Morning Edition

At a recent academic conference, Michigan State University professor Natalie Phillips stole a glance around the room. A speaker was talking but the audience was fidgety. Some people were conferring among themselves, or reading notes. One person had dozed off.

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Steve Inskeep talks to Beijing-based economist Patrick Chovanec about too many subsidies in China's solar energy industry. It is resulting in money-losing companies. One company, Suntech, could soon be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because it is performing poorly.

Major League Baseball finished its first weekend of divisional play. A couple of teams have already been eliminated thanks to baseball's new single-elimination, wild-card round.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

NPR's business news starts with slower growth in East Asia.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

INSKEEP: That prediction comes from a World Bank report released today. The bank warns of a deeper and longer slowdown in the region caused by weak exports and weak domestic demand.

Bruce Osterweil is a lucky man to live just a short walk from where San Francisco's Golden Gate meets the cold, rough waters of the Pacific Ocean. He is also a lucky man to have married his wife, Patricia Furlong, who has long provided the family's health insurance through her job at a small financial consulting firm.

But last month, Osterweil's wife turned 65 and decided to retire, and although she may walk away with a crystal bowl or a golden watch for all those years of service, she will also walk away from her company's generous health insurance benefits.

After failing to predict the Arab Spring, intelligence officials are now exploring whether Big Data, the combing of billions of pieces of disparate electronic information, can help them identify hot spots before they explode. The intelligence community has always been in the business of forecasting the future. The question is whether tapping into publicly available data — Twitter and news feeds and blogs among other things — can help them do that faster and more precisely.