DNC TO SEAT FLORIDA & MICHIGAN DELEGATES

The Democratic National Committee has agreed to seat all of the Florida delegates at the upcoming National Convetion. The delegates will each be allowed to cast 1/2 vote.

Florida has 185 pledged delegates and 26 super-delegates.

A similar agreement was also worked out for Michigans delegates. Michigan has 128 pledged delegates and 29 super-delegates.

Both states were stripped of the their delegates' voting rights for hold early primaries without the party's permission.

Obama leads Clinton in total delegate count - 2,070 to 1,915.

2,118 delegates are needed to win.

Jesus Image Appears In Tree At Night

from WKMG Orlando TV 6

An apparent image of Jesus that appears and then vanishes in the bark of a tree has grabbed the attention of a Central Florida neighborhood. The mysterious image in the trunk of a tree only appears after dark at Joe Lewis' home.

Lewis said the image appears every night and then vanishes. The face forms near a knot in the tree. The tree can be seen from the street in Lewis' neighborhood.

Cell Phone Caller ID Leads To Drug Bust

from The Capitol (Baltimore, MD)

An Annapolis man was arrested for drug possession after he called another man who was being arrested. It started out as a simple traffic stop. At about 10:30 p.m., an officer on patrol pulled over a car for failing to stop at the red light.

The driver was identified and told police he did not have his license with him, but a check through MVA records showed that his license was suspended. While police were arresting him, his cell phone rang, and the caller ID said it was "Zack the Weed Man" calling.

Officers asked him if he was planning to meet Zack to buy drugs and he told them no. One officer called "Zack the Weed Man" back and confirmed the meeting place at the gas station near his Morris Street home.

The officer took the man with him and went to the gas station, where they found 19-year-old Zach who told police he had about 3 grams of marijuana in his pocket and that he was planning to smoke it. Both men where arrested and subsequently charged.

It's the only time the police can think of that caller ID has led directly to an arrest. But sometimes someone calling an arrested person leads to another arrest.

Billboards With Spy Cams

from The New York Times

Advertising is often measured successful by being able to deterime how many people see a particular advertisement, when they see it, who they are. All of that is easy on the Internet, and getting easier in television and print.

Billboards are a different story. For the most part, they are still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.

Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.

The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.

Over Memorial Day weekend, one of these cameras was installed on a billboard on Eighth Avenue near Columbus Circle in Manhattan that was playing a trailer for “The Andromeda Strain,” a mini-series on the cable channel A&E.

Organized privacy groups agree, though so far the practice of monitoring billboards is too new and minimal to have drawn much opposition. But the placement of surreptitious cameras in public places has been a flashpoint in London, where cameras are used to look for terrorists, as well as in Lower Manhattan, where there is a similar initiative. Although surveillance cameras have become commonplace in banks, stores and office buildings, their presence takes on a different meaning when they are meant to sell products rather than fight crime. So while the billboard technology may solve a problem for advertisers, it may also stumble over issues of public acceptance.