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A front-facing iPhone camera means video calling, but it’s also a sign of something bigger. Combined with other recent leaks, it means that Apple is bringing iChat to the iPhone. Everything about voice calling may be about to change. More »

O loves Twi-Hards. The new and final trailer for the next film in The Twilight Saga, Eclipse, premiered on The Oprah Winfrey Show on Friday.

Watch as Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner battle their continuing love triangle and an army of vampires.

Twilight Eclipse bares its fangs to take a bite out of the box office on June 30.

UPDATED Users who sign up for Blippy, the service that encourages sharing personal transactions online, do so with the expectation of becoming more open about their purchase data. But they don’t expect their credit card numbers to be posted online, which is what seems to have happened. If you search Google using the terms “site:blippy.com + ‘from card,’” you’ll see what appear to be a set of transactions at Starbucks, Exxon Mobile, Kroger’s and other stores. Many of them are in Michigan and many of them appear to be from a single credit card.

To be clear, there are only 196 results for that search query. But Blippy has yet to speak up for itself, more than three hours after VentureBeat’s Owen Thomas tweeted about it, and in the meantime “Blippy Users’ Credit” has become a trending topic on Twitter. Blippy’s privacy page promises to tell users of security breaches “in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay.”

Update: Blippy founder Philip Kaplan has now posted on the company blog and spoken to at least one reporter about the breach. He said the credit card numbers shared belonged to a total of four users who had been early beta testers. Blippy had since cleaned up its data but Google was still caching it.

Kaplan wrote:

We take security seriously and want to assure Blippy users that this was an isolated incident from many months ago in our beta test, and doesn’t affect current users.

While it looks super-scary and certainly sucks for those few people who were affected, and is embarrassing to us, it’s a lot less bad than it looks.

He gave further detail to the New York Times,

Mr. Kaplan said that early on, Blippy started disguising the raw transaction data behind the scenes, but it did not know about the breach until today. He added, “This still looks pretty bad.”

Blippy is a brand-new startup that just raised $11.2 million in new funding at a valuation of $46.2 million — and yesterday was the recipient of a New York Times writeup about the new age of personal information sharing online. What the company doesn’t need is the perception that it’s cavalier with user data. A little breach goes a long way against user trust — and the service is on the hook for a lot of growth to live up to that new funding.

Following an explosion Tuesday night on the British Pretroleum (BP) oil drilling rig known as Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, at least two families have filed lawsuits against BP and the rig’s builders alleging negligence caused the disaster.

Eleven of the 126 crewmembers of the Deepwater Horizon were still missing Friday morning, after the BP drilling platform exploded and caught fire for reasons that are still unknown. The platform burned until Thursday morning, when it collapsed and the massive oil rig plunged into the waters of the Gulf.

There were 115 people on the rig who have been confirmed to have escaped by life boat. At least seventeen of the rescued workers were injured, with three in critical condition. The wounded were flown by air ambulances to hospitals in New Orleans, Louisiana and Mobile, Alabama.

On Thursday, the family of missing worker Shane Roshto filed a lawsuit over the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion against BP and Transocean Ltd. in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District Court of Louisiana. The lawsuit accuses the companies of negligence and failing to meet federal regulations. Another Deepwater Horizon lawsuit was also filed against the companies on behalf of worker Karl Kelppinger Jr. in state court in Harris County.

Officials have indicated that the explosion and sinking oil rig may unleash a catastrophic oil spill in the already environmentally fragile Gulf of Mexico. Coast Guard officials on the scene say it does not appear that such a spill has occurred yet, but they are monitoring the drill’s wellhead and will continue to do so. The Coast Guard warns that if the wellhead does rupture, it could release up to 8,000 barrels of crude oil a day.

The Coast Guard has detected a sheen of oil on the water across a five mile area, but has determined that the oil was blown out by the explosion.

The Deepwater Horizon platform was constructed and owned by Transocean Ltd., and was under lease to BP. The rig was 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana performing exploratory drilling. Officials from Transocean said that workers who escaped the burning platform feared that the 11 missing workers were too close to the initial blast, and may not have escaped.

The potentially deadly explosion comes a few months after the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined BP $77.4 million for safety problems at its Texas oil refinery. A blast in 2005 at the refinery killed 15 people and injured 170 others. OSHA has issued 270 safety notifications in regards to problems at the BP refinery, noting that there were 439 instances of “willful and egregious” safety violations at the facility.

Following the recent ruling in the Myriad Genetics case, that gene patents are invalid, it was amusing (if it a bit frightening) to watch some patent attorneys, who specialize in the field, react as if the world had been turned upside down, and that major scientific advances in health and medicine were all going to collapse into a giant blackhole. Of course, they had no evidence to back that up. As we’ve seen time and time again, the evidence suggests exactly the opposite — and now there’s even more evidence, specifically when it comes to patents on genes and related processes. Justin Levine points us to an Economist article highlighting a series of recently released studies that found that gene patents are quite damaging:

Even more striking is the claim made by the Duke researchers that patent exclusivity is not necessary to spur innovation in genetic testing. Dr Cook-Deegan argues that testing, unlike pricey drug development, has low barriers to entry and is relatively cheap, so a monopoly is not required to lure investors. As evidence, he points to the case of cystic fibrosis: unlike breast cancer, no monopoly patent blocks access to the relevant gene, and dozens of rival testing companies flourish.

The research also found that thanks to gene patent monopolies, many people may suffer in being unable to get access to important tests, and worse (as was the case in the Myriad suit), the monopoly kills off the potential of getting any sort of second opinion — which can be incredibly important in properly judging the situation. Of course, I fully expect the typical group of patent attorneys to ignore this evidence yet again. The full set of studies, led by Robert Cook-Deegan, at Duke University can be read online. It was done in response to a request from the US Dept. of Health — so perhaps the US gov’t is finally starting to look at actual evidence in figuring out patent policy as well. The different studies look at the impact of patents on a variety of different diseases. The results definitely differed depending on the case study, but it’s difficult to see any evidence of patents helping with innovation in any of the studies.

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Benedict Nightingale, reviewing the new London theater season for the New York Times in 1999, put his finger on the big trouble with Rose, Martin Sherman’s one-woman play about an 80-year old Holocaust survivor sitting on a park bench in Miami and remembering the high and low points of her extraordinary life.

“Rose’s life sometimes seems too exemplary to be true,” Nightingale writes. “Add some convenient coincidences to her tale — like meeting a bitter old shopkeeper in the Arizona desert and realizing he is the spouse she thought she had lost to Dachau — and Rose could easily be a case study rather than a character.”

But Nightingale also saw beyond Sherman’s desire to embrace the entirety of the post-Holocaust Jewish dilemma in a single overstuffed play, instead championing the drama’s extraordinary heart and the quietly stunning performance of its star, Olympia Dukakis — “the permafrost beneath the surface, the Siberia in her soul.”

He praised Rose for its “always lively, often distressing, sometimes hauntingly strange observation,” and concluded: “If you think that sedentary bravura is a contradiction in terms, this should change your mind.”

England liked Rose. It was nominated for the Olivier Award for best new play, and moved in 2000 to New York, again with Dukakis, where its reception was chillier. Bruce Weber, also writing in the New York Times, reacted like this: “(H)er story resonates on the tired frequency of a lecture about the wages of forgetting the past. If you are not of a certain age, you may react to her as a child to a relative who has overtaken one too many family gatherings: Yes, Grandma. Now can we go out and play?”

Then, echoing a theme sounded by several reviewers, he lamented the script’s streaks of jokiness amid the general despair: “Either Mr. Sherman is talking through her, or else in the year it took Rose to become fluent in English, she assimilated a lifetime of Borscht Belt humor.”

Well, maybe. But then, Rose is 80 years old when she sits shiva on that park bench, and she’s lived in America for most of her adult life. And Borscht Belt humor doesn’t come just from the Catskills. The Catskills are only a pipeline to older places and older times, where that peculiarly Jewish humor of survivors’ exaggeration was born and nourished before it immigrated to summer camps on American lakes. So Rose couldn’t be a little funny? So she shouldn’t be a little funny? Jews have been laughing about the unlaughable for a long, long time. It’s one way you get through.

About that other point, the “wages of forgetting the past”: Rose and Sherman are guilty as charged. Except, you should pardon the expression, I’m not sure why that’s something to feel guilty about. We do forget the past. Forgetting is disastrous. One can remind without being a nag. Even then, in the orbit of Jewish comedy, the old nag, the busybody, the yenta, is a stock character. You hear, you nod, you shrug, you laugh. Rose is not exactly a yenta and not exactly a nag: her complaints are visceral and rooted in real horrors, not imagined or exaggerated slights. And Rose is not a tale of elegant construction and beautiful words, like Jerzy Kosinsky’s (or whoever actually wrote it) The Painted Bird. So be it. Rose is not an elegant woman. But she’s memorable.

All of which is an extremely long way around to pointing out that Triangle Productions‘ Portland version of Rose, featuring Wendy Westerwelle and directed by Don Horn, is nearing the end of its run (final performances are 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday at CoHo Theater) and well worth your time. No, it’s not a perfect play. But it’s an intense, intelligent, funny and deeply moving play, and Westerwelle inhabits it with remarkable restrained passion.

Before the show opened I talked with Westerwelle about it and then wrote about our conversation here. It was obvious she’d made an enormous commitment to the role, and it shows on stage. She delivers a terrific performance, technically smart and emotionally vivid and precise.

I suspect her performance is very different from Dukakis’s: This Rose is not a permafrosted soul. People who know Westerwelle from past performances as varied as her Sophie Ticker show Soph: A Visit With the Last of the Red Hot Mamas and the old Storefront Burlesques know her as an extrovert, an outsized personality, an ambassador of the broad gesture. In Rose, she doesn’t reject that so much as she channels it to the sobering realities of the life of a woman who endured and survived some of the worst atrocities the 20th century threw at the world.

From a Ukrainian shtetl to the Warsaw pogroms to the postwar detention camps to her almost magical-realist transformation to freedom and eventual wealth in the United States, Rose relates the story of a woman bobbing on the waves of vast historical movements, trying to find ground. Her losses and occasional gains are intensely personal, and that is part of Sherman’s point, which Westerwelle and Horn so ably bring home: Great cultural tragedies are intense private tragedies, too. Small, common lives are ripped apart, and in the process, become uncommon. Yes, Rose is a survivor, with the guilt and the scars that go with it. And, yes, she leavens the horrors she relates with some wry jokes. Wouldn’t you?

So, I forgive the play its sometimes awkward leaps, its desperation to tell everything, its occasional ungainly coincidence. Those are small potatoes compared to what it achieves. Rose speaks truth about history, and hope about surviving it, and looks forward as well as back: It carries Rose’s story into the ongoing tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, lamenting that victims have also become victimizers. That final chapter is bound to anger a few people in the audience. But from Rose’s (and, presumably, Sherman’s) perspective it resounds with emotional and spiritual truth. Enough with the slaughter. Time for life.

*

“Looks like you’re the only goy who stayed for the talkback,” a friend commented after the post-show discussion on the afternoon I saw the play. Her comment surprised me: I hadn’t thought of it in those terms at all. I had noticed that I was one of only a few men in the audience, but only because a couple of women in front of me were joking about it as we walked from the lobby into the theater. Jew, goy — yes, it’s a Jewish story, but it’s a story for and about all of us. History has a way of drawing us together as well as pushing us apart.

In addition to Westerwelle and Horn, the post-show talk included Eva and Les Aigner, both Jewish and both Holocaust survivors. Their stories were simple and profound: stories of luck, stories of delivery. Stories of what these days we call post-traumatic stress. Les told of his 15 years of nightmares, of the job he held for decades in Oregon without ever telling anyone about his background. They told about how having each other made things easier, and how having children gave them a future. And Eva revealed why they finally decided it was time to start telling people their stories. It was when the Holocaust denial movement started gathering steam, she said. It just made them angry. How could anyone say it hadn’t happened? They were there. So they began to speak.

Sometimes, theater really is about life.

*

ILLUSTRATION: Wendy Westerwelle as Rose. Photo by Mark Larsen.

MICRO FARMING HOW-TO: Many of those involved in small scale farming and micro farming utilize various organic mulches. If you own a farm dog or cat, you may want to avoid cocoa mulch, an otherwise excellent mulch widely available.

It’s made from the shell waste caused by the extraction of chocolate from cocoa beans. It contains the same lethal pet ingredient called ‘theobromine’ that chocolate contains, which can cause sometimes deadly cardiac complications, including a racing or irregular heartbeat. — www.MicroEcoFarming.com

One day after an agreement to approve nine new judges in return for providing enough funding to prevent the closure of any state courthouse, the deal hit a major roadblock Friday afternoon.

Senate President Pro Tem Donald Williams, the highest-ranking senator, said he does not want to approve the judges and the funding for the courts until the entire $19 billion budget is approved. Legislators are scrambling to approve the budget before the legislative session ends at midnight on May 5, but no fiscal deal has been reached.

“I want to see the entire budget for 2011 resolved, not just to resolve it piece meal as to one branch, one agency,” Williams told reporters after a meeting of the top legislative leaders and Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell in her Capitol office. “I think it needs to be part of the entire budget package. We need to resolve it all, not just one branch at a time.”

The latest development is part of an ongoing stare-down among all three branches of government: the executive, legislative, and judicial. Rell, in her final months as governor, is pushing to get nine judges appointed to the bench, but that cannot happen without approval by the Democratic-controlled legislature.

Some lawmakers noted that the deal Thursday between the Rell administration and the judicial branch included only the legislature’s powerful judiciary committee. That agreement never included an agreement between the full Democratic legislative leadership – including Williams – and Rell.

Senate Republican leader John McKinney of Southport criticized Williams, saying there is no reason to hold up the approval of the judges in order to reach an overall budget deal.

“Today’s meeting, while good in many ways, was one step forward, two steps back,” McKinney said outside the governor’s office as Williams stood a few feet away.

The legislature, McKinney said, will be essentially handcuffed for the next two weeks if bills related to funding cannot be passed until the entire budget is resolved. Lawmakers, for example, could not vote on the University of Connecticut’s plans for improvements to the financially troubled health center in Farmington because that involves money, he said.

“Today’s action is a big step backwards in getting an overall budget deal,” McKinney said.

McKinney hopes an arrangement can be reached in the coming days to avoid a showdown where Williams was “holding those judges hostage to try to get a budget settlement, and that would be extraordinarily unfair to those nine individuals – and unprecedented.”

Hiring the new judges is necessary, according to Rell and Republicans, because there could be as many as 31 vacancies in the Superior Court by the end of the year.

Under the funding deal that was announced Thursday, three courthouses that would have closed will now remain open. Those are the juvenile courthouses in Norwalk and Willimantic, as well as the state Superior Court in Bristol. The law libraries in Bridgeport, Hartford, and Litchfield – which were slated to close on July 1 – would now remain open.

The law libraries in Milford, Norwich, and Willimantic, which were all closed on April1, will be reopened under the original deal.

When asked if the judge-nominees are being held hostage, Rell said, “I have heard that comment, but I will tell you, obviously, everything is working around the budget. … We’ll deal with it, and that includes judges.”

For the nominees, becoming a judge would be the crowning achievement of their legal lives.

“I’ll give the benefit to the majority party that they would not play games with people’s lives,” Rell said outside her office. “I don’t think anything is held up or should be held up because we don’t have a budget.”

The original deal, announced Thursday, between the Rell administration and the judicial branch was designed to prevent the threatened closings of three courthouses. The courts were never closed, but three law libraries were closed as of April 1 because of budget cuts as the state faces its worst fiscal crisis in decades.

As such, the deal would essentially limit the budget-cutting powers of the governor regarding the judicial budget.

“We would have to print it as it’s presented to us,” Rell said of the judicial budget.

In another development Friday, lawmakers discussed whether the proposed early retirement program would need approval from the state employee unions.

“The best course of action would be to have their blessings,” Rell said.

House Speaker Christopher Donovan, a longtime union supporter, said that having union support “would be the preferable way to do it.”

“With regard to the early retirement, it is my opinion that it can be done without the unions’ consent, if you will, because it is not a concession,” said House GOP leader Lawrence Cafero of Norwalk. “I’ve read some case law that would allow that to be offered to them without the unions’ check-off.”

On Thursday, Hayden Panettiere — the Heroes animal rights activist, who’s been blonde, brunette, and cropped to a bob in recent months — arrived at The Green Carpet and Home Tree Earth Day celebration at The JW Marriott in Los Angeles, accompanied by her boxer BF Vladimir Klitschko and sporting a new short mane of sunkissed tresses!

How Rihanna of her — but we kinda like it. What do you think? Hate it or Love it?

A beautiful island in Greece was the setting for an ugly pronouncement from Prime Minister George Papandreou today :   His country is broke and wants to activate a bail-out deal arranged with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund…to the tune of 60 billion dollars.

“The moment has come, since markets aren’t giving us time,” Papandreou said, “to make the decision, so that Greece can have support.”

The move came as fears rose that Greece would not make the deadline for refinancing its debt next month, that its money woes were bigger than feared, and that it could even face default.

It also came as public workers conducted more strikes effecting everything from ferries to hospitals as the Greek government implements  needed economy moves.

“The IMF will be demanding austerity measures that are politically unpopular,” Terry Roth of Dow Jones told Fox News, “we could see more public protest.”

Those protests have already gone violent and there could be more trouble.   The current bail-out package will only be enough, we are told, to get Greece through this year. There are more cuts to come.  

While there is resistance from Germany and others to helping Greece, the risk of not helping and seeing problems grow and spread, is even bigger.

“Everybody, despite some concerns and opposition,” economist Vassilis Vlastaklaris of Beta Securities is quoted as saying, “will be convinced there is no way around ‘solving’ Greece.”

As for why the US should care about and help rescue Greece, analysts tell us it’s already had an effect on our markets, it could have a “knock-on effect” for other European (and US-allied) countries, and might even cast a shadow over American state and municipality efforts to raise their own funds.

 It IS a “small world” after all.

This week, Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) financial regulatory reform bill moved to the floor of the Senate. And with that bill close to passage, Wall Street and lobbyists turned their attention to Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and the Senate Agriculture Committee’s proposal to regulate derivatives, a $450 trillion market and a major source of investment-banking profits.

Derivatives are essentially a type of financial insurance. They let two parties trade a contract derived from the price of some underlying security, currency or commodity. For instance, say you were a major airline. You might go to your bank to purchase a derivative locking in the price of gas, just in case a summertime oil shortage pushed up prices at the pump. In this case, you would be an “end user,” meaning you actually take delivery of the good. About 90 percent of the derivatives market involves financial firms trading derivatives like credit-default swaps back and forth for profit — and just 10 percent involves end users, non-financial firms using derivatives to mitigate risk.

Still, end users have become the unlikely center of the fight on derivatives legislation. With the reputation and credibility of big financial firms weak, companies in industries from agriculture to aviation came forward to say that this legislation might not only dampen big business’ profits but also hurt them. On Tuesday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business lobbies — via a group called the Coalition for Derivatives End-Users — took to the Hill for a flurry of meetings between corporate representatives of those worried end users and members of Congress.

“The legislation has the potential to take hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy through margin and capital requirements,” says Cady North, a lobbyist at Financial Executives International and a member of the Coalition for Derivatives End-Users’ steering committee. “We estimate that the bill could require up to $900 billion in capital expenditures.” Moreover, the Coalition argues, the bill will increase the cost of derivatives for end users. (The Coalition declined to provide a list of participating executives or their companies, or a list of the legislators or assistants with whom they met, and the Chamber of Commerce did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

But there’s just one problem. The Lincoln bill forces financial firms to put up collateral and use clearinghouses when they trade derivatives, but specifically exempts end users from those requirements. Banks are using their end-using clients as proxies to help kill off the legislation, lawyers and lobbyists contend. And for most end users, the opposition to the bill makes little sense.

Other lobbying organizations representing end-using white-collar companies said they had no issues with the legislation. For instance, Michael Griffith, a legislative analyst at the Association for Financial Professionals, which represents 16,000 of “the folks that manage your average companies’ money,” says he has no issues with it. “We’re pretty happy with what the Agriculture Committee approved,” he says. “It has a broad end user exemption on it, and we haven’t had many complaints from our members.”

“I know the banks are screaming about it,” says Brian Kalish, the director of AFP’s finance practice. “[My members are] getting panicky emails from their bankers. But [of] my members, no one’s panicking.”

But this week, some end users got more than panicky emails from their banks. Lawyers and lobbyists say that banks clearly misled companies about how the legislation might impact their business costs. In one case, a derivatives broker told a company that the legislation would force it to pay the same fees and put up the same collateral as financial firms, even where it explicitly would not.

“I’ve heard of a few folks who use derivatives [as end users who] called up their banks to talk about the legislation,” another lobbyist said. “Of course, their bankers told them to expect the whole market getting disrupted, price increases, collateral calls. Now, for most of them, they’re buying swaps to hedge. The legislation specifically exempts them.”

Legislators this week repeated the concern. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Dodd said he sees evidence of the bankers’ influence when end users lobby him. “The end users have been basically used by the major investment banks,” he told the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim on Tuesday.

Indeed, Lincoln took pains to ensure most end users are not impacted by the legislation. Some firms with “captive finance entities” — financial-products divisions within big, diversified companies, like Cargill — might not qualify as end users on some transactions, and might have to post collateral when they use derivatives to speculate rather than hedge. But they represent a small proportion of end users, who represent a small portion of derivatives users.

Furthermore, the legislation might eventually drive end-users’ costs down. Many derivatives experts — off of Wall Street, at least — believe that Lincoln’s reforms will increase competition and transparency, reducing prices. Robert Litan, a derivatives expert at the Brookings Institution, explains, “In a world of nontransparency, the world the derivatives market is in right now, the way I understand it, if you try to call four or five dealers, to shop around, none give you a real price. They might quote you an indicative price. If you commit, then they give you pricing information.”
The White House concurs. Jen Psaki, the deputy communications director, recently argued, “The unregulated OTC derivatives markets were at the center of the recent financial crisis. The Wall Street banks that dominate this market want to keep it unregulated so they can make money off regular firms.”

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The era of the electric vehicle is drawing nearer (albeit excruciatingly slowly) and with Volkswagen set to get its first EV into showrooms in 2013, its latest EV concept indicates how the world’s third largest auto maker is reading the market. Dubbed the Milano Taxi, the concept is a long overdue shot at getting a purpose-built electric cab into major cities. The 115 PS vehicle can reach 74 mph, travel 186 miles between charges and be recharged to 80 percent of capacity in just over an hour…
Continue Reading VW shows Milano Taxi Electric Vehicle Concept

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I regularly pull extra-hard on bus handles, quietly flexing my biceps (and triceps, if possible), sneaking in a small work-out on my way across town. Designer Junjie Zhang has dreamed up a way to generate power from doing just that. More »

An important part of first grade math is learning addition and subtraction facts. Students need to develop an understanding of the relationship between addition and subtraction as well as develop strategies for quick recall of facts. This post includes some of the best resources for helping students learn addition and subtraction facts to 18.

Books

Math Fables Too
by Greg Tang
Illustrated by Taia Morley
This book is math and science all in one.  Students will learn interesting facts about the behavior of animals such as bats, archerfish, and seagulls, they will develop their vocabulary and learn addition facts. Students are presented with a number of animals grouped in different ways.  For instance 4 herons are all together, then 3 use a feather and 1 uses a twig to lure fish to the surface of the water.  There are many excellent teaching opportunities in this book.

Math-terpieces
by Greg Tang
Illustrated by Greg Paprocki
In this book math is combined with art history. Each page focuses on a famous work of art by artists such as Degas, Warhol, and Pollock. Each page has groupings of objects related to the painting. Students are asked to add together the groups to get a certain sum. Students also get the opportunity to see how three or more groups can be used to get the desired sum. Tang tells students how many ways it is possible to get the sum and provides all the illustrated answers in the back of the book.

Mission: Addition
written and illustrated by Loreen Leedy
This is a very well illustrated and engaging book with stories that students will love. Leedy includes all the basic concepts of addition including definitions, place value, horizontal and vertical computation, adding groups of the same things and groups of different things, as well as incorporating word/story problems throughout.

Subtraction Action
written and illustrated by Loreen Leedy
The same characters from Mission: Addition appear in Leedy’s subtraction book. This is a great book for teaching the concept of subtraction. Leedy covers all the basics of subtraction including definitions and showing each step of a subtraction problem. She uses numbers, words, and pictures to tell subtraction stories.

Subtracting with Sebastian Pig and Friends On a Camping Trip
by Jill Anderson
illustrated by Amy Huntington
In this book some of the things that Sebastian and his friends need on their camping trip are disappearing. Each page spread tells of a missing item. “Where Are the Worms? There were seven worms. Now there is just one! How many worms are missing?” Each problem in the story is represented in the text by a word problem and also in Sebastian’s notebook where he writes the number sentence, draws a picture representation of the problem and then lists the addition facts from that family. Students who pay attention will see that it’s a group of mice who are taking the campers things.

Websites for Students

Addition Word Problems is a great activity for students to get experience solving story problems. If a student enters an incorrect answer they can click on the button “Explanation” and they will see a written explanation of the problem, a strategy for solving, and the number sentence for the correct answer. When they are finished playing they will get a summary of their time and how many problems they solved correctly.

Alien Addition is an arcade style game where students must use the arrow keys to move back and forth firing the laser “sum” at the spaceship with the corresponding number sentence. Students may select the range for facts as well as the speed of the game. At the end of each stage students get a summary of hits and misses (incorrect answers). Misses show the student’s answer and the correct number sentence. Minus Mission is the subtraction version of Alien Addition.

Sum Sense is a subtraction game that challenges students by giving them three number cards that they must arrange into the correct number sentence. They can choose the number of problems they want and a time from one to ten minutes to solve. If the student answers incorrectly they are told to try again.

Hidden Pictures can be played with either addition or subtraction facts. Students solve problems to uncover a photograph. The photos are of animals in their natural habitats and a short description is given for each one.  Addition Concentration is also a fun game on this website.

Funbrain includes several games that are great for practicing addition and subtraction facts. Line Jumper gives students the visual of a number line for solving addition and subtraction problems between 1-20.  Students can play Tic Tac Toe against the computer with addition or subtraction facts. In Math Baseball students solve addition or subtraction problems to move around the bases and score runs. A one or two player version is available.

Additional Resources for Teachers

Mathwire.com is a great source for addition and subtraction classroom games and templates you can use for assessment or as center activities. The site also includes good ideas and resources for incorporating writing in math.

The NCTM Illuminations site has a large collection of lesson plans for teaching addition and subtraction. Each lesson in the list is actually a unit plan that contains up to five related lessons.

UEN.org provides a great resource for games and centers that will help students practice their addition and subtraction facts. Templates in pdf form are included for all the games as well as background information, instructional procedures, assessment plans, and extension ideas.

There are some good short video clips on addition and subtraction that you could incorporate into lessons or use at listening stations. Many use music and interesting visuals and could be helpful for students who are having difficulty remembering certain facts. Here are a few good videos that I have found: Adding and Subtracting Song, Adding 9 + 1, Doubles Doubles, and Five Bees, which also counts in Spanish.

Posted by Michelle Manchir at 12:38 p.m.



SPRINGFIELD — Red-light camera tickets would be slightly harder to get and cheaper to appeal under legislation the Illinois House sent to Gov. Pat Quinn today.



Critics say the red-light reform plan falls short of the sweeping overhaul needed, but that didn’t prevent the House from voting 80-27-1 to approve it.



The legislation would ban the city and suburbs from tacking on an extra fee to the standard $100 fine if a ticket is appealed, a common practice which deters many motorists from fighting the charges.

The measure also would give drivers more wiggle room to creep up to the edge of an intersection before stopping. A complete stop would still be required before making a right turn on red, but drivers could come to a halt after the painted stop line without getting a ticket as long as pedestrians were not nearby. Drivers awaiting a green light to head straight into an intersection also could make stops past the stop line without being nabbed by a camera.

Statistics show that the most dangerous red-light-running infractions involve drivers who barrel straight into an intersection and become involved in broadside collisions. But most tickets issued through cameras involve drivers who fail to come to a complete stop while making a right turn on red — a violation that experts say rarely is dangerous.



Rolling right turns would still be outlawed under the measure, but drivers would no longer be required to make their stop at a white line several feet shy of the intersection.



Other changes to the state red-light camera law that are included in the plan codified what is already common practice. One provision mandates that yellow lights on traffic signals be timed to comply with broad guidelines set by state transportation officials, a standard that every community with cameras already claims to meet.



Another provision requires that any ticketed vehicle owner be able to access video of the alleged misdeed on the Internet. That is a courtesy already widely offered by camera vendors.



In the Senate, the measure was sponsored by Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago, and hammered out in a closed-door meeting last month with other lawmakers and lobbyists for Redflex and Redspeed, vendors hired to operate camera systems for Chicago and many suburbs.

El primer coche deportivo exótico en la línea de Ferrari o Lamborghini tenía que llegar de un momento a otro, en un mercado que con el correr del tiempo se ha convertido en uno de los más importantes del mundo. Y parece que la primera que ha dirigido su interés hacia los deportivos, ha sido una ignota firma de diseño llamada CH auto, con el Aculein, una especie de Ferrari made in China.

Siguiendo con la tradición de clonar todo lo que provenga de occidente, el Aculein es la carta de presentación de CH Auto un estudio de diseño bastante considerable, si tenemos en cuenta que tiene en su plantilla a más de 300 personas y cuyo jefe de diseño, un tal Wang Bisen, ideó este coche inspirado en un Ferrari 599 GTO.

La idea de CH Auto parece que es llamar la atención del mundo del diseño para atraer inversionistas y así atraer a posibles clientes de otras marcas. Entre su palmarés figura haber trabajado antes con otras marcas chinas, como Geely, GAW y BAW.

¿Y qué podemos esperar del Aculein? Es un deportivo con motorización de BMW. Usa el motor V8 4.8 produciendo 367 caballos y el cambio del BMW Serie 6. CH Auto ha dado algunas especificaciones de prestaciones bastante respetables: de 0 a 100 km/h acelera en 5.2 segundos, con una máxima de 267 km/h. Claro que son casi 100 km/h menos de velocidad máxima con respecto a todo un Ferrari 599, pero es un buen comienzo para hacerse notar en el mercado.

Vía | Autocar

If there’s any lesson to be learned from this story it’s this: When you decide to take a bunch of clothes into a store’s changing room with the intention of voiding your bladder all over them, do not leave your wallet behind.

That’s what police in Cape Coral, FL, allege a 22-year-old woman did at her local Walmart.

According to authorities, employees saw the suspect take $163 worth of clothing from the racks into the changing room, where she apparently decided to test their urine absorption capacity.

She made it easy work for the police to find her by leaving her wallet, complete with driver’s license, in the room with the pee-drenched pile of clothes.

The woman has been charged with criminal mischief and property damage and has been released on $500 bail.

We’re going to assume that the clothes were not immediately put back on the sales floor.

Police arrest woman suspected of urinating on clothes at Cape Coral Walmart [News-Press.com]

Thanks to Ron for the tip!

[JURIST] The International Whaling Commission (IWC) unveiled a draft proposal Thursday that would make limited commercial whaling legal for the first time in 25 years. The proposal reflects a compromise for the countries that engage in whaling despite international law against it. Japan, Norway, and Iceland would be allowed to continue under strict quotas meant to reduce whaling to sustainable levels over time. Japan, which defends its illegal whaling by claiming an exemption for scientific purposes, will have its self-imposed quota for minke whales reduced from 935 to 400 for the 2010 season and down to 200 by 2015. The hunting of humpback whales in the Southern Hemisphere is still prohibited, but the proposal allows for a limited number in the North Atlantic. The proposal addresses the fact that the overall ban on whaling has been ineffective:
The status quo is not an option for an effective multilateral organisation. To overcome the present impasse, the IWC has in recent years recognised the need to create a non-confrontational environment within which issues of fundamental difference amongst members can be discussed with a view to their resolution. Reconciliation of differences in views about whales and whaling will strengthen actions related to the common goal of maintaining healthy whale populations and maximizing the likelihood of the recovery of depleted populations.Despite this goal, the IWC has received criticism from the anti-whaling group Greenpeace. The IWC will discuss the proposal during its June meeting in Morocco.Whaling is regulated by the 1946 Whaling Convention, and commercial whaling was outright banned in 1986 by the IWC. The Japanese whalers defend their whaling as scientific research because they collect data on the whale’s age, diet, and birthing rate, before packaging and selling the meat. The Japanese mostly hunt for minke and finback whales, but have begun to hunt humpback whales, which have reached sustainable levels since being placed on the endangered species list in 1963. Earlier this month, Japanese authorities indicted New Zealand anti-whaling activist, Pete Bethune, with five criminal charges in connection with boarding a Japanese whaling vessel as part of an anti-whaling protest in the antarctic seas.