National Public Radio

If you do a Google search on the World Cup game in which Germany slaughtered Brazil 7-1, the top results will say things like "destroy," "defeat," and "humiliate." But Google itself is choosing to steer clear of negative terms.

The company has created an experimental newsroom in San Francisco to monitor the World Cup, and turn popular search results into viral content. And they've got a clear editorial bias. After the dramatic defeat by Germany, the team makes a revealing choice to not publish a single trend on Brazilian search terms. Copywriter Tessa Hewson says they're just too negative. "We might try and wait until we can do a slightly more upbeat trend."

In old-school newsrooms, the saying goes: if it bleeds, it leads. Because this new newsroom is focused on getting content onto everyone's smartphone, Agrawal says, editors may have another bias: to comb through the big data in search of happy thoughts.

[Commentary] For better or worse, the public affairs programming of NPR appeals mostly to Americans with a college degree, regardless of race or ethnicity.

By this measure, black listeners index exactly the same as their proportion of college graduates in the wider society.

College-educated Latino listeners are lower but within shouting distance. Asians present the opposite picture. Twice as many Asian-American adults listen to NPR news stations as their weight in the population. Among college graduates, however, the proportions converge.

National Public Radio has undertaken a concerted effort to "sound like America." So, if NPR's shows are expected to reflect the interests and voices of all the nation's races and ethnic groups, then clearly it helps to have those groups represented in the newsroom.

Staff breakdowns include my 2012 study and what they were following layoffs announced May 20. The numbers are of reporters, editors, producers, designers and other full time newsroom professionals, and not administrative support. NPR had 365 such professionals after the layoffs.

The Open Food and Drug Administration's database unveiled at the conference, for one, is intended to make it easier for the public to search more than 3 million reports on adverse reactions to prescription drugs.

Up until now, the information was available by reading quarterly reports, by filing a Freedom of Information Act request or by combing through the raw data. Any improvement would be a help for those of us not adept with relational databases.

That kind of data is "lazy data," Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius told the Datapaloozers; data that is locked away or difficult to access. "HHS is converting lazy data and making it active data," Sec Sebelius said.

Health apps have failed to reach the level of popularity and financial success that we've seen with apps for weather and geolocation, says Josh Rosenthal, chief scientific officer of RowdMap, a Web-based business management platform. He told participants in an entrepreneur's boot camp session. "Put it all together and you get a big bucket of fail."

A new pioneer has just planted its flag on the education-technology frontier: the country of Trinidad and Tobago. Its government announced the creation of a "national knowledge network" to promote free online learning in partnership with Khan Academy and Coursera.

The initiative is part of a broader national strategy of investment in education. The currently oil- and gas-dependent Caribbean nation is trying to transform itself into a knowledge economy. For observers of ed-tech, meanwhile, the news represents a possible future path for Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs -- not as a replacement for a college degree but as a resource for hybrid and lifelong learning, made in the USA and exported around the world.

So, what's really new here? Well, this Trinidad and Tobago effort takes the level of coordination up a notch. Their focus is on connecting MOOC-powered learning to jobs. Graduates from Learning Hub programs will receive a government-issued certificate of participation from knowledge.tt.

This edgy strategy is part of a larger trend of the nation investing hugely in education. Since 2010, education has received the highest budgetary allocation of all government ministries, representing 18 percent of the country's annual expenditure and six percent of GDP (above the US, at 5.4% of GDP). Trinidad and Tobago spent $250 million in 2013 on classroom laptops alone.

The desire to communicate privately is one reason people have largely abandoned talking on the phone as a social medium. What was once a major indoor sport, taking up hours of many people's days, is now not only more limited but may be going the way of mailed letters and express telegrams.

"Now, calling on a phone is almost like a violation," says Scott Campbell, a professor of telecommunications at the University of Michigan. "It's very greedy for your social presence, and texting is not."

Hiding from Mom is one reason texting took off in the first place, says Danah Boyd, the author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. Stretching the phone cord down the hall was no longer good enough to get away from hovering "helicopter" parents.

Boomers are still more apt to pick up the phone in professional contexts, but at work as well as home a ringing phone has come to be seen as an unwanted intrusion. "I used to think the millennials were wrong about this, but it is an imposition to call someone and say put aside whatever you were doing and give me 30 minutes of your time," says Neil Howe, president of LifeCourse Associates, which consults with corporations about generational attitudes and behaviors, while mobile phone use is up, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

The onslaught of information and time spent with screens is another reason why people are talking less, says Campbell, the Michigan professor. We keep up with family and friends via Facebook, Instagram and other social media channels. Those we're closer with, we might interact with almost constantly through group texts on WhatsApp or Kik. For many people, there's no need to pick up the phone to catch up. Your friends already know what you did last night.

The board of directors of National Public Radio has selected Jarl Mohn to become its next president and chief executive officer.

Mohn is currently chairman of Southern California Public Radio (SCPR) and has had a life-long career in media, including serving as founding president and chief executive officer of Liberty Digital and president and chief executive officer of E! Entertainment Television.

Mohn, 62 years old, will begin his term at NPR in July and will succeed Paul Haaga Jr, who has been acting chief executive officer and president since 2013. In addition to his service to public radio, Mohn was the founding President and Chief Executive Officer of Liberty Digital, a public company that invested in interactive television, cable networks and internet enterprises. Prior to Liberty Digital, he created E! Entertainment Television and served as President and Chief Executive Officer from January 1990 to December 1998.

He was Executive Vice President and General Manager of MTV and VH1, from 1986 to 1990. He began his career as a disc jockey in 1967 and was on the air on WNBC-AM in New York in the 1970s. Most recently he has divided him time between being a corporate director and advisor to a number of media companies, making direct early stage angel and seed investments in digital media/technology ventures. He and his wife Pamela created The Mohn Family Foundation in 2000. Mohn attended Temple University, where he studied Mathematics and Philosophy.

One of the biggest challenges American hospitals face right now is moving to electronic medical records from old-fashioned paper files.

The switch is costing tens of billions of dollars, eating up tons of staff time, and it's especially tough for the country's 2,000 rural and small-town hospitals. Rural hospitals are typically short on cash and people with information technology skills. So a lot of small hospitals are turning to bigger hospitals for help, and giving up some independence in exchange.

The 10-bed Beartooth Billings Clinic in Red Lodge (MO), a historic mining town just outside Yellowstone National Park and 60 miles west of Billing is one hospital that did. Sharing electronic records sounds simple. But for a lot of little hospitals doing that while meeting new federal digital standards means coming up with $1 million or more up front.

That's a tall order, when the average rural hospital runs at a financial loss of 8 percent a year. So the Red Lodge hospital became part of the bigger Billings Clinic system, in part to get help with IT.

A patent from Apple could play a big role in helping teens -- and adults -- avoid accidents.

The proposed feature, which would lock out certain features such as texts and calls, is not the first of its kind. There's DriveAssistT, created in 2008, and TEXTL8R, both developed by Aegis Mobility to block calls and texts. There're other devices that try to make young drivers safer beyond the texting angle, such as by using MyKey, a chip in the car key that you program to limit radio volume or sound a continuous alert if the driver doesn't wear a seatbelt. And Drive Pulse, which tracks the location of the car, as well as things like driving at high speeds or slamming on the breaks.

The Apple patent would lock out certain phone functions in one of three ways: by using a motion sensor that knows when the phone is moving at driving speeds; by using a "scenery analyzer" that can tell whether the phone is in a safe place in the car; and a lock-out mechanism that automatically disables things like texting for a period of time.

In the past several years, as more and more people are connected through more and more social media, the idea of turning personal grievances into class actions has been popping up, well, more and more. In Virginia, a group that is against affirmative action in education went fishing for plaintiffs on websites recently, according to National Public Radio. The group seeks college applicants who feel they were discriminated against. In Utah, the American Civil Liberties Union posted a tweet on Twitter earlier in 2014 seeking plaintiffs in a suit to protect the rights of same-sex couples married there. And in California, Tea Party organizations have come together in a class action alleging that the Internal Revenue Service treated them unfairly. They have created a website, Sue the IRS, that focuses on aspects of the suit. According to a recent post on Law360, the action -- which comprises tax and privacy issues -- could be a test case for social media and the law. Citizens for Self-Governance, the group behind the case, is led by Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler. Such public activity could have repercussions for the case, reports Law360. "As the overlap of social media and class actions continues to escalate, this could be a great case to watch."

The people who design marketing apps are celebrating a change in the way iBeacon works on iPhones. iBeacon has been around for a while, and marketers liked the concept in principle.

But there was a big practical problem: It only worked when a customer's phone was running the marketer's app. Once you closed the app, the tracking stopped. That problem has now been fixed.

When Apple updated the iPhone's operating system in February 2014, it changed it to allow marketing apps to keep tabs on your location even when they're off. When you close an app, it "deputizes" the phone's operating system to keep listening for iBeacon signals on its behalf. Of course, the change has others spooked.

"As a privacy researcher, I always get nervous when marketers are celebratory about something," says Garrett Cobarr, a technologist and writer based in Seattle. He says Apple seems to ignore certain assumptions that people make about what's happening on a device.