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Tuesday, 26 July 2022

New hires are getting paid more than loyal workers + Baby-talk is universal and could serve an evolutionary function.

WATCH THIS SPACE- If you’ve gotten a new job offer, it’s likely it’s for better pay: Thanks to rising inflation and a competitive labor market, US workers who choose to switch jobs saw an average salary increase of 6.4% in June, while those who have stayed at their job only saw their wages rise by 4.7%, according to monthly data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta picked up by the Wall Street Journal. This is the largest pay gap between those who left their jobs and those who stayed in 20 years.

At the heart of the problem are workers increasingly being aware of rising inflation, pushing hiring managers to catch up, Yongseok Shin, an economics professor at Washington University said. This has been exacerbated by an increase in the number of people switching jobs, with US employers hiring 372,000 in June, according to a Labor Department report earlier this month.

Should you stay or should you go? Ultimately, it’s a trade off. Yes, leaving would likely get you a better paying job in this climate, but it doesn’t come with the stability, and the likelihood of career progression, experts tell the WSJ.


Baby talk is a universal language, a global study finds: You may have cringed at it before and you’ve definitely done that high-pitched, sing-song, dopey-grin-induced sound for a baby. Well it turns out that baby talk — technically referred to as “parentese” — is truly a global language, according to a cross-cultural study published recently in the journal Nature Human Behavior. More than 40 scientists contributed to the research and analyzed over 1.6k voice recordings by 410 parents who speak 18 languages and hail from six continents. The families came from vastly diverse backgrounds, including rural, cosmopolitan, tech-savvy, and off the grid, as well as hunter-gatherers in Africa and city dwellers in Asia. All spoke and sang to their infants in profoundly similar ways.

But why do we make these weird wittle sounds? These baby noises are thought to serve a key evolutionary and developmental function, Samuel Mehr, a psychologist and director of The Music Lab at Haskins Laboratories who conceived the new study, told the New York Times. The noises we make with a newborn help teach language and communication by helping some infants remember words better, and allowing them to piece together sounds with mouth shapes. High pitched, soothing sounds also help sooth crying or distressed babies, she notes.

Out theory: Babies learn to talk just so they can tell us to shut up with those annoying sounds.

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