Meet Deborah Linton, Executive Director, The Arc of Florida. With chapters from the Panhandle to South Florida and on the west and east coasts, The Arc of Florida advocates for people with disabilities across the state.
Is it a printing error? A pixilated maze? One of those puzzles where you have to cross your eyes to see the hidden image? Two-dimensional matrix bar codes are expanding into the mainstream. You can find them in magazine and newspaper ads and in stores including Best Buy, Lowe's, Gap and Macy's. They're even showing up on television: Jimmy Fallon recently flashed a black and white code on his Late Night show to plug a featured band. The codes are designed to tell smartphones to do something: open a website, play a video, show a map, add a contact, text a friend. But in order to make them work, you need the right code-scanning app. These codes have been widely used in Japan for several years, but U.S. companies are just beginning to test them. Today, the Miami area gets its first billboard featuring a QR code. The Florida Grand Opera's code takes smartphone users to a website for buying tickets to the show. Read more from the Miami Herald and the Digital Dish blog.
Starting today, those dancing Statues of Liberty you see as part of a tax-service chain's publicity campaign will be taking off their green smocks and foam crowns and calling it a season. It hasn't been bad work, several of them said, with pay of up to $10 an hour for dressing up like Lady Liberty and waving and dancing to get customers to consider having their taxes prepared at Liberty Tax Service. But after midnight Monday, the demand evaporated, so the supply will follow suit. Read more from Florida Today.