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Flipgrid is where social and emotional learning happens! The leading video discussion platform for millions of PreK to PhD educators, students, and families.

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Flipgrid is where social and emotional learning happens! The leading video discussion platform for millions of PreK to PhD educators, students, and families.

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Flipgrid is where social and emotional learning happens! The leading video discussion platform for millions of PreK to PhD educators, students, and families.

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Flipgrid is where social and emotional learning happens! The leading video discussion platform for millions of PreK to PhD educators, students, and families.

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Amazing Entrepreneurs and Business People Flashcards | Quizlet

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How to Choose Where to Eat with Friends. Deciding where to eat with friends can be challenging. To narrow down the choices, you should first determine what types of dietary, time, and budget restrictions members of the group might have....

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Renovated Microsoft offices have a variety of work spaces for employees. Left, a phone-booth-style room for privacy, and right, an isolation room. Credit... Stuart Isett for The New York Times

First there were individual offices. Then cubicles and open floor plans. Now, there is a "palette of places."

New office designs are coming to a workplace near you, with layouts meant to cater to the variety of tasks required of modern white-collar workers. Put another way, it means people don't sit in just one place.

It's partly a backlash against the one-size-fits-all mind-set, not to mention the corporate penny-pinching, embodied in the move toward pure open floor plans that packed more workers into less and less space. That idea was supposed to drive collaboration, but many experts agree it often went too far, with row upon row of desks and workbench-style seating more likely to generate ennui than efficiency.

"When used as a generic answer for work space design, it's terrible," said David Lathrop, a researcher at Steelcase, a big office furniture maker.

The new model is largely open, but not entirely. Under the revised thinking, breaking down walls to bring people together is good, but so are "team spaces" and standing tables, comfortable couches and movable walls.

Privacy is also good, particularly for tasks that require intense concentration, the thinking goes. That doesn't mean a return to the glory days of private offices, but it does mean workers have more space and more places to seek solitude than in the neo-Dickensian workbench settings. The new designs often include "isolation rooms," soundproof phone booths, and even lounges where technology is forbidden.

And it's meant to be tweaked as needs change. "This continues to be iterated," said Frank Cuevas, who is working on a major redesign at IBM - and whose use of the word "iterated" hints at the kind of start-up mentality the changes are intended to evoke.

"It's not something we're going stop and say, 'This is it,'" he said.

The corporations setting the new standard are not young Silicon Valley companies known for free food, slides and foosball tables at work - or for carefree spending, as at Apple, whose new corporate mothership cost a reported $5 billion. Nor are the designs one-of-a-kind projects that veer toward eccentricity. Salesforce's new skyscraper campus in San Francisco, for example, has areas on every floor for meditation, partly inspired by the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk.

Instead, the companies behind the emerging new norm in workplace design are a lineup of more staid companies across a range of industries, and they may spend heavily but also systematically. They include Microsoft, IBM and General Electric. Certain workspace innovations may surface first at Google or Facebook, but the older stalwarts are combining and refining them for mainstream businesses.

"These workplace ideas are beginning to be adopted across all industries," said Arlyn Vogelmann, a principal at Gensler, an architecture and design firm whose clients include Facebook and G.E.

The new designs are not about looks. They are an attempt to adapt to the spread of internet-era digital technology - and its hurry-up ways - into every industry. Space drives behavior, experts say, and the goal of the new designs is to hasten the pace of sharing ideas, making decisions and creating new products. They are also meant to appeal to millennial recruits, many of whom are more comfortable working in a Starbucks than in a traditional office.

The new model eschews the common dogmas of work life: Everybody gets an office, or everyone gets a cubicle, or everybody gets a seat on a workbench. A diversity of spaces, experts say, is more productive, and the new concept is called "activity-based workplace design," tailoring spaces for the kind of work done.

"Office geography matters, and it can be a key managerial lever to increase communication and the cross-fertilization of ideas," said Christopher Liu, an assistant professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

One of the most aggressive makeovers is happening at Microsoft, a change forced by business necessity. The company faces a new wave of technology, as the market has shifted to software delivered and constantly updated as a service over the internet cloud, as opposed to being loaded onto individual computers, with the code often stored on compact discs and sold as a product every few years. To compete, Microsoft has had to adopt a faster pace.

"You have to collaborate more," said Michael Ford, Microsoft's general manager of global real estate. "We absolutely have to change."

For decades, the company, based outside Seattle, housed its software engineers in secluded offices, thinking that the privacy helped employees focus while writing computer code. But in 2010, Microsoft started testing open designs with a quarter of a floor, and then expanded. Since 2014, it has opened 10 renovated buildings without offices, including four this year.

Microsoft, Mr. Ford said, has taken a test-and-learn approach. It learned, for example, that its early designs were too open plan, with 16 to 24 engineers in team-based spaces. Engineers found those spaces noisy and distracting, and concentration suffered. Too much openness can cause workers to "do a turtle," researchers say, and retrench and communicate less - colleagues who retreat into their headphones all day, for example.

Today, there are more private spaces, and the team areas hold only eight to 12 engineers. "That's the sweet spot for Microsoft," Mr. Ford said.

The company thinks it is working. Microsoft's Azure cloud software business has surged in the last few years, as has the company's stock price. Mr. Ford said about 20 percent of the workplaces have been redone on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash., and the surrounding area. Within five years, he said, he expects the renovated share to reach 80 percent.

Offices, he said, will not disappear entirely, but they will be reserved mainly for people who regularly have confidential conversations, like lawyers and top executives.

Companies renovating their work spaces often tap into a growing body of research on building design and worker well-being and productivity. Research at the University of Oregon concluded that exposure to sunlight and outdoor views correlated to about 6 percent fewer sick days than those without. Research done by Craig Knight, a British organizational psychologist, concluded that "empowered offices" - in which workers can choose their conditions - can increase productivity on cognitive tasks by 25 percent or more.

And at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, scientists found that well-ventilated offices can significantly improve a person's ability to perform challenging tasks like developing strategy or responding to a crisis.

But companies can also save money, by using a little less space than conventional offices do.

Worker space is now about 150 square feet per person, down from 225 square feet in 2010, estimates Tim Venable, senior vice president for research at CoreNet Global, a commercial real estate association. But the hybrid design saves less than entirely open designs, which usually have workbench settings and in which the amount of space can drop to as low as 60 square feet per worker.

"There can be huge value to people coming together, but the real reason a lot of corporations have gone to bench seating is money falling to the bottom line," said Mr. Lathrop of Steelcase.

Another space saver has been getting people to work from home, a trend for years in corporate America. But that trend is reversing, as companies recognize that offices can be creative clusters.

IBM, for example, recently called 5,000 of its at-home employees back to offices, though one in five workers in North America still work from home full time, the company said.

Since 2014, IBM has spent $380 million renovating its work spaces in the United States, which now bear all the hallmarks of the new hybrid design - open spaces, whiteboard walls, no offices, sit-or-stand desks, huddle rooms and phone rooms.

IBM, said Mr. Cuevas, vice president for real estate strategy and operations, offers employees up to 10 different space configurations. In January, the company also remade its headquarters in Armonk, N.Y., with senior executives departing wood-paneled offices for smaller, side-by-side glass ones without doors.

While G.E. executives wait for the company's new headquarters to be built in Boston, they are working in temporary offices nearby, designed according to the new principles. The contrast with the cavernous offices and silent hallways of the old headquarters in suburban Connecticut could scarcely be more striking - open spaces, sit-or-stand desks, and no parking spaces. (Workers are urged to take public transportation.)

Face-to-face conversations have replaced endless email chains, so decisions are made faster, said Ann Klee, vice president for the Boston development and operations. Still, openness has its limits. Sometimes, she concedes, you do have to ask colleagues to use their "indoor voices." More quiet rooms are being added to the new headquarters design.

The Boston Consulting Group has also adopted the new design, with two goals in mind: prompt people to come to the office rather than avoid it, and encourage more "casual collisions" that might spur workers to trade ideas and build relationships.

Its old Midtown Manhattan office was a traditional space with offices housing one, two or four people each. "Lots of doors, lots of pillars, nowhere to really hang out, and people had lunch delivered to their desks," said Ross Love, a senior partner in New York.

The new space, in the Hudson Yards development on the Far West Side of Manhattan, is a hybrid open design. Since the firm moved in last November, most consultants have been coming into the office substantially more often than they did to the old building.

To measure informal interactions, Boston Consulting hired a start-up in the emerging field of workplace analytics, Humanyze, a spinoff from the MIT Media Lab. It monitored workers' physical movements, meetings and patterns of communication.

Two tests were conducted of about 100 employees, before and after the move. In the new space, workers spent an additional four to five hours a week in short, unplanned interactions. And they spent less time in formal meetings.

In surveys, the company's workers say they are getting more done, faster in the new space. But the payoff, Mr. Love concedes, is difficult to measure so far.

"It's like increasing the clock speed of a computer," he said. "If you rev things up, you ought to be able to do more."

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First there were individual offices. Then cubicles and open floor plans. Now, there is a "palette of places." New office designs are coming to a workplace near you, with layouts meant to cater to the variety of tasks required of modern white-collar workers. Put another way, it means people don't sit in just one place.

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PORTLAND, Ore. - By the time her mother received the doctor's email, Yuna Lee was already 2 years old, a child with a frightening medical mystery. Plagued with body-rattling seizures and inconsolable crying, she could not speak, walk or stand.

"Why is she suffering so much?" her mother, Soo-Kyung Lee, anguished. Brain scans, genetic tests and neurological exams yielded no answers. But when an email popped up suggesting that Yuna might have a mutation on a gene called FOXG1, Soo-Kyung froze.

"I knew," she said, "what that gene was."

Almost no one else in the world would have had any idea. But Soo-Kyung is a specialist in the genetics of the brain-"a star," said Robert Riddle, a program director in neurogenetics at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. For years, Soo-Kyung, a developmental biologist at Oregon Health and Science University, had worked with the FOX family of genes.

"I knew how critical FOXG1 is for brain development," she said.

She also knew harmful FOXG1 mutations are exceedingly rare and usually not inherited - the gene mutates spontaneously during pregnancy. Only about 300 people worldwide are known to have FOXG1 syndrome, a condition designated a separate disorder relatively recently. The odds her own daughter would have it were infinitesimal.

"It is an astounding story," Dr. Riddle said. "A basic researcher working on something that might help humanity, and it turns out it directly affects her child."

Suddenly, Soo-Kyung, 42, and her husband Jae Lee, 57, another genetics specialist at O.H.S.U., had to transform from dispassionate scientists into parents of a patient, desperate for answers.

They were plunged into a fast-moving ocean of newly identified gene mutations, newly named diagnoses, and answers that raise new questions.The newfound capacity to sequence genomes is spurring a genetic gold rush, linking mystifying diseases to specific mutations - often random mutations not passed down from parents.

New research shows that each year, about 400,000 babies born worldwide have neurological disorders caused by random mutations, said Matthew Hurles, head of human genetics at Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. As sequencing becomes cheaper, more children will receive specific diagnoses like FOXG1 syndrome, doctors say.

This burst of discovery might eventually help doctors treat or prevent some brain damage. "We used to lump them all together under autism or another category," said Dr. Joseph Gleeson, a neurogeneticist at University of California San Diego. "It's really changing the way doctors are thinking about disease."

Balancing the missions of science and motherhood, Soo-Kyung has begun doing what she is uniquely positioned to do: aiming her research squarely at her daughter's disorder. With Jae's help, she is studying how the FOXG1 gene works and why mutations like Yuna's are so devastating.

"Our ultimate goal is to find a better treatment for FOXG1 syndrome patients," she said. Her day-to-day goal is helping Yuna make slivers of developmental progress.

Yuna is now a sweet-natured 8-year-old still wearing a toddler's onesie over a diaper. "Cognitively she's about 18 months," Jae, her father, said.

A major achievement would be getting Yuna to indicate when her diaper is wet. Or to stand when they prop her against a kitchen corner and remove their hands for a split second. "If Yuna doesn't fall down right away," Soo-Kyung said, "we consider that a success."

"My daughter's brain is so damaged," Soo-Kyung said, eyes brimming with tears. "Can we rescue any of her skills?"

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When their daughter was born in Houston in January 2010, southeast Texas experienced a rare snowfall. It inspired the Lees, then professors at Baylor College of Medicine, to name her "Yuna," meaning "snow girl" in a Korean dialect, with the middle name "Heidi" for its allusion to snowy peaks.

"She was perfectly normal," Jae said. "We were joking, 'What will come later?' Yuna's mom is a very smart person, so we thought, 'Well, she will make the world better.'"

But soon, things seemed off. Yuna often failed to respond to sounds. She struggled to swallow milk from breast or bottle. What she did swallow she vomited. "She looked like someone with malnutrition," Soo-Kyung said.

A doctor said her head circumference was not growing enough. Then Yuna began having seizures , often sending the Lees to the emergency room. She cried so persistently that Soo-Kyung had to assure neighbors Yuna was not being abused.

"What did I do wrong?" Soo-Kyung grilled herself. Had she eaten something while pregnant that infected Yuna? "I was traveling a lot during the pregnancy to attend seminars - was I too stressed?"

Shortly after Yuna's second birthday, Soo-Kyung traveled to Washington, D.C. to serve on a National Institutes of Health panel reviewing grant proposals from brain development researchers. At dinner, she found herself next to Dr. David Rowitch, a respected neonatologist and neuroscientist she knew only by reputation.

"She started to tell me what's going on with her daughter," recalled Dr. Rowitch, professor and head of pediatrics at the University of Cambridge who was then at the University of California San Francisco. He was stumped but offered to send Yuna's brain scans to "the world's expert" in neuroradiology: Dr. Jim Barkovich at U.C.S.F.

Dr. Barkovich said Yuna's scans revealed "a very unusual pattern," one he had not seen in decades of evaluating brain images sent to him from around the world. Yuna's cerebral cortex had abnormal white matter, meaning "there were probably cells dying," he said, and the corpus callosum, the corridor across which cells in the left and right hemispheres communicate, was "way too thin."

Searching scientific literature, he said, "I found a gene that seemed to be expressed in that area and found that when it was mutated it caused a very similar pattern." That gene was FOXG1.

FOXG1 is so crucial that its original name was "Brain Factor 1," said Dr. William Dobyns, a professor of pediatrics and neurology at University of Washington, who published a 2011 study recommending a separate diagnosis: FOXG1 syndrome. "It's one of the most important genes in brain development."

FOXG1 provides blueprints for a protein that helps other genes switch on or off. It helps with three vital fetal brain stages: delineating the top and bottom regions, adjusting the number of nerve cells produced and "setting up the organization of the entire cortex," Dr. Dobyns said.

So, when Dr. Barkovich's email said he "would not be surprised if this is a FOXG1 mutation," Soo-Kyung's heart shuddered. "That's unthinkable," she despaired.

Yuna's neurologist declined to authorize FOXG1 gene analysis, considering the possibility improbable - and irrelevant because it would not change Yuna's treatment, Soo-Kyung said. So she decided to sequence the gene herself, preparing to seek university permission since her lab only worked with animals. Then, she became pregnant again. That provided justification for professional analysis of Yuna's gene to determine if there was a heritable mutation the Lees could have also transmitted to their second child.

When results showed a FOXG1 mutation, Soo-Kyung requested the raw data, hoping the lab had messed up. But scanning the data, Soo-Kyung spotted the problem instantly: Yuna was missing one nucleotide, Number 256 in the 86th amino acid of one copy of FOXG1, which has 489 amino acids.

It was a random mutation, so she felt relief her second child was at little risk. But its location in the DNA sequence had given Yuna a smaller, incompletely functioning brain. A single mutation had disabled the entire gene.

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Bridlemile Elementary School's long hallway is both minefield and laboratory for Yuna. In a wheelchair or special walker, she is guided by a paraprofessional, Audrey Lungershausen, who tries to keep her from grabbing student artwork and coats, while encouraging her to identify balls and faces on a mural.

Soo-Kyung must also navigate a daunting hallway. In June 2016, overcome by stress, she collapsed. Diagnosed with vestibular neuritis, an infection involving nerves linking the ear and brain, she was bedridden for weeks and struggled to stand. She still experiences vertigo and nausea walking the hall to her lab, "like I'm on a ship that's constantly moving."

Her disability, glancingly parallel to her daughter's, helps her understand that "the world that Yuna has to face with her limited ability to control her body - that must be really scary to her," she said.

While Yuna's condition gives Soo-Kyung's work personal importance, her own condition makes it harder. She cannot look at her computer more than 25 minutes straight, reads with a yellow filter often used by children with autism, and does visual exercises using paper images taped to her office wall..

Like Yuna, Soo-Kyung needed physical, occupational and speech therapy. A psychiatrist prescribed an antidepressant. Instead of sleeping in Yuna's room, Soo-Kyung began blocking out light and sound by sleeping on a mattress on the floor of the master bedroom closet. "They say I may not recover to a normal level."

-

Long before Yuna was born, Soo-Kyung stumbled upon research she found fascinating, showing that mice missing both FOXG1 genes did not form brains. That would apply to humans, too. "There's nobody who is missing two copies of the gene," said Dr. Riddle of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "They don't survive."

Soo-Kyung told Jae she wanted to someday study how FOXG1 drives brain development. "Then Yuna arrived," Jae said.

Now, studying mouse brains, the Lees have identified genes that interact with FOXG1, helping explain why one crippled copy of FOXG1 damages the corpus callosum's ability to transmit signals between hemispheres.

"We now understand how this gene works and why," Soo-Kyung said.

Many mysteries remain. Individual FOXG1 mutations affect gene function differently, so one FOXG1 patient's symptoms can vary from another's. For example, Charles A. Nelson III, an expert in child development and neurodevelopmental disorders at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, evaluated two 10-year-old patients with mutations in different locations and markedly distinct levels of impairment.

Since patients like Yuna, with one dysfunctional and one functional FOXG1 gene, produce half the necessary FOXG1 protein, Soo-Kyung wonders if gene therapy could restore some protein or boost protein activity in the good gene.

But because FOXG1 is crucial so early in development, Dr. Rowitch said, "I don't think you can just go back when the baby's born and build the brain back up."

Still, Dr. Dobyns said, "are there parts of FOXG1 syndrome that we might be able to fix once we understand it better? Sure, parts of it."

-

When Yuna was 6, Soo-Kyung, half-asleep in bed with her, noticed something extraordinary: Yuna was sitting up. "Am I dreaming?" Soo-Kyung wondered. For years, Yuna failed to learn this skill, usually mastered by six-month-old babies.

Physical therapists had stopped Yuna's sessions, saying " 'What's the point of doing it when she's not making any progress?'" Soo-Kyung recalled. She began painstakingly urging Yuna to push up using her elbow, never sure Yuna understood. Then, "suddenly Yuna was sitting up and I didn't know how it happened." Probably a fluke, Soo-Kyung thought-but soon Yuna began sitting up regularly.

Experts say too little is understood about newly recognized neurological disorders to know children's developmental limits. But the Lees believe the sitting-up success shows that if they persevere, Yuna can make incremental progress. Their next goal is for Yuna to communicate when she is hungry, uncomfortable or wants something.

Speech therapists could not get Yuna to intentionally press a button activating a recorded voice saying things like "more." "I don't know if she understands what I am telling her," said Diana Deaibes, a speech-language pathologist at Shriners Hospital for Children.

But the Lees refused to let Shriners pause speech therapy, urging therapists to try teaching Yuna to stare at something she wants. "We insisted," said Jae, optimistic even though they attempted visual communication before "and it was a complete mess - she wasn't able to do it at all."

Ms. Deaibes tried pictures and then computer eye-gaze programs that track Yuna's eye movements. After months of Ms. Deaibes darkening the room to minimize distractions, buckling Yuna to control her jerky movements, Yuna can now stare for about three seconds, causing barn doors to open in computerized farmyards and other onscreen responses. The Lees hope to train Yuna to choose toys or books with her eyes.

At school, Yuna spends time in a regular second-grade classroom where social exposure helps her and enlightens other students, said Bridlemile's principal, Brad Pearson. These days, she increasingly responds to her name with eye contact or sound and rarely puts school materials in her mouth anymore, said Jim Steranko, who teaches Yuna in Bridlemile's learning resource center.

Ms. Lungershausen assists Yuna with everything, including feeding her and, with another aide's help, changing her diapers. She recently made colorful shapes for Yuna to grab while the second-graders studied fractions. "We have our bad days," Ms. Lungershausen said. But she said Yuna increasingly recognizes phrases like "Let's find the library door," recently "brought a Kleenex to her nose after being prompted" and "brought my hand to her mouth and 'kissed' it, deliberately, first time since I've known her."

-

At 41 pounds, Yuna weighs 10 pounds less than her little brother, Joon, 5, who has begun helping care for his older sister. One day, after Yuna's state-funded caregiver, Anne Marie Nguyen, bathed her and propped her in a baby play center to dry her, Joon, announcing he had finished "going potty," brushed Yuna's hair. Seeing her rip the bathroom thermostat's cover off, Joon pulled Yuna's hands from the wall, saying, "Don't touch that."

When Soo-Kyung returned home after lab work involving gene manipulation in mouse and chicken brains, she crouched on the playroom carpet, watching Yuna commando crawl and elbow herself to a sitting position. She lifted Yuna into the special walker, called a gait trainer and, waving toys, coaxed her to propel the contraption with her feet.

Then came Yuna's nightly FaceTime visit with her grandparents in South Korea, who sing and show pictures as Yuna intermittently eyes the screen. Later, Jae played guitar, while Soo-Kyung held Yuna, keeping her rangy arms from tearing into the instrument. Yuna smiled and bobbed.

Soo-Kyung rarely used to mention her daughter to fellow scientists, but recently began thanking Yuna during presentations. "I was afraid every day that she might not be with me the next day," Soo-Kyung said, voice breaking. "But she's done amazing things that we wouldn't dare to dream. So, how can anyone say she will never be able to do this, she will never be able to do that?"

They carried Yuna upstairs to her giant crib, her body arching elastically. Carting her up and down is getting harder, so the Lees expect to move from the three-level, cliff-side house they bought to be closer, for Yuna's sake, to the hospital and their labs. With breathtaking views of Mount St. Helen's, it is an optimist's house, where it is possible to see beyond the horizon.

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Infinitesimal Odds: A Scientist Finds Her Child's Rare Illness Stems From the Gene She Studies

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PORTLAND, Ore. - By the time her mother received the doctor's email, Yuna Lee was already 2 years old, a child with a frightening medical mystery. Plagued with body-rattling seizures and inconsolable crying, she could not speak, walk or stand. "Why is she suffering so much?" her mother, Soo-Kyung Lee, anguished.

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From that day to this, no president of either party has appointed a union leader to a cabinet-level post. President Trump's secretary of labor is R. Alexander Acosta, the dean of Florida International University College of Law and a former United States attorney.

The position was supposed to be organized labor's means of exerting influence in the inner circle of any administration. Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor, started the process by insisting that President William Howard Taft separate labor's needs from those of commerce in general. President Taft finally split the Commerce Department in two in 1913, with one branch focused on working people and the other on commerce, broadly defined.

The new system gave organized labor a seat at the president's elbow. Frances Perkins - the first female cabinet member in history - soon emerged as a powerful labor secretary in President Franklin D. Roosevelt 's cabinet during the Great Depression. She had worked for Mr. Roosevelt while he was governor of New York, and he brought her along when he became president in 1933.

Ms. Perkins remained in the post throughout his presidency, which ended with Mr. Roosevelt's death in 1945, at the start of his fourth term. Social Security came into existence in 1935 partly through her efforts, as did 1938's Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a Federal minimum wage as well as rules for overtime pay.

Union membership grew rapidly during her tenure and continued to do so in the immediate post-World War II decades, reaching a peak in the mid-1960s, when at least a third of all wage-earners in the upper Midwest states belonged to unions. In Michigan - the quintessential manufacturing state - the share stood at 45 percent in 1964, or nearly half of that state's work force. Simply by their numbers, unions had the leverage to slow manufacturers who wanted to build factories abroad.

By the late 1970s, however, the merchandise trade deficit - the excess of imported goods over exports - turned negative. (It grew to almost $800 billion last year.) The many benefits of global trade have come at a tremendous cost to American workers. As the trade deficit swelled, unions lost much of their power.

Think about it: A huge amount of what America consumes is made overseas, with the implicit consent of the nation's now nearly neutered industrial unions. There were just seven strikes that involved at least 1,000 workers in 2017, according to Labor Department records. From 1968 to 1983, in sharp contrast, the total number of strikers across the country fell below 10 million in only one year - 1982. After that period, the annual total exceeded 10 million only three times.

In 1983, union membership was 17.7 million - representing 20 percent of all wage and salary workers. Last year, it was 14.8 million, representing just 10.7 percent of those workers. No wonder President Trump can talk about making America great again and not feel much pressure from organized labor to do much about it.

As union membership declines, labor has less leverage to intervene in the management of a corporation, or to galvanize the public into boycotting the products of manufacturers who put too many factories overseas while exporting less from the United States.

Strikes work when union membership is high enough to encourage the public to support the strikers, or at least feel a kinship with them. My parents, who lived comfortably on my father's earnings as a textile broker in New York, never crossed a picket line thrown up by a labor union in pursuit of a favorable contract. They might not have agreed with a union's demands, or even known what they were. But they respected a strike as an often-necessary tool in reaching a compromise acceptable to both sides.

They wanted that compromise. They had been young adults during the Depression, and they did not want to see, once again, the vagrancy and hunger that had been so commonplace - so visible - in the 1930s. That sentiment resurfaced for many Americans in 1965, when Cesar Chavez dug in his heels against California's table grape growers, organizing a strike against them and calling - successfully - for a nationwide boycott of their grapes.

Mr. Chavez and his cause riveted the nation, and my family and friends stayed away from grapes for weeks. So did millions of others.

The prestige of the labor movement was much greater then. In today's climate, it is hard to recall the public stature of a man like Douglas Fraser, president of the United Auto Workers from 1977 to 1983, and the first labor leader to sit on the board of an American automobile company - in his case Chrysler. His views mattered.

We have come a long way since then, not necessarily in the right direction. The street demonstrations and marches so characteristic of today's resistance can be immensely meaningful, but they don't force the sort of permanent economic change that a union can achieve through a binding contract that emerges from a strike.

Or at least they haven't yet. Perhaps in time new organizations will emerge - heirs to the old union movement - and one of their priorities will be to pressure manufacturers quite publicly to put more of their factories in the United States.

Correction: April 20, 2018

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How the Loss of Union Power Has Hurt American Manufacturing

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From that day to this, no president of either party has appointed a union leader to a cabinet-level post. President Trump's secretary of labor is R. Alexander Acosta, the dean of Florida International University College of Law and a former United States attorney.

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Wirecutter, a New York Times company, recommends the Roku Streaming Stick+, if you need help choosing, which costs retails for about $65. It comes with an external Wi-Fi antenna, tons of supported content to stream, a customizable home screen so you can get right to the services you use, and even supports 4K video. Best of all, these streaming sticks are portable enough you can take them with you if you travel, head off on vacation, or even fly somewhere for work, and take your streaming media with you.

Of course, you can also go with something cheaper like the Roku Streaming Stick for $45 or Google's Chromecast, for $35. The point of course is to finally go with something, and embrace laying down on the couch, binge watching your next new favorite TV show, especially if you haven't already.

The gadget that finds all your lost gadgets

Back in 2013, a small company started a crowdfunding campaign on its own website. The small company met its crowdfunding goal, racked up more than 200,000 presales and earned a loyal customer base. Today, that company, Tile, makes a well-known Bluetooth tracker that attaches to anything you deem important and keeps track of it via mobile app. Other Bluetooth trackers now also exist because finding your keys, wallet, or anything else you lose is easier than ever.

Wirecutter recommends going with the Tile Sport for its Bluetooth range, alarm sound volume and its handy crowd-finding feature. Basically, if you lose an item that has a Tile attached to it, anyone with the Tile app that passes by it will help ping the location of your lost item to you. That's right; the person didn't have to use the app to help you out (and no, they won't know you lost something).

If you prefer to go with a Bluetooth tracker that has a replaceable battery (but less stellar Bluetooth range and no crowd-finding), Wirecutter recommends the TrackR Pixel. You can replace the battery, rather than the whole product, and it comes with flashing lights as part of its alert system.

So, while you're reminiscing about your days going to a Blockbuster for movies, or reflecting on losing your keys and having to go through the couch cushions to find them, just know there's a gadget for that now. They aren't all perfect, but they do make life a little simpler and give you one less thing to worry about.

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3 Gadgets You Didn't Know You Needed, but Are Worth Buying

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Wirecutter, a New York Times company, recommends the Roku Streaming Stick+, if you need help choosing, which costs retails for about $65. It comes with an external Wi-Fi antenna, tons of supported content to stream, a customizable home screen so you can get right to the services you use, and even supports 4K video.