As we have discussed (see here and here), two trends currently dominate the US labor market: The tightening of the labor market, leading to higher turnover and faster compensation growth, and Significant slowdown in labor productivity growth. Looking forward, we believe labor productivity growth is unlikely to bounce back to the rates seen 10-20 years […]

Teenagers. They’re not exactly known for their listening skills. But over Thanksgiving weekend of 2015, high school students across the United States sat down with elders and asked them deep, meaningful questions about their lives. More than 50,000 people — most in their teens — took part in the Great Thanksgiving Listen and recorded an interview using the StoryCorps app. A 14-year-old in Georgia heard what it was like for her grandmother to go to bed hungry; students in Colorado heard one man’s experience of enlisting during the Vietnam War; and a teen in Louisiana found out that her grandparents got engaged at a drive-in movie.

The StoryCorps app launched in March 2015, when StoryCorps founder Dave Isay won the TED Prize. But Isay says that the app’s first real test came in November during the Great Thanksgiving Listen. The event proved to him that the app — which lets anyone record an interview, and upload it to the Library of Congress — could exponentially increase the number of voices in StoryCorps’ archive. The 50,000 interviews recorded over Thanksgiving weekend doubled the number of interviews the organization recorded in its first 10 years combined.

“A year ago, I stood on this stage with a dream: to see if we could use technology to scale the incredibly intimate StoryCorps interview experience,” says Isay in the talk above, given as an update at the TED2016 conference. He shared the app’s stats — that it has now been downloaded 602,000 times, and used to record more than 81,000 interviews. But the real triumph is in quality. Isay notes that these interviews have the same depth and intensity of those recorded in StoryCorps booths; the difference is that interviews recorded with the app are “more informal” and “spontaneous.” These interviews, says Isay, take place “in basements and bedrooms, in kitchens and classrooms and cars.”

Andrew Goldberg works at StoryCorps, and is listening to interviews recorded with the app. In Great Thanksgiving Listen recordings, he’s noticed a few themes: the fight for civil rights, immigration to the United States, the hardships of military service. Another theme surprised him: September 11. “High school seniors were only about 3 years old when it occurred,” he said. “They want to know where their interview partner was at the time, how they learned about it, and if they felt scared.”

In general, both Goldberg and Isay — who listens to app interviews every Sunday evening — notice universals running through these interviews. There’s almost always discussion of love, and advice for what really matters in life. In a large number of recordings, the person being interviewed says either, “I have never told you this before,” or “I always wanted to share this with you.”

Over the past year, StoryCorps has worked with organizations to find creative ways to document voices typically excluded from media. At the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, participants interviewed each other about life in the rural West. At the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, attendees spoke to find the connective tissue between women’s experiences in different parts of the world, be they a Syrian journalist or an Iranian lawyer.

Still, only a small percentage of app interviews have been recorded outside of the US — which offers a big growth opportunity. “We’re still a couple of years away from truly going international,” says Isay. “One thing we’ll be doing this year is making it easy for the app to be translated into other languages.”

Also in the plans for the next year: a redesign that will make the app a hub for listening to StoryCorps content. Other improvements will make the interview recording process more seamless, as Isay thinks what’s been recorded so far is “the tip of the iceberg.” In the next year, Isay hopes to double the number of interviews recorded with the app in its first year.

The Great Thanksgiving Listen will take place again in 2016, and StoryCorps is working to strengthen its relationships with schools and educational organizations with an eye toward making interviews a standard part of the high school curriculum. Interviews give a first-person look at history, but they also teach students how to listen, says Isay. It’s something he fears could become a lost art.

“We live at this moment when our means of communication are advancing so quickly, while at the same time we don’t seem to be able to hear each other anymore,” he says in the talk above. “I heard someone say recently that hate is louder than love, and there’s some truth to that. We’re going to keep working with every cell in our bodies to turn up the volume on love.”

The StoryCorps app was launched with the 2015 TED Prize. In its first year, more than 81,000 interviews have been recorded using it. It has more than doubled StoryCorps’ archive of voices. Photo: Courtesy of StoryCorps

Programmatic buying and data-driven creative can help drive more effective digital advertising campaigns. But connecting the dots between the data and the creative can be a challenge. In this session, Google shared their latest research based on three brand experiments they ran with L’Oreal, Gilt.com, and RBC Royal Bank that outlines a creative process for programmatic to help drive more effective digital campaigns.

Just 173,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in August, according to the latest release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics out Friday morning. That’s well below market expectations as well as the 12-month average. However, with the unemployment rate coming in at its lowest level since April 2008, seemingly for the right reasons, and solid revisions to prior months’ payroll count the situation may not be as lackluster as the August figure suggests.

The count for June was revised up to plus 245,000 from the latest reading of plus 231,000 jobs. July’s figure was also revised up to plus 245,000 from an initial reading of 215,000. Net total employment gains in June and July were therefore 44,000 higher than BLS previously reported and in line with the 12-month average of 247,000 monthly jobs added.

“Look past the August payroll number at the upward revisions in June and July to get a true sense of this report,” advises Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at financial data site Bankrate.com.

PNC Chief Economist Stuart Hoffman wrote in a note, “The August preliminary payroll jobs number is notorious for understating the final revised data by a huge average of 78,000 jobs in the past three years so there will be upward revisions to the 173,000 gain in the next two months.”

The sectors that added the most jobs were: health care and social assistance (56,000), professional and business services (33,000) and food services and drinking place (26,000). Conversely, manufacturing and mining lost jobs (17,000 and 9,000 respectively).

At 5.1% the unemployment rate, which is drawn from a different survey, was down from 5.3% in June and July. Up for debate, however, is whether people are leaving by choice or because they have determined opportunities do not exist for them.

Currently 8 million Americans are unemployed, down 1.5 million year-over-year, about half of the reduction from the long term unemployed. In August there were 624,000 discouraged workers — i.e. people not currently looking for work because they don’t believe jobs are available for them and therefore are not considered unemployed — which is down by 151,000 from a year ago and down by more than 40,000 from last month.

The labor force participation rate was also steady at 62.6% for the third month in a row, remaining at its lowest level in almost four decades. Previously the rate has been remained in a narrow 62.7% to 62.9% range. The U-6 rate, which measures under-employment, came in at 10.3% in August versus 10.4% in July and down from 12% a year earlier. The employment-population ratio was little changed at 59.4%.

Average hourly earnings rose by 8 cents to $25.09 last month. The 12-month wage growth rate is therefore 2.2%. Pre-recession normal year-over-year wage gains were between 3% and 4%.

McBride points to the steady participation rate and employment population ration combined with the revisions to conclude the unemployment rate is lower because more people are getting back to work.

“We have been saying for months that we want to see more people coming back into the labor market, but at this point it looks like they may stay on the sidelines,” notes Tara Sinclair, chief economist at job search site Indeed. ”If this is the new normal we need to start getting comfortable with it.”

Equity markets futures were in the red Friday, with the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite all down about 1% in the first 20 minutes following the release. The question on investors’ minds is what this all means for the Federal Reserve, which has indicated it would like to nudge interest rates from near zero if economic conditions allow.

“There is nothing in there that would deter the Fed from raising rates this month. The decision is ultimately going to come to what shape financial markets are in mid September,” says McBride.  Markets have been suffering a bout of drama in recent weeks the Vix volatility index soaring and the Dow declining close to 9% for the year. “The Fed wants to raise rates or at least get the process started. They need to restock the cupboard in order to having something to serve up” next time the economy gets into trouble.

“With the unemployment rate falling to within the range the Fed has said is consistent with full employment, and labor force participation showing no sign of picking up, it may finally be time for the Fed to call this economic recovery stable and raise rates,” says Sinclair. “Wages are rising, and inflation is nowhere to be seen, so although we would hope for stronger numbers there is an argument for a September rate hike.”

This article was written by Samantha Sharf from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Talent HQ is a premier information channel empowering professional development for recruiting and HR communities through regional events including Minnesota Recruiters, Wisconsin Recruiters, Florida Recruiters and California Recruiters.

U.S. Jobs Report: 173,000 Jobs Added In August, Unemployment Rate Down To 5.1%

U.S. Jobs Report: 173,000 Jobs Added In August, Unemployment Rate Down To 5.1%

Animation studio Aardman Nathan Love takes their artistic talents to the scalp, waging war against those pesky critters known as “super lice” in a new campaign for Prestige Brands’ lice solution product, Nix Ultra.

Aardman Nathan Love director Eric Cunha follows up his sleek, all-digital intro film for the Chevy Camaro Six app with an effort that continues the studio’s standout work in the pharma sector. Joining forces with agency Avrett Free Ginsberg, Cunha and the rest of the Aardman Nathan Love team produce an oddball, yet memorable cast of characters in the form of mutated super lice. “It’s easy to gross out an audience when portraying bugs on screen,” Cunha says, “so AFG was interested in creating a really stylized world with appealing character designs.” By infusing their trademark blend of animation, Aardman Nathan Love once again serves up an entertaining spot to shine a light on a not-so-entertaining problem.

Creative Credits:
Agency: Avrett Free Ginsberg
Client: Prestige Brands

Production Company: Aardman Nathan Love
Executive Creative Director: Joe Burrascano
Creative Director: Anca Risca
Director: Eric Cunha
Head of Production: James Elio
Producer: Amy Fahl
Character Design: Sigmund Lambrento
Additional Design: Ellen Su, Cassey Kuo, Tom Shek
Storyboards: Tim Probert
Layout: Shuyang Wang, Ellen Su
Modeling: Eric Cunha
Texturing: Jin Fang Jiang
Rigging: Lukas Wadya
Animation: Tom Shek, Thaddaeus Andreades
Motion Graphics: Ellen Su, Jim McKenzie, Matt DeFranco
Lighting & Rendering: Eric Cunha, Jin Fang Jiang, Triston Huang, Shuyang Wang
Compositing: Eric Cunha, Matt DeFranco, Jin Fang Jiang, Triston Huang, Shuyang Wang
Live Action Production Company: Zoomari Films
Director of Photography: Rob McEnamy

The productivity slowdown does not result primarily from the mismeasurement of technology output, but from our failure to invest effectively in innovation. Concerns about a global productivity slowdown are rapidly spreading, as it is increasingly identified as one of the possible causes of the mediocre global growth performance. In a series of reports by The […]

By Fard Johnmar, Founder, Enspektos, and Advisory Board Member, Society for New Communications of The Conference Board Our culture has long celebrated the lone genius who — by sheer force of will —transforms companies, industries, mindsets and even civilizations. One of these celebrated individuals is the late Steve Jobs. Nearly 20 years ago, he returned […]

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights.

A 4.37-lightyear starshot. Humanity has sent people to the moon and rovers to Mars. It might be about time we embark on interstellar travel. Russian philanthropist Yuri Milner, along with board member Stephen Hawking, unveiled a plan on Tuesday to send a fleet of iPhone-sized robots to our closest star, Alpha Centauri. Led by Pete Worden, a former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, this bold initiative will take 20 years to get off the ground and another 20, roughly, to make the 4.37-lightyear journey. If completed, Hawking says, it will propel humans further into what we’re made for: “Today we commit to the next great leap in the cosmos, because we are human and our nature is to fly.” (Watch Stephen’s TED Talk)

A chemistry-driven 3D printer you can buy. At TED2015, Joseph DeSimone introduced a radical new 3D printing technology prototype that creates objects out of a puddle of liquid (inspired, DeSimone admits, by Terminator 2). Through Continuous Liquid Interface Production, the chemical interplay between light and oxygen is harnessed to print objects 25-100 faster than standard 3D printing. This month DeSimone’s company, Carbon3D, debuted the M1, its first commercially available printer. (Watch Joseph’s TED Talk)

Health that zips through the sky. Drones — ominous, unmanned vehicles in the sky with the power to destroy, or, alternatively, bring hope and health to thousands worldwide. The latter is Keller Rinaudo and his company Zipline’s mission. Working with governments of developing countries, “Zipline plans to use its drone fleet to deliver medications to rural clinics all over the developing world,” says Olga Khazan in The Atlantic. Their first flights will begin this July in Rwanda. (Watch Keller’s TED Talk)

The surprising paradox of an elephant’s brain.  What about the human brain gives us greater cognitive abilities than other animals?  Suzane Herculano-Houzel believes the answer lies in the absolute number of neurons contained in an animal’s brain rather than the brain’s mass. But the African elephant poses an interesting, and enlightening, paradox to her research. She discovered that the African elephant’s brain–more than 3 times heavier than our brain–contained more neurons, but the location of those neurons plays a pivotal role in the difference between our cognitive ability and the elephant’s. (Watch Suzane’s TED Talk)

Stories from home. StoryCorps, which recently celebrated its own anniversary, announced a partnership with Fun Home to celebrate the Tony-winning musical’s one-year anniversary on Broadway. Stories will be available from Fun Home’s cast and creative team, and fans are encouraged to record their own stories using the StoryCorps app. The collaboration was born at the 2015 StoryCorps gala, which celebrated OutLoud, StoryCorp’s multi-year project to capture LGBT stories from around the country. (Watch Dave’s TED Talk and read his stories on TED’s Ideas blog)

Remembering the Bosnian War. Janine Di Giovanni, with radio in hand, listened to a Bosnian Muslim commander’s plea for help in 1993: “In the name of God, do something…We are dying here.” In a new Newsweek piece, she remembers what it was like reporting on the Bosnian War and the pain afflicted by President Radovan Karadžić, who in March was found guilty of 10 war crimes, including genocide, by a UN tribunal at The Hague. (Watch Janine’s TED Talk)

Oil fields ablaze. “Twenty-five years ago, as the United States–led coalition started driving out Iraqi forces from Kuwait, Saddam Hussein’s troops responded by setting ablaze hundreds of oil wells, creating one of the worst environmental disasters in recent memory,” recalls photojournalist Sebastião Salgado in The New York Times. He describes his admiration for the oil-well firefighters and the difficulty of photographing in such an extreme environment: “the heat warped one of my lenses and my jaws ached from the sheer tension of being exposed for hours to scalding temperatures.” In his signature black-and-white, Salgado captures the drama of the burning landscape–the giant clouds of smoke and flame spilling into the air, the firefighters covered in oil–with this reminder, “We must remember that in the brutality of battle another such apocalypse is always just around the corner.” (Watch Sebastiao’s TED Talk)

A blend of theater and journalism.  Playwright Anna Deavere Smith is famous for her bold mix of theater and journalism, capturing the experiences of her subjects in interviews and translating them, verbatim, onto the stage.  On April 5, she received the 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship. The award will fund her latest project, Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education, which explores the school-to-prison pipeline. (Watch Anna’s TED Talk)

(Several other 2016 Guggenheim grantees have great TED Talks too, including poet Stephen Burt, musicologist Ge Wang, photographer Hasan Elahi, and neuroscientist Rajesh Rao. And watch soon for a talk from choreographer and TED Fellow Camille A. Brown.)

“Animal” shouldn’t be an insult. Humans have friends, but animals have “affiliation partners”; humans have sex, but animals have “breeding behavior.” But as primatologist Frans de Waal points out, humans laugh … and animals do too. In The New York Times, de Waal looks at the dangers of the linguistic pedestals we have erected over the animal kingdom, and suggests that humbling ourselves to recognize the true capabilities of animals is a mark of progress. Our human brilliance and the animal in us are not mutually exclusive: “There is nothing wrong with the recognition that we are apes — smart ones perhaps, but apes nonetheless… The more we succeed, the more we will realize that we are not the only intelligent life on earth.” (Watch Fran’s TED Talk)

Why safety should affect college rankings.  As college acceptance season hits its climax with students preparing to make a decision by May 1, Michael Kimmel puts forward a provocative idea on how to make college campuses safer. In Time, he suggests incorporating campus safety data into the Princeton Review’s college rankings. While current crime data for the rankings is self-reported, most ranking information comes from an annual survey of 100,000 students, “the real experts,” and Kimmel believes that this survey should include student opinions on safety and sexual violence. By incorporating this information into the ranking system, it “would help students make informed choices — and help hold schools accountable.” (Watch Michael’s TED Talk)

Have a news item to share? Write us at [email protected] and you may see it included in this weekly round-up.

Abandoned school turned maker space. Theaster Gates turns Chicago’s abandoned buildings into thriving hubs for art and education. His next project? Turning an old elementary school into a maker space. Gates heads Place Lab, a think tank that fuses the brainpower of urban planners, architects, artists and other diverse professionals to create “culture-led neighborhood transformation”. Gates and his Place Lab team will soon turn this school into a collaborative space for job training, education and design fabrication, as well a place for youth to explore culture and identity. (Watch Theaster’s TED Talk)

“Be yourself” is bad advice. An alternative: Before taking the TED stage for the first time, Adam Grant – nervous and eager to impress — asked his colleagues and friends for advice and they all said the same thing: be yourself. Turns out, Grant says, that was lousy advice. Our world is obsessed with authenticity, but as Grant outlines in The New York Times, those who take their behavioral cues from the outside environment go further in their careers, are more likely to try again after failure, and more likely to be of service to others. Ultimately, Grant suggests, sincerity in striving to be the best version of yourself, regardless of what’s on the inside, has a higher payoff: “As an introvert, I started my career terrified of public speaking so my authentic self wouldn’t have been giving a TED Talk in the first place. But being passionate about sharing knowledge…I decided to be the person I claimed to be, one who is comfortable in the spotlight.” (Watch Adam’s TED Talk)

New action on gun control. Awareness alone is not enough — action is what makes change. Over 2,2000 supporters of The Brady Campaign, Dan Gross’ organization to reduce gun deaths and injuries, called the office of Senator Chuck Schumer, asking him to introduce Brady Bill 2.0. Spurred by the calls, Senator Schumer introduced the bill mere hours later on May 16.  A followup to previous legislation, Brady Bill 2.0 will expand universal background checks on gun sales. This mobilizing achievement is the latest of The Brady Campaign’s tremendous effort, read more here. (Watch Dan’s TED Talk)

An advocate for North Korean women. Hyenseo Lee’s dream to work with the UN or an NGO on human rights issues for North Korean refugees is set to become reality with a slight twist: the NGO is her own. Lee is in the process of setting up North Korean Women, an NGO that aims to help North Korean women living in North Korea, South Korea, China, and around the world.“Life as a North Korean defector is really painful. Women are sold as sex slaves to human traffickers or Chinese men. They are being tortured, are suffering, with no payment, but the sad thing is that even a 20- or 30-year-old North Korean woman being a sex slave or being sold as human merchandise to an old Chinese farmer prefers that situation to being repatriated to North Korea. It’s another hell to live in North Korea,” says Lee. (Watch Hyeonseo’s TED Talk)

A funny way to fight racism. Instead of just diversity panels and awkward trust falls, maybe comedy is the key to fighting racism. Negin Farsad, an Iranian-American Muslim comedian and filmmaker (and TED Fellow), wants to create tolerance through laughter. In fact, she’s been doing this for years, as shown in her documentary The Muslims Are Coming!. Last month, Farsad released a memoir, How to Make White People Laugh, chronicling her experience as an Iranian-American Muslim post-9/11 with blunt honesty and unabashed humor.

Diets: a losing battle. “If diets worked, we’d all be thin by now. Instead, we have enlisted hundreds of millions of people into a war we can’t win.” A frank, perhaps uncomfortable truth that Sandra Aamodt outlines in in her new book Why Diets Make Us Fat, coming out June 7. But with this knowledge comes hope for a better, more scientific approach to long term weight loss and an overall healthier lifestyle. (Watch Sandra’s TED Talk)

A better way to predict the future. We’ve all heard them, predictions about the future that are wildly off: hoverboards, an entire meal in a pill, and flying cars are just a few that come to mind. But in grappling with the future, Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable (out June 7) takes a different tack, avoiding speculation about specific technologies that may emerge because “the specifics, the products, the particular institutions are completely unpredictable.” Instead, he breaks down the future of technology into 12 major trends, arguing that these trends are not only already happening, but that they will drive inevitable changes in the next 30 years. (Watch Kevin’s TED Talk)