US Agriculture Department Opposes Food Stamp Eligibility for Taco Bell, KFC

No fair! You can buy Cheetos and 'nutritionally-based products' with food stamps in the supermarket but you cant get a burrito or a bucket of wings?

Talk about repressing civil liberties and personal rights...JL

Mark Miller reports in Brand Channel:

Pretty much everybody is hurting for cash these days. And that has led to the U.S. government’s food-stamp program having a fresh influx of members.

In August, a new record was set of participants when it reached 45.8 million Americans, an increase of 8.1 percent form 2010. Way to go, America! In 2010, the program “distributed a record $64.4 billion,” according to Bloomberg. So there are plenty who’d like a piece of that pie

Social Networks Matter: Friends Increase the Size of Your Brain

Gray matter increases with social network size. In fact, there is also a correlation between the size of one's network and one's social dominance in the group(this assumes all those reading this are primates, as were the subjects of the study in question).

Now, this study was conducted with monkeys, not humans. But humans are the most social of the primates. The implications for online social networks are in the realm of informed conjecture at this point. But the signs are leading us you-know-where. So, for those of you who sniff dismissively at anyone whose Facebook or LinkedIn contact lists run to the thousands, snark no more. Those grasping show-offs may be your social, intellectual and leadership superiors. We know this is painful, but you just need to apply yourself to adding names. You will clearly have plenty of company. JL

Eric Johnson reports in Scientific American:

New research confirms that social complexity enriches cognitive growth. Could having more Facebook friends actually make you smarter?

Let’s face it, as a species we’re obsessed with ourselves. The vast majority of us spend our days at work or school where a considerable amount of time is taken up not discussing the important issues of the day, but rather the juicy details of one another’s personal lives. Then we go home only to sign on to social network services like Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ and continue where we left off. In this respect we’re fairly typical primates.

Why Not Break Up Citigroup?

This will be, first and foremost, a legal battle.

The economics are clear; the US government can not manage the melt-down of a too-big-to-fail bank. The arguments around doing so are emotional and political. Ideological conflict will lead to stasis which will lead to the courts.

The battle will be fought along familiar lines: federal and state authority to take action. The larger question of what makes sense economically will subsumed in the political debate. Scale is a benefit in a global economy. But it can also be a threat if the web of regulations strung around it permit risk without accountability and diffusion of responsibility.

The crisis in Europe has focused attention on the still unresolved issues in the US. The evidence leads one to suspect that the battle will soon be joined. JL

Simon Johnson comments in the Economix blog:

Earlier this week, Richard Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, captured the growing political mood with regard to very large banks, observing, “I believe that too-big-to-fail banks are too dangerous to permit.”

Market forces don’t work with the biggest banks at their current sizes, because they have great political power and receive almost unlimited, implicit subsidies in the form of protection against downside risks — particularly in times like these, with Europe’s financial situation looking precarious.

'If It Doesnt Spread, It's Dead:' How Transmedia Storytelling is Changing Advertising

Two words: convergence and alignment. Those are the keys to building a strategy that optimizes impact across multiple channels and platforms. Which is consultant-speak for saying if brands want to expand their audience in order to increase sales - all while maximizing profits - the best way to do it is by employing every outlet they can get their hands on.

Convergence means that disparate channels such as tv, the internet, games and comics recognize the value they each bring to the other's initiatives. Alignment means that in order to capture that value brands have to consider them as part of a whole, not as separate, disconnected entities. However, to make this work, taking the specific idiosyncracies of each into account is important. Simply importing tv onto mobile without rethinking the context (light, movement, time, sound) makes for a less satisfying - and probably less profitable - customer experience.

As a creative effort, this should be stimulating and enjoyable. But it does require that all the kids in the business sandbox play nicely together. Which is exactly why some will succeed and some will not. JL

Lisa Hsia comments in Mashable:

Until now, media companies have focused on getting audiences to watch shows “live” via a TV set, where the bulk of advertising dollars are.

But transmedia storytelling — which is defined as telling a story that extends across multiple media platforms (for television, it’s going beyond the on-air show) — has the ability to upend that. “Transmedia” is not a new concept. Star Wars, The Matrix, Dr. Who and Pokeman all expanded beyond their core franchise decades ago — to games, books and alternative realities.

Checked Out: Food-borne Illnesses Traced Through Grocery Loyalty Cards

Knowledge is power. But concerns about privacy and the uses of personal information continue to arise.

As a society we appear to have largely made peace with the tradeoff between convenience and the inevitable violations that arise from misuse. It is, in some sense, the personal price of doing business in a digital era.

But recent examples of using information for which it was not originally intended also demonstrate the value derived from innovative applications of that data.

In this case, supermarket customers potentially impacted by salmonella outbreaks have been traced through their frequent buyer cards and warned of the danger.

Businesses and consumers understand that there are mutual benefits to rewarding loyalty. Most of focused on points or a few cents off purchased items. That health and safety may also reside in these exchanges of information for services is a new concept and one that an industries increasingly concerned about contagion will now explore more scientifically. JL

Elizabeth Weise reports in USA Today:

An outbreak of salmonella in five Eastern states has sickened 42 people so far this year, with two hospitalizations. Dozens more might have been struck down were it not for a strikingly successful new tool used by public health officials to quickly figure out what was making all those people sick: the lowly shopper-loyalty card.

How Inequality Hurts the Economy

For an issue on which plenty of data are available, the debate about inequality has been largely emotional.

One side refuses to acknowledge whether or not there is inequality and if there is, whether it is harmful or not. And that lays the groundwork before one even gets to the numbers.

A wealth of information supports the contention that there is a wealth gap. The length or breadth may be open to discussion but the fact of its existence is now well established. Whether it is detrimental and if so, how, is another matter. But again, the data are becoming more compelling. The essence is that in a consumer driven economy like that of the US and most of Europe, large wealth gaps lead to shorter expansions and slower recoveries. In other words, without the distributed purchasing power of a substanial middle class, the economy is weaker than it might otherwise be. And like a sickly child, more susceptible to contagions, in this case, like financial crises.

The question may be moral to many. But if sensible policies are not designed to address it, the data strongly suggest that the issue will soon become tangibly financial. JL

David Lynch reports in Business Week:

The public discussion about the widening gap between rich and poor hasn’t been this loud since the Great Depression. Warren Buffett has condemned the disparity, Occupy Wall Street has inveighed against it, President Barack Obama cites it to justify higher taxes on the wealthy.

Much of the debate, though, has focused on inequality’s moral dimension. Somehow it just doesn’t seem right that so many Americans struggle while a handful prospers. What many are missing is the actual impact rising inequality is having on the U.S. economy. Hint: It isn’t good

Ideas vs Experts: Are Influentials Done?

Funny thing about all the latest popular movements: Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, the Arab Spring(s); none of them have famous or even recognizable leaders.

We are used to iconography: Martin Luther King, Ayatollah Khomeini, Chairman Mao. All were the faces of change in different cultures and different eras. As a society we picked up on that trend and have created new leaders to sell whatever needs selling: Beyonce, Beckham, Beiber, even Bachmann (for the politically inclined). We have constructed a scrum of 'influentials,' those who are believed to sway the opinions of multitudes so that if we can just solicit a nod of approval from them, then products, services and ideologies will fly off the figurative shelves.

But another funny thing happened on the digital interface between hype and reality: all that information being processed into knowledge and sometimes, heaven forbid, wisdom, has enabled a growing self-confidence that may have undercut the power of influence just as the virtual megaphone got bigger. As movements, brands and trends grow, they are increasingly doing so because the customer believes, not because the leaders points the way forward. The net, and by extension the social media, have enabled the consumers. And if those who are pitching - whatever it may be - handle this knowledge with respect, intelligence and care, they may find greater prosperity than they ever imagined. JL

Greg Satell comments in Digital Tonto:

In the ancient world, primitive people knelt at altars and prayed to imaginary Gods for good fortune, a bountiful harvest, a pox on an enemy’s house, victory in battle or whatever. This was a matter of faith, not fact. They simply believed.

In our modern world, marketers pray to their own imaginary Gods. They call them “Influentials,” anonymous people with godlike influence, who are about as real as the ones on Olympus or Valhalla.

Historic Decline: Number of US Middle Class Neighborhoods Shrank 20% Since 1970

The power of numbers is that they force you to deal with them. You may disagree, you may charge that they are false, but you can not ignore them.

Polliticians, economists and historians have been arguing for some time that the US middle class is shrinking. There was visual evidence of decline in the broken homes of once handsome neighborhoods in cities as disparate as Detroit, New Orleans and Philadelphia. There was even evidence to suggest changes in family income and buying patterns. But a new report uses census data to demonstrate that the number of neighborhoods deemed middle class has shrunk by as much as 20% over the past 40 years. This time period is roughly co-terminous with the period in which American manufacturing employment began to decline in the face of increased global competition both from reawakened European economies recovering from the devastataion of WWII and from newly emboldened economies in what was once called the Third World.

The implications are serious. History has demonstrated that a strong middle class acts as the heart and lungs of a society. It pumps life into an economy and assures its vitality through increased purchasing power that stimulate growing markets for higher margin goods. It also supports the educational attainments that lead to critical innovations for the future.

The data suggest an hour-glass effect: expanding poor and wealthy neighborhoods reflective of the vast growth in numbers at the bottom and vast growth in wealth at the top. History suggests that the outcome of such trend lines is rarely beneficial. JL

Sabrina Tavernese reports in the New York Times:

The portion of American families living in middle-income neighborhoods has declined significantly since 1970, according to a new study, as rising income inequality left a growing share of families in neighborhoods that are mostly low-income or mostly affluent.

The study, conducted by Stanford University and released by the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University, uses census data to examine family income at the neighborhood level in the country’s 117 biggest metropolitan areas.

America's Brain Drain: Best and Brightest College Grads Head to Wall Street

For the past few years, 70% of Harvard grads have taken jobs on Wall Street. And the other 30% probably thought about it.

Critics of the US economy decry the process of 'financialization' in which exotic innovations created by engineers and physicists, but poorly understood by even their inventors, caused much of the financial crisis carnage. But the most pernicious effect of the stampede to Wall Street pay packages has been to turn potential entrepreneurs, scientists and teachers into 'wealth managers' whose job is to repackage assets created by their forebears and sell them to the highest bidder.

Previous civilizations saw similar phenomena as they peaked: the British, the Chinese and the French. The latter referred to this as the 'rentier' economy. Little was actually built during that period, but everything was for sale or rent by brokers living off the output of their more productive predecessors.

As the US and Europe contemplate the detritus of their over-leveraged economies, much anguished hand-wringing has been devoted to identifying and nurturing the magic elixir that will reignite growth. Reexamining employment incentives and alternatives for talented college grads might be a useful place to start. JL

Amanda Terkel reports in the Huffington Post:

For employers in need of fresh talent, there are few better places to go than the Stanford University career center, where intelligent, over-achieving, creative and ambitious students stop by on their way toward picking up a degree or three.

Access to these top recruits is extremely valuable, and Stanford, like many other top-tier colleges, sells it to the highest bidder.

Is Product Still the Most Tangible Key to Success in an Increasingly Intangible Economy?

Factories have become clothing boutiques. Workers have become symbolic analysts. The assembly line has been replaced by the cubicle. And the wealth of nations is measured in bytes not gold-weight.

But we will still pay up for a well-designed product. The question is whether, in a world lived largely online, product has eclipsed price, promotion and place as the primary driver of value. Apple's stable of i-products is the exemplar, but Ikea, BMW and Samsung - among others - also thrive. Has our increasingly ethereal existence sparked a yearning for tangible value? JL

Jens Skibsted and Rasmus Hansen comment in Fast Company:

Recently, we argued for for a 1P (for Product), not 4P, approach to marketing.

We are saying that in an increasingly transparent, digitally empowered economy, where everyone potentially can know everything, companies can no longer use the other three P's (Price, Promotion, and Place) to gain a long-term competitive advantage.

Well-Intentioned or Counterproductive? The Inefficiency Debate About Locavore Food

America loves its local farmers' markets.

An increasingly common staple of urban and suburban weekends, the offerings of fresh produce and home-made products attracts a frequently affluent clientele bent on eating better and feeling they are doing something positive for the environment just by being there.

In much of Europe and many other parts of the world, such markets are food shopping as it has always been known. In the US, it is a quaint throwback, now attracting some serious attention. And that may a problem.

The question is not whether organic or natural products are better. It is a question of scale. Supermarket chains are investing heavily in organic products, some even opening all-organic stores. They are also beginning to make such products available in their mainstream locations so that customers of all economic and demographic segments have access.

But there is a belief that smaller farms are inherently superior. The issue raised by concerned economists is that to be successful they must also be more expensive - and the cumulative impact of their exclusionary pricing and fuel usage could offset the environmental benefits.

Those arguments may well be true. But they studiously ignore some of the reasoning behind the support for the locavore movement. And as we have learned over the past few decades, the behavioral may well trump the statistical. Adherents will argue that the point is not purely economic; that creating a sense of community, of support for a more healthful lifestyle is important, too. That, particularly as the population ages, it will make demands that could be perceived to be economically irrational but personally satisfying.

The inefficiency arguments appear well-grounded and their warnings must be heeded. But it would also be imprudent to ignore the locavore supporters. As a society we have learned to mistrust purely data-driven arguments. The financial crisis and recession have taught us that the system can be gamed. Watchful citizens are not sure but that some inefficiencies might be worth the additional burdens they impose, especially when compared with the trade-offs demanded as an alternative. JL

Steve Sexton comments in Freakonomics:

Two members of Congress earlier this month introduced legislation advancing a food reform movement promising to help resolve the great environmental and nutritional problems of the early 21st century. The intent is to remake the agricultural landscape to look more like it did decades ago.

But unless the most basic laws of economics cease to hold, the smallholder farming future envisioned by the local farming movement could jeopardize natural habitat and climate change mitigation efforts, while also endangering a tenuous and temporary victory in the battle against human hunger.

Ethics vs Economics? Retailers Push Thanksgiving Holiday Openings

OK, is this getting maybe just a little out of hand?

Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. It signals the start of the holiday shopping season. Stuck in the depths of a three-years-and-counting recession, retailers have glommed onto the promotional event as a way of building sales by giving consumers what they want. The result: two years ago a Wal-mart worker was killed by a crowd that broke through a glass door after waiting for hours for the pre-Christmas sales frenzy.

Now, many large national retailers are opening on Thanksgiving Day itself, traditionally a 'family' holiday and national day of rest. When confronted with the inherent contradiction between a time to give thanks and the desire to make sales, at least some have said their workers are thankful to have jobs. The workers feel coerced but in a buyers market for job seekers, are afraid to say no.

The ethical dilemma is not just of the merchants' making; if Americans did not enable, nay fully embrace, this practice there would be no demand. Whether the practice is unethical is an open question. The retailers are businesses, not moral exemplars. But this is a society, not just an economy. If we dont look after the rights of others, we should have no expectation that anyone will look after ours. Maybe that is who we have become. And maybe that is part of the problem. JL

Hadley Malcolm reports in USA Today:

As stores up the ante with earlier holiday hours that creep into Thanksgiving night, Black Friday is turning into Black Thursday, and some shoppers and employees aren't happy about it.

Are Wall Street's Sinking Bonuses and Job Losses Cyclical or Permanent?

It's the holiday season and smug feelings of schadenfreude are inappropriate. But dont expect a lot of sympathy if you are a newly unemployed financial whiz.

Wall Street bonus pools are expected to drop 20% or more this year-end and as many as 10% of New York financial sector jobs are expected to disappear by next year. Even hedge funds and private equity firms, the princes of the city, are having trouble this year. The sector's contribution to GDP doubled in the past decade, from approximately 4.5% to over 9%. Reversion to the mean, the process by which whatever went up heads back down is now in process. This may be bad news for NY real estate agents and tax collectors but it is almost certainly beneficial for the rest of the global economy. Finance is supposed to be a service to commerce and industry, not an end in itself. Historically, such periods of financial concentration have never ended well.

But is it permanent? Probably not. Wall Street has always been a boom and bust culture. The companies involved tend to overhire when times look good and overfire when results turn down. That said, the same forces of technological innovation and globalization that have had their way with the rest of the economy will reshape The Street, as well. New rules to better moderate trades will pinch and government intervention is unlikely. Some of those jobs will not be coming back and neither will many of the irrationally exhuberant bonuses that accompanied them. Those who remain will continue to live large. For the rest, Target and Sears will be open on Thanksgiving Day...JL

Maureen Farrell reports in CNN/Money:

Will MF Global's 1600 employees find gainful employment? Probably not anytime soon.
During what's left of 2011, Wall Street firms are expected to continue cutting employees.

Still the question for many of MF Global's employees -- and the thousands of others who were laid off by financial services firms this year -- is if they can ever find jobs on Wall Street again. Many of these lost jobs are unlikely to come back.

Reversal of Fortune: Farmers Buying Land From Real Estate Developers

Corn versus condos. For over a century there was no contest on the trade-off between residential and agricultural land use: condos and houses won, everywhere, every time. Real estate developers scarfed up huge plots of farmland on which to build developments full of the single family homes that personified the American Dream. No more.

In a stunning reversal of fortune, overbuilding, rising gas prices and a relentless increase in food prices has flipped the historical development model on its head. Farmers are now reclaiming land once destined for housing subdivisions and converting it back to agriculture. The mechanization that drove down the price of food and dramatically reduced the number of people needed to farm the land has now been offset by the increasingly insupportable cost of commuting which, combined with stagnant incomes, is reducing demand for home purchases. The result is that developers are being forced to sell expensively acquired land at prices low enough to make it economically attractive once again to farm. Rising incomes in developing countries have caused increasing demand for meat, grains and other American staples. This, in turn, is driving agricultural prices to new heights.

Residential land values have fallen 70% since their peak in 2006 and may not have bottomed while foodstuff prices are still rising. Urbanization is one of the great mega trends of this era. And that is unlikely to change. But the development model in the US may simply no longer be economically viable, while food demand to meet the rising expectations of wealthier global populations shows no signs of abating. The result, for the first time in US history, may be that rising real estate values are not the defining determinant of national well-being. JL

Robbie Whelan reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Five years into a brutal national housing downturn, raw land destined for residential development has fallen so far in value that thousands of acres across the country are being used again for agriculture.

During the fast-moving days of the housing boom, real-estate speculators in California, Arizona, Florida and other states paid top dollar to buy land from farmers and convert it from citrus groves and cotton fields to potential subdivisions. Now, with crop prices soaring and housing in a deep slump, the economics of land investment have turned upside down.

Shopping Shake-Up: 40% of Consumers Using Phones To Cut In-Store Deals

Black Friday? Who cares about lining up at midnight on Thanksgiving when you can cut your own deal a week earlier.

As retailers brace for the annual holiday shopping madness they confront not just very large crowds, but very large crowds armed with smart phones that alert them to comparison pricing, instant deals and better offers down the street.

Instore and online are merging. Consumers are using the tradeoffs to their advantage. The challenge for businesses is to figure out how to capture the interest and drive sales their way. Even Wal-mart is reporting that customers dont really care about the physical vs ephemeral distinction; they just want what they want at the best price, either to carry away or have delivered on time. All with a minimum of hassle.

This is causing changes in store layout, sales commissions, hours and inventory policy. You think you're stressed? Try managing the busiest period of the year with a customer based often better informed than your sales people. Traditional notions or labrynthine aisle configurations designed to lure shoppers to specific high margin products to be sold by staff hired and compensated to deliver turnover during certain hours may be obsolete in the face of consumers who have already priced and chosen what they want.

The situation remains dynamic. Claims that power has shifted to the consumer may be premature because technology has also given merchants the ability to project, price and manage based on data that enable them to react quickly. It is more likely that the contest is now more equal. But the notion of winning is one of perception. And it will go to the swift and the smart. JL

Ryan Kim reports in GigaOm:

Connectivity has shifted the balance of power to individual shoppers. The traditional ways that retailers and merchants reach out to users and how they expect them to discover, shop and pay are getting disrupted by mobile and social. And that’s forcing companies to react.

Venky Harinarayan, SVP of Walmart Global eCommerce and Head of @WalmartLabs, said that 30 to 40 percent of shoppers are now coming into Walmart stores armed with smartphones. That allows them to conduct searches right from the store and go looking for better deals.

The Future, By Design

The future will not just happen. It will be designed. We presume that is a good thing. History suggests that is not necessarily so.

Perhaps more importantly, design has become a signficant part of the conversation. It is no longer assumed, a pleasing but often anonymous contribution that is too often taken for granted. Those who believe that some sort of serendipitous libertarian vision will guide our future through allegedly munificent market forces have seen their fantasy implode.

But with recognition, credit and authority comes responsibility. Every day's headlines provide further proof of how wrong Francis Fukuyama's 'End of History' meme was. If design is to provide a positive way forward it must do so purposely. JL

Greg Satell comments in Digital Tonto:

The future has a nice ring to it. It is fairly busting with promise. We can let our dreams run wild, imagine that some of the bullshit we currently have to endure will subside and that cool new things will replace boring old ones. And, for the most part, that’s been true. Despite some novel challenges that each generation needs to face, life does get better, healthier, more prosperous.

A while back, I argued that we’re currently undergoing a radical shift toward design. Today, I’d like to take a longer view and make a more wide ranging argument: that the march of civilization itself has, in actuality, been a long march of design. Further, it’s becoming clear that as design takes over, we’ll have to rethink how we produce prosperity.

Too Much Information: How Crowd Sourcing is Changing Science

Scientific inquiry is about breaking down barriers to understanding. Two of the biggest barriers in the modern era are too much information and too little cross-disciplinary collaboration.

There may simply not be enough scholars to analyze and interpret all of the data in any given subject a timely fashion. And academic or professional traditions militate against sharing since credit for research and insight is the means by which most experts advance in their fields.

Crowd sourcing or crowd science as it is known in this realm is increasingly being employed to address those problems. Making information available enables an army of interested researchers from other fields to add their perspectives. Begun as an experiment tracking the benefits of crowd sourcing in technology, the results have been sufficiently impressive that it has stoked a movement of sorts. Putting more minds to work on specific questions has been beneficial, but the real value has come from the fresh perspective of those trained to think critically, albeit in subjects frequently far removed from those who post the inquiries.

While a relatively few people may be trained in water-borne illnesses, for instance, the application of pattern recognition from disparate fields to specific questions is yielding insights that might not have occurred to those whose education and careers may have been focused on one set of issues. It may also provide ancillary benefits in the form of enhanced support for policies based on all of those inquiring minds. JL

Gareth Cook reports in the Boston Globe (hat tip Scientific American):

At the end of the 19th century, a team of British archeologists happened upon what is now one of the world’s most treasured trash dumps. The site, situated west of the main course of the Nile, about five days journey south of Memphis, lay near the city of Oxyrhynchus. Garbage mounds are always a sweet target for those interested in the past, but what made the Oxyrhynchus dump special was its exceptional dryness. The water table lay deep; it never rained. And this meant that the 2,000-year-old papyrus in the mounds, and the text inscribed on it, were remarkably well preserved.

Eventually some half a million pieces of papyrus were drawn from the desert and shipped back to Oxford University, where generations of scholars have been painstakingly transcribing and translating them. But a few months ago, the papyrologists tried something bold. They put up a website, called Ancient Lives, with a game that allowed members of the public to help transcribe the ancient Greek at home by identifying images from the papyrus. Help began pouring in. In the short time the site has been running, people have contributed 4 million transcriptions.

Recognize Moi? Sci-fi Goes Social

No contest. In the on-going heavyweight bout between convenience and privacy, convenience wins another round by acclamation. Facial and voice recognition technologies that have become popularized through Hollywood thrillers are now becoming a staple of social media. Why? Because the cool characterization has helped build demand. And like many things tech these days, we think the virtuosity of the downloadable apps are astonishing. And we like being astonished enough to pay for the sensation.

For business, this gets one step closer to the Holy Grail, being able to personalize sales appeals whose targeting metrics make them almost impossible to refuse. Higher success rates mean higher margins and that means bigger bonuses. For consumers, the personalization of recognition adds one more attractive element to the attention economy: we like being recognized. In fact, we also like hanging out with people we recognize (or would desperately like to recognize) and who recognize us. Again, we will happily pay for the privilege.

So, it's a win-win on the commercial level. Are there moral or ethical implications? Well, if you've seen the new Leo DiCaprio movie about FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover, you can only imagine what he would have done with such power. His faceless but infinitely smoother successors are probably more diplomatic but no more reticent about the end uses. But recent history suggests that getting between a consumer and his or her fantasies is neither economically - nor politically - advisable. JL

Natasha Singer reports in the New York Times:

Facial recognition technology is a staple of sci-fi thrillers like “Minority Report.” But of bars in Chicago?

SceneTap, a new app for smart phones, uses cameras with facial detection software to scout bar scenes. Without identifying specific bar patrons, it posts information like the average age of a crowd and the ratio of men to women, helping bar-hoppers decide where to go. More than 50 bars in Chicago participate.