How a ‘Super PAC’ Can Give $1.2 Million to McAuliffe

The Democratic Governors Association’s “super PAC” has given $1.2 million to the party’s nominee for governor of Virginia, one of the larger single political donations in recent history.

Because the candidate, Terry McAuliffe, is running for a state office, federal restrictions that prevent super PACs from contributing directly to Congressional or presidential campaigns do not apply. Virginia is also one of the few states that do not limit contributions to candidates for state office.

The super PAC, DGA Action, reported the donation on Tuesday in a filing to the Federal Election Commission.

Mr. McAuliffe’s Republican opponent, Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, has received several large individual donations and at least $5.6 million from the Republican Governors Association â€" two individual gifts of $1 million and the rest in smaller increments of in-kind donations like television commercials.

Biden’s Son to Be Released From Houston Hospital

WASHINGTON â€" Beau Biden, the son of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., is scheduled to be released from a Houston hospital on Thursday after undergoing unspecified tests, according to a statement from the vice president’s office.

The younger Mr. Biden, who is the attorney general of Delaware, suffered “an episode of disorientation and weakness” while on vacation last week, according to the White House, and was admitted to an undisclosed hospital in Houston on Monday evening.

“He is in great shape and is going to be discharged tomorrow,” the vice president and his wife, Jill Biden, said in their statement. “He will follow up with his local physicians in the coming weeks.”

A separate statement from the Delaware attorney general’s office said that Mr. Biden would be returning to Delaware to discuss his department’s efforts to combat violent crime.

The vice president is expected to attend an education-themed event with President Obama in Mr. Biden’s hometown of Scranton, Pa., on Friday, White House officials said.

App Smart: Learning to Read, With the Help of a Tablet

Learning to Read, With the Help of a Tablet

Learn With Homer, a free iPad app.

I learned long ago that the iPad’s game and video apps cast a magical spell over my children, but this summer I’ve also been pleased by how much they have learned while using their tablets. This is important, as my 4-year-old is going to “real” school for the first time. His reading skills, in particular, have been helped by some great apps. These have helped him move from knowing shapes and sounds of letters to actually reading words.

Booksy, a free app for iOS and Android.

Montessori Crosswords, $3 on iOS.

One of the most comprehensive apps for teaching reading is a free iPad app called Learn With Homer (not the Greek one or Mr. Simpson, you’ll be pleased to hear). It’s a set of lessons and games presented with bright cartoon graphics and amusing sounds.

Using animations and spoken guidance, the app leads children to sound letters that appear on the screen and shows how letters make words, using examples like “alligator” and “ant.” The app’s learning sections are interspersed with game sections, and there is a listening section where children read and hear stories. Completing a lesson or story is rewarded with the chance to draw something on the screen or to record an answer to a question about the story. The app’s best feature is that it keeps these pictures and recordings, because it is fun to look back on them.

The app’s interface feels child-friendly and is easy to use thanks to on-screen cues and spoken instructions. Children could most likely use it on their own â€" though an adult may need to lend a hand with some controls, like the drawing interface. The app also has great attention to detail. For example, in the section that reinforces learning letter sounds there is a convincing animation of a child mouthing the sounds on the screen.

My main problems with Learn With Homer are that it moves too slowly in places and that younger children may lose interest. Buying extra lessons via in-app purchases could also be expensive, since they each cost $2 or more.

For a simpler reading app, the free Kids Reading (Preschool) app on Android is a great option. The app’s first section helps children learn to blend letter sounds into full words, through a cute game with a tortoise. The game animates the tortoise walking along slowly, sounding out each letter in a short word as he moves. The child can click on sneakers to make him move faster, which then sounds the word faster, or click on a skateboard to sound the word in real time.

A “try reading” section lets children practice reading and saying short words with a simple matching game. And the “make words” option has the child spotting the right-sounding letter to complete a word puzzle. This app has clear sounds, and many children will love its simplicity. But for more words you do need to pay $3 for the full Kids Learn To Read version.

Montessori Crosswords, $3 on iOS, is more sophisticated. This app’s main feature is a game in which children drag letters from an alphabet list onto a very simple crossword grid. Each word on the grid is accompanied by a picture hint. Tapping on this makes the app say the word aloud. Depending on the settings, words can be made of fewer or, if you choose, more sounds, which makes the puzzles more challenging. To keep children interested, getting words right delivers an interactive graphic, like one of shooting stars, that reacts to screen touches.

Compared with its peers, this app has a narrow range of activities, which may limit how long it remains useful. It also probably works best under adult supervision â€" particularly since the app’s main menu is a little confusing.

For children who have learned to recognize words by themselves, and yet would benefit from guided reading experiences, there’s Booksy. This free app, for iOS and Android, is best thought of as a traditional high-quality children’s reading book with added digital powers. For example, as well as displaying a page of text and well-drawn images, it reads the text aloud. Tapping on any word â€" even in the labels, for example in a drawing of a whale â€" will make the app say the word clearly. The app can also record a child reading aloud automatically, then e-mail the audio files directly to you so you can keep track of progress. This feature may seem a little creepy, but you can turn it off.

Booksy comes with two free books, and more are available through in-app purchases. There are about 30 titles for around $1 each. Each book has a different reading difficulty level, and many of them are also available in Spanish. You can lock the bookstore on iOS to prevent children from getting in, but smarter children may spot the parental controls and unlock it again. On Android there is a better “adult question” lock, but on this platform some of the app’s screen space is, unfortunately, taken up with navigation buttons.

Remember, your enthusiasm for reading can be an important example for your children â€" so why not play with these apps alongside them?

Quick Call

Dots is a simple game that has already had a lot of success on the iPhone â€" to play it is as easy as connecting the dots, yet it’s fiendishly addictive. Now it’s on Android, and free.

State of the Art: Android vs. Siri: The Voice-Recognition Sequel

Android vs. Siri: The Voice-Recognition Sequel

90 Seconds With Pogue: Speech Smackdown: The Times’s David Pogue pits Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS against each other to see which voice recognition system is better.

“Your review was the dumbest thing I’ve ever read. It strains me to avoid profanity in describing how stupid you sound.”

Samsung's Galaxy S4, left, and a person using Siri, right, on an iPhone.

That’s the kind of e-mail that brightened my day after I reviewed Google’s Moto X phone two weeks ago.

My correspondents seemed especially unhappy with one sentence in that review: “Android’s voice commands are still no match for Siri.”

Man, I really was stupid. Who’d be dumb enough to take sides in a religious war? I’d have been better off writing, “Conservatives are better-looking than liberals” or “Pro-life people are worse drivers than pro-choice.”

But the superiority of cellphone speech-recognition technology is not an idle question. Once touch screens became the future of phones, voice recognition became desperately important. Without physical keys or buttons, entering text and manipulating software controls are fussy, multistep procedures.

So I’ve just spent two weeks immersed in voice recognition. I carried an iPhone and a phone running Google’s Android operating system with me everywhere. I spoke to both phones simultaneously. I wanted to get to know the differences, the strengths, the weaknesses.

When people talk about speech recognition, they mean, and often confuse, three different functions. There’s dictation, where the phone converts speech to text; commands, where you operate the phone by talking; and Internet information searches. There are vast differences among the successes of the three.

Dictation, for example, is still fairly poor on both systems. Both Android phones and Siri, the iPhone’s speech feature, make many transcription errors. When you hear people bashing cellphone transcription, declaring, “I gave up on it,” they’re usually referring to dictation.

That’s forgivable, but come on. You’re asking your phone to understand varying accents at varying distances from its microphone, in rooms with varying background noise. It’s a wonder this feature works at all.

The latest Android version doesn’t require an Internet connection to do basic dictation. And in Android, the words appear on the screen as you utter them; Siri doesn’t transcribe until you stop talking.

On the other hand, Siri understands formatting controls like “capital,” “all caps” and “no space,” as well as all kinds of punctuation â€" “colon,” “dash,” “asterisk,” “ellipsis” and so on. Android understands only the basic symbols, like “period,” “comma” and “exclamation point.”

The second category, phone-control commands, is far more successful for far more people. This is when you say: “Call Mom,” “Text Emily,” “Wake me at 7:30,” “Play some Billy Joel,” “Remind me to feed the cat when I get home,” and so on.

Controlling your phone without touching it is important for safety, of course. If you must interact with your phone while driving, speaking to it certainly seems safer than looking at it.

But don’t forget the convenience factor. It’s much faster to say, “Open Angry Birds” than to flip through home screens full of icons. And “Set my alarm for 8 a.m.” is about 375 finger-taps quicker than using the clock app.

Here, Siri has the edge. As you’re driving along, for example, and you hear the incoming message sound, you can say, “Read my new messages,” and Siri reads them aloud. It even invites you to dictate a reply, without ever taking your eyes off the road. Android can’t do that.

Both systems can tap into some of the phone’s own apps. They recognize commands like “Make a meeting with Bob Barnett Thursday at noon” (a calendar interaction), “Make a note to pay back Harold” (notes), “Send an e-mail to Danny Cooper” (mail) and “What’s Steve Alper’s home address?” (contacts).

Android blows away iOS, though, in Web searches. Both kinds of phones do an amazing job fetching weather updates (“What will the weather in Detroit be this weekend?”), times (“What time is it in Belgium?”), stock prices, sports information (“When’s the next Cowboys game?”), conversions (“How many dollars in 32 euros?”), calculations (“How many days until Valentine’s Day?”) and every kind of Web-search query (“How many calories are in a Hershey bar?”, “When is the next solar eclipse?”, “How do you spell schadenfreude?”, “Show me pictures of a 1985 Corvette,” and so on).

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

Senior House Democrat Sues I.R.S. Over Tax Exemptions

WASHINGTON â€" Representative Chris Van Hollen filed suit in Federal District Court on Wednesday to force the Internal Revenue Service to block tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations from engaging in any overt political activity.

The suit, joined by the campaign watchdog groups Democracy 21, Public Citizen and the Campaign Legal Center, signaled that forces for increased campaign finance regulation may be regaining their footing after the controversy over the I.R.S.’s targeting of political groups had put them on the defensive for months.

But the battleground appears to be shifting from Congress to the courts.

For decades, the I.R.S. has struggled with defining the meaning of “social welfare” when determining whether a group should be eligible for tax-exempt 501(c)(4) status. The government has generally said a group’s “primary” purpose should be social welfare, allowing a significant amount of its work â€" roughly 49 percent â€" to be partisan politics. And those groups do not have to publicly disclose their donors.

With the Supreme Court’s deregulation of campaign finance laws, the issue has become more controversial. In 2012, 501(c)(4) groups pumped $256 million into the presidential campaign cycle, triple the amount spent in the 2008 cycle and 33 times the $7.6 million they spent in 2004.

The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and citing the tax law that created such tax exemptions, says the I.R.S. should rule that the exemptions should go only to groups exclusively engaged in social welfare work. That would prohibit any tax-exempt activity aimed at electing or defeating specific political candidates.

Many Democrats have sought legislative remedies to force more disclosure amid the flood of money to outside political groups. But the scandal over the I.R.S.’s targeting of political groups â€" conservative and liberal â€" for extra scrutiny has diminished the already low prospects of any such legislation.

Advocates of the lawsuit said the case law was clear. Congress never intended a 501(c)(4) to be buying attack ads aimed at candidates. And they said Republicans should back the effort if they really believe the I.R.S. should not be trying to determine the lawful balance between “social welfare” and political activities.

“If you agree the I.R.S. should not be in the business of looking into the activity of every organization to determine how much is political versus social welfare, then you should welcome this,” said Mr. Van Hollen, a senior House Democrat from Maryland.

By and large, Republicans have reached a similar conclusion but with an opposite remedy. The I.R.S., they say, should simply leave the groups alone and not infringe on their activities at all.