Author Archives: AlfredoParnell

Sprint Update: 5,000 New Jobs, But They Still Don’t Know What They’re For

by AlfredoParnell Posted on December 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last April, Sprint announced that it planned to hire 5,000 workers to deliver cell phones to customers at their homes. A few days ago it announced it would be hiring 5,000 new workers for…something. I surmised that these were actually the same 5,000 workers, and Sprint wasn’t doing anything new. But apparently I was wrong. Max Ehrenfreund reports:

Representatives of Sprint have said the company will create positions for about 5,000 more people in the United States, counting both new employees and workers at Sprint’s contractors.

….Spokesman David Tovar said that the new positions would be in addition to Sprint’s previously announced plans to expand its presence on the street with 2,500 new stores and a fleet of vehicles for delivering phones. However, he added, the company has not yet determined exactly what the new workers will do or how many of them will work for Sprint as opposed to contractors.

Well…OK. But this is damn peculiar. We’re going to hire 5,000 new people, but we don’t really know what they’re going to do. What kind of company does something like that? It’s nuts. But they do know that a bunch of them will work for contractors. How do they know that? It’s all very mysterious. But I guess Masayoshi Son wanted to suck up to Donald Trump, so he sent down word to hire 5,000 people and find something for them to do. Welcome to free enterprise, Trump style.

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Sprint Update: 5,000 New Jobs, But They Still Don’t Know What They’re For

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Talk, Talk, Talk to Your Kids

by AlfredoParnell Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’ve long been sort of interested in the ongoing research that shows the importance of building vocabulary in children. This is famously summarized as the “30 million word gap,” thanks to findings that high-income children have heard 30 million more words than low-income children by age 3. But apparently new research is modifying these findings somewhat. It turns out that quality may be more important than quantity:

A study presented on Thursday at a White House conference on “bridging the word gap” found that among 2-year-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words — the use of shared symbols (“Look, a dog!”); rituals (“Want a bottle after your bath?”); and conversational fluency (“Yes, that is a bus!”) — were a far better predictor of language skills at age 3 than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.

….In a related finding, published in April, researchers who observed 11- and 14-month-old children in their homes found that the prevalence of one-on-one interactions and frequent use of parentese — the slow, high-pitched voice commonly used for talking to babies — were reliable predictors of language ability at age 2. The total number of words had no correlation with future ability.

In practice, talking more usually leads to talking better, so there’s probably a little less here than meets the eye. Still, it’s interesting stuff. Regardless of parental education level, it turns out that simply interacting with your newborn more frequently and more conversationally makes a big difference. So forget the baby Mozart, all you new parents. Instead, just chatter away with your kids. It’s cheaper and it works better.

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Talk, Talk, Talk to Your Kids

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