, Narborough Road, is known as Britain's most diverse main street.

"On Narborough Road, you can eat Turkish, you can eat Indian, Pakistani, Greek," says Leo Daniels, who lives on the road. "There are so many different languages spoken and different people living here."

Daniels was taking his children out for an evening stroll, to pick up ice cream and soak in local team spirit.

"We're looking at a Leicester City scarf 'round the statue of Richard the III's neck," he says. "Everything connected with Leicester, and about Leicester, is now supporting Leicester City for this title run. It's fantastic."

Leicester is where the bones of the 15th-century King Richard III were found buried under a parking lot severa l years ago. Some Leicester fans believe the spirit of Richard - who ruled 500 years ago - is guiding their soccer team now.

"If he could be here, he'd be cheering them on!" says Rachel Hare, in a local Leicester pub. "He's been here for 500 years, we just didn't know it!" says her husband, Steve Hare.

And that's pretty much how they feel about their soccer team, too.

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Leicester City: From Last Place To England's Likely Soccer Champion

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Karishma Kapoor, 20, is a business student, and a fan of soccer - or football, as the game is known outside the U.S. She's also a betting woman. One day last August, she was at her grandmother's house. "We just all sat 'round just talking, and then football came up.

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The article tells how the more we know the more we want to know, this explains how much technology has increased over the years like the smartphones.

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A personal experience conveyed in the narrative was that Amy tan had seen her grandmothers ghost and talked to her, I have had some experiences with ghosts my grandpa was always picking up pennies and when ever I saw him he would tell me about his "penny jar" where he kept all the pennies he found. After he passed away about a year ago I have always seen pennies in the weirdest places. I think it might be my grandpa trying to say he is still there.

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I believe that there are many risks to playing football. But most players don't care they have a love for the sport and the reward that comes afterwards outweighs the price you have to pay now. In this case a young man died after playing in an October football game. By him dying from what was suspected as a brain aneurism it brought his team closer together and making it possible for the awareness of the dangers of football to be put out there for other players who don't know the risk http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/11/25/457374128/deaths-persist-in-youth-and-student-football-despite-safety-efforts

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How he never gave up until he complete his goal to be the best boxer

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Guadalupe Arroyo task(A&C)
Oded Ben Dov created a technology that is called eye tracking to make a video game and realizes that his technology could change lives.

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The narrative tells the reader to not give up in whatever goal they have in life always try to achieve it. Hard work is going to pay off at one point.

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Recovering the hope of childhood by TJ Turner TJ believes that everyone who has lived in poverty live happier. he believes the people kids who are sad should be given a gift to make their day.

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I believe in the power of teddy bears. I know that sounds a little funny coming from a military man, and I'd be laughing myself if I hadn't seen the power of teddy bears firsthand.

Two years ago, I was deployed with the Air Force to Bagram Airfield in northern Afghanistan. The area around Bagram is filled with extremes. It is both ruggedly beautiful and desperately poor. It is peaceful and serene, but punctuated with unbelievable violence and the scars of decades of conflict. It is an area where landmines coexist with children playing in the fields.

One day, we were driving back home through the Panjshir Valley. As we went along, I saw the destruction left from the seven-year conflict with the Soviets. I saw the damaged houses and damaged bodies of the people, and, written on their faces, I saw their despair. It occurred to me that this is what hell is like - not a place that's destroyed, but when hope is destroyed. I saw this in the faces we passed.

Except for the kids. The kids still played and their faces were alive, not infected with despair. They were the hope amid the hell.

On our way out of the valley, we passed an old man and what I guessed to be his grandson. He heard the vehicles coming and pulled the child in close. His expression seemed hostile, but maybe it was just the snow and the cold. As we slowed down to pass, I held a bright blue teddy bear out the window. I remember feeling bad that the bear was so bright, more of a girl's teddy bear than a boy's. The little boy didn't care. He grabbed it right away, and hugged with both arms. The old man looked right at me: "Tashakkur," he said, thank you.

I watched until they disappeared around a bend behind us, the child still hugging his bear. I can still see the look on the old man's face. Maybe it was just a smile, but it looked more like hope - hope that his grandson wouldn't live in the same world he did. I guess we all hope for that.

I hear lots of talk in our nation about the global war on terror, and my opinions evolve with that debate. However, we seem to miss the root cause. Hell is what causes terrorism. It's about pure desperation and feeling like there's no way of recovering the hope of childhood. I'm not saying that we'll be able to win this conflict with teddy bears alone, but when I deploy next, I'm packing a bag full of them just in case.

TJ Turner lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Independently produced for Weekend Edition Sunday by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.

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While serving with the Air Force in Afghanistan, TJ Turner saw a country scarred by years of conflict. Yet in the faces of Afghan children, he saw a glimmer of optimism. Turner believes nurturing their hope can help bring an end to terrorism.

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" Welcome to entanglement" This Articles states that humans the more we know the more we want to know

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In the last 400 years or so, since the time of the scientific revolution, we have come to find it natural to suppose that the world is comprehensible.

Nature and its laws, operating in things most small as well as in the cosmos as a whole, are understandable.

And, yet, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, quoted in Samuel Arbesman's intriguing new book coming out next week, Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension, has written: "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but it is queerer than we can suppose."

It isn't just the world of physics that has come to seem so exceedingly strange - at the level of the quantum and also that of the multiverse - but consciousness itself. We human beings seem to resist inclusion in a uniform, coherent conception of reality. How is it that human experience arises from the sorts of goings-on quantum physics teaches us, finally, that we are?

It's not just that the more we know, the more we realize how much more there is to know. It's that the more we know, the less we seem to understand.

An earlier generation, before Galileo and Newton and Descartes, might have taken it for granted that there are realities - life, morality, freedom, God - that are simply beyond our comprehension.

But since the new age of science, that sort of modesty has been in shorter supply. No where else is that clearer than in the domain of technology. What greater proof that we can understand and master reality than our ability, for example, to build a rocket, shoot it into space and hit the moon?

The philosopher Daniel Dennett argued in the 1970s that artificial intelligence provided a valuable philosophical and experimental framework for studying what it is to have a mind. By trying to build it, we can better understand it.

I have long suspected that if we did ever manage to build a genuinely artificial intelligence, we wouldn't understand its workings. It would be as complicated, and as messy, and as shaped by a history and by culture, as we are ourselves.

This brings us to the curious and delightful theme of Arbesman's book. We have entered the Entanglement - the phrase is due to computer scientist Danny Hillis - an era in which our technologies themselves are so complex as to exceed what any of us can really grasp. It used to be thought that a "Renaissance Man" could know everything that was known. If Arbesman is right, no person alive today can even really understand everything that we human beings make.

The book is full of examples from the recent history of technology: from "correctly functioning" medical equipment administering lethal doses of radiation, to software instabilities wreaking havoc with global financial markets, to self-accelerating Toyotas.

We are like map-makers (a la Borges) whose maps are so complicated that we get lost in them; we make products that are no less difficult to grasp than the world for the sake of whose mastery and comprehension we make them in the first place.

There has been much discussion of the "Singularity": The supposed point in time when our own machines get smarter than us and find that they can make ever more improved versions of themselves without us. It's debatable whether we'll reach this point.

But it's plausible, as Arbesman explains, that we are already well embedded in the Entanglement. Here, the problem is not machines that are too smart, but the need to recognize that we are not as smart as we think we are.

Is it possible to thrive in the Entanglement? Arbesman's prescription is a return to the intellectual modesty of an earlier time, together with a deeper appreciation of the sources of the new complexity.

But is that enough?

Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015). You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe

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In the last 400 years or so, since the time of the scientific revolution, we have come to find it natural to suppose that the world is comprehensible. Nature and its laws, operating in things most small as well as in the cosmos as a whole, are understandable.

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I Am Still The Greatest

Nothing in life has defeated me. I am still the "Greatest." This I believe.

http://www.npr.org/2009/04/06/102649267/i-am-still-the-greatest

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saying thanks to my ghosts: talk about how her mother tell her how she got the give to talk to ghost. She didn't believe in her until she saw her mother after she past away. she believe  in ghost and wherever she go she know their there.

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The article talks about how people are getting more social with one another, and for an example, this is a picture of Santa Monica Pier (best place for people to go for the game) showing how many people are appearing.

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This was the camp that Elie Wiesel and his family were put in. Auschwitz.

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Saying thanks to my ghosts by Amy Tan, Ms. tan believes that ghosts are real and that they are there whenever she needs support.

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I didn't used to believe in ghosts, but I was trained to talk to them. My mother reminded me many times that I had the gift. It all stemmed from a lie I told when I was 4. The way my mother remembered it, I refused to get ready for bed one night, claiming there was a ghost in the bathroom. She was delighted to learn I was a spirit medium.

Thereafter, she questioned anything unusual - a sudden gust of wind, a vase that fell and shattered. She would ask me, "She here?" She meant my grandmother.

When I was a child, my mother told me that my grandmother died in great agony after she accidentally ate too much opium. My mother was 9 years old when she watched this happen.

When I was 14, my older brother was stricken with a brain tumor. My mother begged me to ask my grandmother to save him. When he died, she asked me to talk to him as well. "I don't know how," I protested. When my father died of a brain tumor six months after my brother, she made me use a Ouija board. She wanted to know if they still loved her. I spelled out the answer I knew she wanted to hear: Yes. Always.

When I became a fiction writer in my 30s, I wrote a story about a woman who killed herself eating too much opium. After my mother read a draft of that story, she had tears in her eyes. Now she had proof: My grandmother had talked to me and told me her true story. How else could I have known my grandmother had not died by accident but with the fury of suicide? She asked me, "She here now?" I answered honestly, "I don't know."

Over the years, I have included other details in my writing I could not possibly have known on my own: a place, a character, a song. I have come to feel differently about my ghostwriters. Sometimes their clues have come so plentifully, they've made me laugh like a child who can't open birthday presents fast enough. I must say thanks, not to blind luck but to my ghosts.

Ten years ago, I clearly saw a ghost, and she talked to me. It was my mother. She had died just 24 hours before. Her face was 10 times larger than life, in the form of a moving, pulsing hologram of sparkling lights. My mother was laughing at my surprise. She drew closer, and when she reached me, I felt as if I had been physically punched in the chest. It took my breath away and filled me with something absolute: love, but also joy and peace - and with that, understanding that love and joy and peace are all the same thing. Joy comes from love. Peace comes from love. "Now you know," my mother said.

I believe in ghosts. Whenever I want, they will always be there: my mother, my grandmother, my ghosts.

Independently produced for Weekend Edition Sunday by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.

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Novelist Amy Tan hasn't always believed in ghosts, but as a writer she's had too many inspirations that she can't fully explain. Now, Tan embraces her belief in ghosts and the messages of joy, love and peace they bring her.

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A personal experience conveyed in the narrative are between Ms. Thompson and a man named Ronald. Ms. Thompson had a theory that Ronald was the one who had harassed her. After she found out it was not him she asked him for his forgiveness. Ronald forgave her.

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Researchers study effects of social media on young minds by Shankar Vedantam.
They talk about how peoples minds react to the same picture but with different like amounts. For example when someone saw their picture have a lot of likes they felt good about themselves and showed that there's greater activation in the area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. He talks about how social media effects how you feel and how it affects your brain.

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subscribe to Hidden Brain podcast

Teens showed an image that was deemed to have lots of "likes" tended to also like the image. Seeing popular pictures also produced greater activation in the reward centers of the brain.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

So if you're freaking out because you think social media is running your life, I recommend that you do not listen to the next four minutes or so of radio. My colleague, social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam, is here to talk about the effects that social media has on our brains. Hi, Shankar.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Hi, David.

GREENE: Is this bad news you're about to give me?

VEDANTAM: You know, it depends on your point of view.

GREENE: All right.

VEDANTAM: Researchers took teenagers, stuck them in the brain scanner and observed them as they engaged with social media. Lauren Sherman - she's a researcher at UCLA - she told me that she and her colleagues wanted to analyze the effects that social media has on young minds. They had the intuition that, besides all the conversations that happen on social media, there was something about mediums like Twitter and Instagram that was qualitatively different than interactions in the physical world.

LAUREN SHERMAN: Suddenly, there are these interactions that have a little number on them, whether it's a like or a retweet or a favorite. And I was really curious how that quantifiable interaction was affecting the way that teens perceived information online.

GREENE: I see. So we're looking specifically at, like, likes and numbers of likes. And, I guess, how much do they matter?

VEDANTAM: Well, they matter a lot. Sherman and her colleagues, Ashley Payton, Leanna Hernandez, Patricia Greenfield and Mirella Dapretto, they scanned the brains of a few dozen adolescents as they watched what looked like an Instagram feed. The feed showed them photos that they had taken and photos supposedly taken by their friends. In reality, the other pictures were pictures the researchers had selected. Sherman and her colleagues found that when a photo had more likes, it generated greater activation in the reward centers of the brain. This was true of all photos, including photos the kids had taken themselves.

SHERMAN: When teens saw their own pictures had received many likes, they showed a greater activation in an area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. And this is an area that's part of the brain's reward circuitry.

GREENE: Reward circuitry - that's the part of the brain that's making you feel good about yourself.

VEDANTAM: Precisely.

GREENE: Is this that surprising? I mean, if you see a photo and one of your photos that you took has a lot of likes, you're feeling good about yourself, so that part of the brain would be active.

VEDANTAM: I think that is what you would intuitively expect to see, but the research also produced some really interesting nuances, David. Researchers manipulated the pictures supposedly taken by the friends of the teenagers so adolescents saw different pictures that were supposedly popular. So you might see a picture and see that it had 50 likes, and I might see the very same picture and see that it received only five likes. The brains of the teenagers responded very strongly to the pictures deemed popular, regardless of which pictures they were. In fact, the researchers asked the adolescents to themselves like photos that they admired. And they found that if a teen saw a picture with lots of likes, she tended to like it herself. If another teen saw the same picture with only a few likes, he tended not to like it himself.

GREENE: Oh, interesting. So it really can have a snowballing effect.

VEDANTAM: Exactly. And the remarkable thing is that this was also true of the photos that the teenagers had taken themselves. Rather than make up their own minds about which of their own pictures they liked, teens deferred to the opinions of their peers. So, you know, in some ways, this study is confirming what we've known - peer pressure matters a lot, especially when you're 14.

GREENE: And probably when you're older, too.

(LAUGHTER)

VEDANTAM: That's right.

GREENE: Shankar, thanks.

VEDANTAM: Thank you, David.

GREENE: That is Shankar Vedantam, who regularly comes on the program to talk about social science research. And he explores this topic and other ideas on his podcast, Hidden Brain.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Researchers Study Effects Of Social Media On Young Minds

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subscribe to Hidden Brain podcast Teens showed an image that was deemed to have lots of "likes" tended to also like the image. Seeing popular pictures also produced greater activation in the reward centers of the brain.

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A God Who Remembers by Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel believed that it was his job to share the things he experienced in the horrific concentration camp that he was put in.

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I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction. I remember, I remember because I was there with my father. I was still living with him there. We worked together. We returned to the camp together. We stayed in the same block. We slept in the same box. We shared bread and soup. Never were we so close to one another.

We talked a lot to each other, especially in the evenings, but never of death. I believed - I hoped - that I would not survive him, not even for one day. Without saying it to him, I thought I was the last of our line. With him, our past would die; with me, our future.

The moment the war ended, I believed - we all did - that anyone who survived death must bear witness. Some of us even believed that they survived in order to become witnesses. But then I knew deep down that it would be impossible to communicate the entire story. Nobody can. I personally decided to wait, to see during 10 years if I would be capable to find the proper words, the proper pace, the proper melody or maybe even the proper silence to describe the ineffable.

For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share. When we endure an experience, the experience cannot stay with me alone. It must be opened, it must become an offering, it must be deepened and given and shared. And of course I am afraid that memories suppressed could come back with a fury, which is dangerous to all human beings, not only to those who directly were participants but to people everywhere, to the world, for everyone. So, therefore, those memories that are discarded, shamed, somehow they may come back in different ways - disguised, perhaps seeking another outlet.

Granted, our task is to inform. But information must be transformed into knowledge, knowledge into sensitivity and sensitivity into commitment.

How can we therefore speak, unless we believe that our words have meaning, that our words will help others to prevent my past from becoming another person's - another peoples' - future. Yes, our stories are essential - essential to memory. I believe that the witnesses, especially the survivors, have the most important role. They can simply say, in the words of the prophet, "I was there."

What is a witness if not someone who has a tale to tell and lives only with one haunting desire: to tell it. Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

After all, God is God because he remembers.

Independently produced for All Things Considered by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.

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I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction. I remember, I remember because I was there with my father. I was still living with him there. We worked together.

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Pokémon Go: The Live Video Games Everyone Seems to be Playing. by: Laura Sydell Talks about how video games now are including the real world and are better for exploration and socialization.

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Pokemon Go is the latest game to use something called augmented reality which combines virtual and real worlds on a smartphone screen. Released only last week by Nintendo, it is a runaway success.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Most summers have a hit song that everybody knows. This summer, it may turn out to be a hit video game, the latest version of Pokemon. Twenty years ago, a version of Nintendo's game swept Japan. Now some Americans are obsessed with a video game that pushes people out into the real world so that they can ignore it. NPR's Laura Sydell reports

LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: The western edge of Golden Gate Park is amazingly beautiful. There's a view of the Pacific Ocean, a historic beach LA restaurant with a view of the water. Today, there are dozens of people that are in the restaurant parking lot. And they could care less about the ocean. They're looking down at their smartphones. Danielle Sheridon says she's searching for fictional monsters called Pokemon.

Did you come all the way out here today to play?

DANIELLE SHERIDON: Yeah.

SYDELL: Well, how come?

SHERIDON: Because we thought the beach might have a lot of Pokemon because they tend to be in, like, more public places like this.

SYDELL: This is one of the hot spots in San Francisco for spotting Pokemon. Elliot Nicholson is also on the hunt.

ELLIOT NICHOLSON: You can tell, there's usually a big group of people just clustered around a certain area. Or in my neighborhood, they're just taking night walks in places and at times that I usually don't see people out at night (laughter). So it's one of those, OK, I know what they're doing (laughter).

SYDELL: Playing Pokemon Go. It's part of a genre of games that uses something called augmented reality. That's a mix between the virtual and the real world. The object is to catch Pokemon. On your phone screen is a map of where you're standing, courtesy of GPS. As you go off and search for the monsters, your phone's camera turns on and an animated Pokemon appears in your view of the real world.

The key is you have to keep moving if you're going to catch one. You do that by moving your finger across the screen and throwing little animated balls at the guy.

DEAN SPEER: So it's like a giant scavenger hunt. And it's all over the world, wherever you are, whenever you want to go.

SYDELL: Dean Speer, 28-year-old personal trainer says Pokemon Go takes you places. You can't play it sitting down. And the search reveals more of the world, like the entrance to a trail you've never noticed.

SPEER: I had walked by the entrance many times, never really realized it was an entrance. But then you're like, wait, that's a trail. And then you walk back there and suddenly there's creeks and trees. And I'm like, oh, there's more of this than just Golden Gate Park.

SYDELL: And this is happening all over the country. It's topped the app charts for both iPhones and Android phones.

CHELSEA STARK: People were walking around both floors of our office trying to catch Pokemon. A bunch of us left for lunch at the same time so we could do it.

SYDELL: Chelsea Stark is the games editor for the tech site Mashable. There are other augmented reality games. But Stark says, hands down, this one is the most popular.

STARK: I think it's the fact that it's Pokemon and the fact that it's the real world, the fact that maybe we kind of all need a distraction in this kind of horrible summer full of, like, really dire political events and social events.

SYDELL: The game is making money from in-app purchases to the tune of $1.6 million a day, according to the research firm SensorTower Inc. And it's only been out since last Thursday. Nintendo's stock is going gangbusters, though it only partially owns this version of Pokemon, which was produced by Niantic. Already, there are some downsides.

There are reports of people getting so lost in the game, they trip in potholes or robbers using it to lure victims and concerns about privacy. The app collects a lot of personal data off your phone. So far, none of this is deterring players like Elliot Nicholson.

How long do you think you can keep this up?

NICHOLSON: Oh, I don't know, until I get bored of it (laughter). That could either take weeks, months, maybe a year.

SYDELL: Or maybe until cold weather arrives. This could just be a summer fling. Laura Sydell, NPR News, San Francisco.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Pokemon Go: The Live Video Game Everyone Seems To Be Playing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pokemon Go is the latest game to use something called augmented reality which combines virtual and real worlds on a smartphone screen. Released only last week by Nintendo, it is a runaway success. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Most summers have a hit song that everybody knows.

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Work Is A Blessing by Jay Allison. Mr. Allison believes that Work is a Blessing because that's how he gains money to support his family. He believes that work gives you a better social identity and that you receive better goods.

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I grew up in Lakeland, La., one of 12 children. We all lived on my parents' subsistence farm. We grew cotton, sugar cane, corn, hogs, chickens and had a large garden, but it didn't bring in much cash. So when I was 12, I got a part-time job on a dairy farm down the road, helping to milk cows. We milked 65 cows at 5 in the morning and again at 2 in afternoon, seven days a week.

In the kitchen one Saturday before daylight, I remember complaining to my father and grandfather about having to go milk those cows. My father said, "Ya know, boy, to work is a blessing."

I looked at those two men who'd worked harder than I ever had - my father eking out a living on that farm and my grandfather farming and working as a carpenter during the Depression. I had a feeling I had been told something really important, but it took many years before it sank in.

Going to college was a rare privilege for a kid from Lakeland. My father told me if I picked something to study that I liked doing, I'd always look forward to my work. But he also added, "Even having a job you hate is better than not having a job at all." I wanted to be a farmer, but I joined the ROTC program to help pay for college. And what started out as an obligation to the Army became a way of life that I stayed committed to for 37 years, three months and three days.

In the late 1980s, during a visit to Bangladesh, I saw a woman with a baby on her back, breaking bricks with a hammer. I asked a Bangladesh military escort why they weren't using a machine, which would have been a lot easier. He told me a machine would put that lady out of work. Breaking those bricks meant she'd earn enough money to feed herself and her baby that day. And as bad as that woman's job was, it was enough to keep a small family alive. It reminded me of my father's words: To work is a blessing.

Serving in the U.S. Army overseas, I saw a lot of people like that woman in Bangladesh. And I have come to believe that people without jobs are not free. They are victims of crime, the ideology of terrorism, poor health, depression and social unrest. These victims become the illegal immigrants, the slaves of human trafficking, the drug dealers, the street gang members. I've seen it over and over again on the U.S. border, in Somalia, the Congo, Afghanistan and in New Orleans. People who have jobs can have a home, send their kids to school, develop a sense of pride, contribute to the good of the community, and even help others. When we can work, we're free. We're blessed.

I don't think I'll ever quit working. I'm retired from the Army, but I'm still working to help people be prepared for disaster. And I may get to do a little farming someday, too. I'm not going to stop. I believe in my father's words. I believe in the blessing of work.

Independently produced for Weekend Edition Sunday by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.

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I grew up in Lakeland, La., one of 12 children. We all lived on my parents' subsistence farm. We grew cotton, sugar cane, corn, hogs, chickens and had a large garden, but it didn't bring in much cash. So when I was 12, I got a part-time job on a dairy farm down the road, helping to milk cows.

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"How video games are getting inside your head" By Steve Henn. Max Kelmon is 13, he plays Xbox with millions of users and some of them are adults that are influencing kids' behavior in many powerful ways, his mom hates when Max plays Xbox because he is addicted to it and when she took the Xbox away from him, he couldn't stop begging for it.

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This week on All Tech, we're exploring kids and technology with posts and radio pieces about raising digital natives. Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments, by email or tweet.

Max Kelmon, 13, has his own little version of a man cave in Palo Alto, Calif. Behind the family kitchen in a converted garage, he has an Xbox, a big-screen TV, headphones and a microphone. There's an old couch covered in a sheet. And that couch where he parks himself, surrounded by boxes and Christmas lights, is one of Max's favorite places on the planet.

From that couch, he connects to friends all over the globe - and he spends hours, pretty much every day, honing his skills in Call of Duty.

The first commercially successfully video game, Pong, invaded Americans' living rooms 38 years ago. Since then, the industry has evolved from a simple bouncing ball in the Atari original to games with astounding graphics and sound, most of them connected to the Internet.

That means that kids like Max can play with people spread across the globe. It also means that gaming companies can analyze how gamers play - each and every decision they make.

So when kids sit down with a game, they are actually sitting across a screen from adults who are studying them - and, in some cases, trying to influence their behavior in powerful ways.

Researchers in game companies tweak games to get players to stay on longer, or to encourage them to spend money on digital goods. They study gamers' reactions. It's become a science.

And parents like Max's mom, Vanessa Kelmon, often feel outgunned.

"I hate it. I really do," she says. "He could play Xbox for 12 straight hours. [He has] friends in Mexico City and friends in England."

Vanessa says Max is addicted to video games. "When I took it away, he started to cry," she says. "My God, I am offering you to go play tennis or go play golf ... and I am making you shut this down, and you're crying about it."
Tracking Clicks And Purchases
In millions of families, video games are a source of intense love and intense hate because they can be so incredibly compelling. You might not believe that if you don't play them, but you can get lost in a great game. They make you feel good.

And it's no accident, says Ramin Shokrizade, the game economist for Wargaming America.

"The technology for this has gotten quite sophisticated," says Shokrizade, who began his career in neuroscience and behavioral economics. "At this point, every major gaming company worldwide either has in place a fully developed business intelligence unit, or they're in the process of building one."

Today's game design is dominated by research, he says. As we play games, game developers are tracking every click, running tests and analyzing data.

They are trying to find out: What can they tweak to make us play just a bit longer? What would make the game more fun? What can get us to spend some money inside a game and buy something?

So as millions of people play, designers introduce little changes and get answers to all of these questions in real time. And games evolve.

For example, most games today sell virtual goods right inside the game - like a new gun in Call of Duty or a cow in FarmVille. Shokrizade's job is to get people to buy them.

One of the tricks of the trade is something developers at Zynga - which created FarmVille - used to call "fun pain" or "the pinch." The idea is to make gamers uncomfortable, frustrate them, take away their powers, crush their forts - and then, at the last second, offer them a way out for a price.

John Davison, who works at video game company Red Robot Labs, says free-to-play smartphone games like Candy Crush Saga and Puzzle & Dragons have become brilliant at using these tests to figure out how to get people to spend money.

And the research is working. Davison says those games are making millions of dollars - every day.
Kids Who Cash In
When adults play games, they consent to share that personal information about how they play. But Shokrizade worries about the millions of kids who play. "If it's a child, how do you even get consent for something like that?" he says.

Many of the people spending cash are kids, including Davison's children. Game consoles sell gift cards at convenience stores that allow kids to make purchases on video games, even if they don't have a credit card.

Davison's kids started playing Clash of Clans this year. In the game, developed by Supercell, you get to run your own little Viking village and team up with friends. To protect your clan, you can spend money on forts and weapons.

It's free to download - but because of these virtual goods, it's one of the highest-grossing apps in Apple's store.

Davison's two boys loved it. "They were clearly getting a lot of enjoyment out of it," he says. "But it did get to the point where my wife and I were like, 'Do you really want to be spending everything on this?' "

And this is coming from a man who has devoted his life to video games.

"I was trying to sort of total up in my head how much the kids had spent on this game," he says. "But there was also a degree of admiration for the team at Supercell, that they had managed to get under my 10-year-old's skin to this degree."

Apple recently settled a class-action lawsuit about kids making in-app purchases like this without their parents' permission, and the European Union is considering new regulations on games.

Some regulations are taking place on a smaller scale. In Menlo Park, Calif., Michelle DeWolf banned her 10-year-old son, Austin Newman, from playing games during the school week.

Originally, she gave him 30 minutes a day, but that didn't work.

"He couldn't think about doing his homework. He couldn't think about walking the dog or helping in any other way, because he couldn't get his mind off the idea that he had 30 minutes coming," she says.

"Once he knew there was nothing, he didn't think about it during the week, and he almost - maybe I'm not objective - but he almost seemed relieved."

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How Video Games Are Getting Inside Your Head - And Wallet

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Some parents say their children are addicted to video games, but it's no accident that kids can get lost in them. Game developers are studying gamers' actions as they play in order to make the games more compelling - and lucrative.

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For people with disabilities, new technology can be life changing by Laura Sydell- she writes about how Ben Dov believes he can change lives of whos have a disability by creating new technology to help them out.

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For most of us, eye tracking technology sounds interesting. But it's not life changing. Eye tracking allows users to move a cursor around a computer or mobile device simply by moving your eyes and head.

Oded Ben Dov initially used eye tracking technology to develop a video game that he showed off on Israeli TV. The next day, he says, he got a phone call from a man who told him: "I can't move my hands or legs. Can you make me a smartphone I could use?"

That's when Ben Dov realized that his eye tracking technology could change lives.

"For me, that was a calling to put my skills and knowledge to good use." Ben Dov went on to found Sesame Enable, a company that sells smartphones for people who can't use their hands.

Sesame Enable, which is based in Israel, was in Mountain View, Calif., this week for Google I/O, the annual conference for developers who make products using Google technologies. Sesame Enable is getting support from Google.org - the company's charitable arm.

Eve Andersson, who leads accessibility across Google, says Google.org has given out $20 million to organizations that use technology to help people with disabilities. She says a lot of the technology that ends up helping people with disabilities comes out of well-designed technology aimed at all consumers.

"We shouldn't need to know they have a disability," Andersson says. "It should just work for them."

But taking existing technology and making it useful for a disabled person often does require new designs. Tomglobal.org - a nonprofit that brings together technologists who want to solve problems for people with disabilities, gets financial support from Google.org.

One of the products generated at a tomglobal.org hackathon was on display at the I/O conference. It's a special sensor device for people in wheelchairs who face the problem of "pressure sores." It was developed by Paul Herzlich and some of his colleagues. Herzlich works in the legal department at Google and he uses a wheelchair.

Pressure sores "happen when someone is sitting in the same position for too long," Herzlich says. "It decreases blood circulation to that area and eventually leads to a breakdown of the skin in that area." Herzlich says he was once hospitalized after getting a pressure sore and that the condition can be deadly.

The sensor device he developed fits easily on a wheelchair seat and it's connected to a smartphone app via Bluetooth.

"If the app notices that the pressure hasn't changed in a certain period of time it will notify the user as a reminder to move," Herzlich says. "It's raising that awareness for the user because we're often paying attention to other things throughout our day and don't remember to move."

Herzlich and his colleagues hope to bring the product to market and develop a version for hospitals where patients face health problems related to bedsores.

Google was actually a little behind some of its rivals when it comes to making accessibility a priority, says Mike Shebanek, the senior director of accessibility at Yahoo. Shebanek is also with an organization called Teach Access, which brings together employees at tech companies that want to work on accessibility issues.

Shebanek says in the tech world, Apple led the way by making its smartphones accessible. "Things like magnifiers and screen readers were built into the product," he says.

Though Apple poses other issues for developers who want to make technology accessible. Oded Ben Dov of Sesame Enable says his company can't make its product work as well on Apple devices because of its closed operating system. Google's Android is open source.

The next update to the Android operating system will enable Open Sesame, an app that can be used on any Android smartphone.

Yahoo has an accessibility team, which works and trains engineers throughout the company to design all Yahoo products to be accessible.

"What we find is that when we give these designers and engineers an opportunity to do this, they have such a positive experience they want to keep doing it," Shebanek says.

He says a lot of tech companies realize that the market for products that have a variety of accessibility features is large. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 1 billion, out of the approximately 7 billion people in the world, experience a disability.

But, as much as disabled people often benefit from technology developed for regular consumers, it also works the other way around. "We discovered that when we focus on users with disabilities our products get better for everybody," Shebanek says.

For example, Shebanek notes that Yahoo has been working on closed captioning for live events streamed on the Web. "We know that more people than those with hearing problems use closed captioning," he says. Try watching a TV screen in a loud airport or sports bars.

While it's great news for disabled people that tech companies are increasing their interest in making products for them, Shebanek says there's still a long way to go. It's still rare for companies to have an accessibility team, and that's especially true at startups.

Google I/O's dedicated space appears to show a real commitment on the part of one of the world's largest and most influential tech companies to using technology to make life better for people with disabilities. And, as Google's Eve Andersson notes, most of us are likely to discover that accessible technology will become more important to us as we age.

"I use magnification a lot more than I did in my younger days," she says.

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For People With Disabilities, New Technology Can Be Life Changing

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For most of us, eye tracking technology sounds interesting. But it's not life changing. Eye tracking allows users to move a cursor around a computer or mobile device simply by moving your eyes and head. Oded Ben Dov initially used eye tracking technology to develop a video game that he showed off on Israeli TV.

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I am still the greatest by Muhammad Ali.  Muhammad Ali talks about how he never believed it losing and how he believed that his will was stronger that his opponentsskill.

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I have always believed in myself, even as a young child growing up in Louisville, Ky. My parents instilled a sense of pride and confidence in me, and taught me and my brother that we could be the best at anything. I must have believed them, because I remember being the neighborhood marble champion and challenging my neighborhood buddies to see who could jump the tallest hedges or run a foot race the length of the block. Of course I knew when I made the challenge that I would win. I never even thought of losing.

In high school, I boasted weekly - if not daily - that one day I was going to be the heavyweight champion of the world. As part of my boxing training, I would run down Fourth Street in downtown Louisville, darting in and out of local shops, taking just enough time to tell them I was training for the Olympics and I was going to win a gold medal. And when I came back home, I was going to turn pro and become the world heavyweight champion in boxing. I never thought of the possibility of failing - only of the fame and glory I was going to get when I won. I could see it. I could almost feel it. When I proclaimed that I was the "Greatest of All Time," I believed in myself. And I still do.

Throughout my entire boxing career, my belief in my abilities triumphed over the skill of an opponent. My will was stronger than their skills. What I didn't know was that my will would be tested even more when I retired.

In 1984, I was conclusively diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Since that diagnosis, my symptoms have increased and my ability to speak in audible tones has diminished. If there was anything that would strike at the core of my confidence in myself, it would be this insidious disease. But my confidence and will to continue to live life as I choose won't be compromised.

Early in 1996, I was asked to light the caldron at the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. Of course my immediate answer was yes. I never even thought of having Parkinson's or what physical challenges that would present for me.

When the moment came for me to walk out on the 140-foot-high scaffolding and take the torch from Janet Evans, I realized I had the eyes of the world on me. I also realized that as I held the Olympic torch high above my head, my tremors had taken over. Just at that moment, I heard a rumble in the stadium that became a pounding roar and then turned into a deafening applause. I was reminded of my 1960 Olympic experience in Rome, when I won the gold medal. Those 36 years between Rome and Atlanta flashed before me, and I realized that I had come full circle.

Nothing in life has defeated me. I am still the "Greatest." This I believe.

Independently produced for All Things Considered by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.

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I have always believed in myself, even as a young child growing up in Louisville, Ky. My parents instilled a sense of pride and confidence in me, and taught me and my brother that we could be the best at anything.

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With 88 goals, Lionel Messi Celebrates a Record Year. Lionel Messi believed that he could accomplish goals this big and he did he scored 88 goals in one season he believes in confident and hard work pays off.

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Stop anyone on the street in Europe, Latin America, Africa and even Asia, and chances are they'll know the name Lionel Messi - and they'll probably know what he did this week. The soccer phenom scored his 88th goal of the year, which is widely thought to be a world record.

And the year's not over yet.

On Sunday, Messi, 25, scored his 86th goal of the calendar year in a Spanish league game against Real Betis, in Seville. The goal, Messi's second of the game, gave Barcelona a 2-1 win over Betis, with the announcer booming, "A new goal king!"

Then on Wednesday, Messi scored two more goals against Cordoba, for a 2-0 win in the Copa del Rey (King's Cup) - bringing his yearly total to 88.

More goals for an already prolific goal scorer. But the art with which Messi plays soccer sometimes brings grown men to tears.

"Lionel Messi rewrites the history book! And we were all there to witness it, and be privileged by this artisan!" exclaimed the announcer.

The British TV announcer Ray Hudson, who narrated one of Messi's goals last Sunday, couldn't avoid poetry.

"Twisting, turning, like an alligator with a twitch, beautiful give and go! He takes a million pictures in that crystal ball that's inside of his head!" said Hudson. "This golden footballer - the most wonderful, stupendously magnificent player in the history of the game!"

Some Americans may be asking: Who?
'Not Even At His Peak'
Messi, who's from Argentina, doesn't have the playboy glamour that's made David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo famous across the Atlantic, says Mark Elkington, who covers Spanish soccer for Reuters.

"He's not what you'd call a classically good-looking guy," Elkington says. "He's quite small. He has this kind of humble, almost like a teenager, sort of shuffling along. He doesn't have all the trappings of the big superstar. And he plays football kind of like an excited teenager as well."

Messi was just 13 when he arrived to train with Barcelona. But he's loved even here in Madrid - enemy territory, home to a rival team, Real Madrid.

In a downtown Madrid park, Jesus Lerma kicks around a ball with his friends. They're all die-hard Real Madrid fans - but can't bring themselves to say anything bad about Messi.

"I respect him a lot as a football player. He's, like, probably the best dribbler. I like him a lot - his game, his kind of goals, his team playing," Lerma says.

With 88 goals, Messi has topped what was widely considered the four-decade-old record held by Germany's Gerd Mueller. There's now a bit of a dispute, with a Brazilian team now saying one of its players may have scored 89 goals in 1979.

Whatever the case, Messi has had a remarkable year and still has two more games to go.

And he's broken many other records, too, Elkington says.

"He's been world player of the year for three years in a row, and he's favorite to win it again. Secondly, the Champions League is the biggest club competition in the world, and he's been the top scorer in the Champions League for the last four years in a row. He's Barcelona's all-time leading scorer. And you've got to remember, he's only 25. In theory, he's not even at his peak yet," Elkington says.
Rise Of 'The Flea'
Messi's nickname is "La Pulga" or "The Flea," which is what the opposing team often thinks of him - a tiny 5 feet 7 inches, but an incessant nuisance that they cannot stop.

"He seems to run into a crowd of players, and you think, 'Oh, well he's never going to get through there.' And he seems to come through on the other side with the ball. And you just laugh and you go, 'That's unbelievable how he's done that,' " Elkington says.

Near the end of a tough game last year against Real Madrid, when players were getting sent off for rough tackles, Messi came out from nowhere, as he does, and scored two clean goals to win the game for Barcelona.

And as one commentator said at the time: "Just as it looked like petulance and bickering would win the day, up steps the 'little maestro' to show us all how 'The Beautiful Game' can still be played."

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With 88 Goals, Lionel Messi Celebrates A Record Year

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Stop anyone on the street in Europe, Latin America, Africa and even Asia, and chances are they'll know the name Lionel Messi - and they'll probably know what he did this week. The soccer phenom scored his 88th goal of the year, which is widely thought to be a world record.

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Finding Freedom In Forgiveness by Jennifer Thompson. Ms. Thompson believes in forgiveness and that her and anybody else should not hold in anger or a grudge on someone else. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101469307

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Saying Thanks To My Ghosts by Amy Tan- Ms. Tan believes in ghost and that they will be there for her.

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I didn't used to believe in ghosts, but I was trained to talk to them. My mother reminded me many times that I had the gift. It all stemmed from a lie I told when I was 4. The way my mother remembered it, I refused to get ready for bed one night, claiming there was a ghost in the bathroom. She was delighted to learn I was a spirit medium.

Thereafter, she questioned anything unusual - a sudden gust of wind, a vase that fell and shattered. She would ask me, "She here?" She meant my grandmother.

When I was a child, my mother told me that my grandmother died in great agony after she accidentally ate too much opium. My mother was 9 years old when she watched this happen.

When I was 14, my older brother was stricken with a brain tumor. My mother begged me to ask my grandmother to save him. When he died, she asked me to talk to him as well. "I don't know how," I protested. When my father died of a brain tumor six months after my brother, she made me use a Ouija board. She wanted to know if they still loved her. I spelled out the answer I knew she wanted to hear: Yes. Always.

When I became a fiction writer in my 30s, I wrote a story about a woman who killed herself eating too much opium. After my mother read a draft of that story, she had tears in her eyes. Now she had proof: My grandmother had talked to me and told me her true story. How else could I have known my grandmother had not died by accident but with the fury of suicide? She asked me, "She here now?" I answered honestly, "I don't know."

Over the years, I have included other details in my writing I could not possibly have known on my own: a place, a character, a song. I have come to feel differently about my ghostwriters. Sometimes their clues have come so plentifully, they've made me laugh like a child who can't open birthday presents fast enough. I must say thanks, not to blind luck but to my ghosts.

Ten years ago, I clearly saw a ghost, and she talked to me. It was my mother. She had died just 24 hours before. Her face was 10 times larger than life, in the form of a moving, pulsing hologram of sparkling lights. My mother was laughing at my surprise. She drew closer, and when she reached me, I felt as if I had been physically punched in the chest. It took my breath away and filled me with something absolute: love, but also joy and peace - and with that, understanding that love and joy and peace are all the same thing. Joy comes from love. Peace comes from love. "Now you know," my mother said.

I believe in ghosts. Whenever I want, they will always be there: my mother, my grandmother, my ghosts.

Independently produced for Weekend Edition Sunday by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.

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Novelist Amy Tan hasn't always believed in ghosts, but as a writer she's had too many inspirations that she can't fully explain. Now, Tan embraces her belief in ghosts and the messages of joy, love and peace they bring her.

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What personal experiences are conveyed in the narrative? Upload an image or video that would represent one aspect of the personal experiences.

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Write the name, title and belief of the narrative.
Elisa Nadworny-  Mrs. Nadworny believes in starting the new year off right. She believes in family values and encouraging her students.

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Like many schools, Gibson Elementary in St. Louis had big problems with attendance - many students were missing nearly a month of school a year.

Melody Gunn, who was the principal at Gibson last year, set out to visit homes and figure out why kids weren't showing up. Her biggest discovery? They didn't have clean uniforms to wear to school.

Many families, she found, didn't have washing machines in the home, and kids were embarrassed to show up at school wearing dirty clothes. The result was that often, they didn't come.

Gunn thought this was a problem she could fix. She called Whirlpool, which agreed to donate some washers and dryers. Gunn had them installed at the school and then opened the doors for parents to use the machines. If folks couldn't make it during the school day, the school would offer access to the laundry machines after hours.

It hasn't made every kid show up, but Principal Gunn says it's working.

Chronic absence - defined as missing more than 10 percent of the school year (or just two days a month) - is one of the most destructive forces in a child's education. Yet more than 6 million students in the U.S. miss three weeks or more of school each year.

Research shows that such students are way more likely to fall behind and, eventually, drop out. Addressing the problem goes way beyond skipping school - a mix of truancy entangled with illnesses and family problems.

Getting kids to school is especially important at the beginning of the year. One study, from Baltimore, found that about half of students who missed two to four days in September went on to miss about a month of school for the whole year.
Identify the kids who aren't there
The most important thing a school can do is figure out which students aren't at their desks.

A few years ago, the Grand Rapids, Mich., school district undertook a big data project to identify kids who were chronically absent.

The data mining showed a big problem: Of 17,000 kids in the district, nearly 7,000 were missing a month or more of school a year. District officials were super transparent about the numbers - they put 8-foot poster boards in every school, so folks could see if their numbers improved.

This highly visible information on chronic absence helped schools and community organizations step in to start addressing why kids were missing.
Outreach
Experts say an important component of any attendance program is talking to the adults at home. Parents understand that attendance is important, but when you get down to specifics - like how many days kids can or should miss - there are a lot of misconceptions. New research from the Ad Council found that nearly half of parents thought it was OK to miss three or more days of school a month, but experts say missing that many days is harmful to student achievement.

Another widely cited factor in improving attendance: Parents and students need to feel comfortable. I visited a school in Baltimore where the principal stands outside every morning - rain, shine, snow - and greets every kid and parent. They've seen attendance numbers shoot up.

The interesting thing that happened in St. Louis, at Gibson Elementary, is that when the school opened up for parents to wash clothes, those adults became more engaged. Parents could wander around the school, meet staff and get comfortable with the building.

"It was an unintended consequence. They saw we cared," Principal Gunn says.

Experts point to mentors as one of the most successful strategies: Pairing kids who are chronically absent with an adult in the community - a college student, a firefighter, a teacher.

So, washing machines may be a good idea at Gibson Elementary.

But it may not work everywhere. Research suggests that, in order to improve attendance long-term, schools should use many strategies together. Strategies that will get everyone involved: parents, community partners, teachers and principals, and the students.

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A New School Year Brings Renewed Focus On Attendance

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Like many schools, Gibson Elementary in St. Louis had big problems with attendance - many students were missing nearly a month of school a year. Melody Gunn, who was the principal at Gibson last year, set out to visit homes and figure out why kids weren't showing up. Her biggest discovery?