I'm posting this paper because poor medical communication this year has resulted in a distrust in science. To improve vaccine uptake we need to understand what works and what doesn't.

Increasing Vaccination: Putting Psychological Science Into

1/OK, I should really write another thread about university-centric regional development, because I think people often make some (very understandable) mistakes when thinking about this issue.

2/The biggest myth, I think, is that universities help regions by educating locals as undergraduates.

Skeptics of universities say: "But most of the people who graduate end up leaving."

3/In fact, most of what a university does for a regional economy is NOT about educating local kids.

Educating local kids is good for the nation, but doesn't help a region much.

The way a university helps a region is through

4/Undergraduates usually leave town after graduation.

But university RESEARCH pulls in OTHER smart people from other regions, and they stay there.

Here's a paper showing that this is the main way universities increase a region's human capital:

5/Research also pulls in business investment.

Companies want to partner with university labs, so they can commercialize the technologies the labs produce. So they invest in the labs, and sometimes they even put their offices in the town.

We are all products of our own environments. Our environments shape our character, our personality, our habits, our identity.

The environment that Ousmane Dembélé grew up in and the environment that FC Barcelona seeks to engulf its youngsters with could not be more different.

The Great Gatsby starts with a life lesson.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

Ousmane hasn’t had the advantages that La Masia youngsters have had. That’s why he’s Ousmane.

Like every La Masia youngster, Ousmane grew up with a dream: playing for Barça.

Like every youngster, he fought to stand out amid a talented group of players, the majority of which would fail to go pro.

However, his football education was the polar opposite to that of La Masia.

Ousmane did not reside in one of the most expensive academies in Europe: he lived in a low-cost public housing unit in Normandy. He did not play in the well-trimmed pitches of La Masia, he played in the concrete jungles of Évreux. These disadvantages made him the man he is today.

While street soccer encourages individuality & creative freedom, academy-based training like La Masia encourages unselfishness & teamwork.

That’s why Barça produce certain types of 20-year-olds like a factory line. It’s also why Barça spent €145m on a 20-year-old Ousmane.

A story of inappropriate technology: in the 1970s it was decided to modernize the rice farming of Sri Lanka, whose system that had not changed much for 3000 years. The goal was to replace the water buffalo with the modern tractor, but the attempt had disastrous consequences...

Buffalos create "wallows", pools of muddy water without which they cannot control their temperatures. Always filled with water, these wallows create many eco-services: in the dry season the become a haven for fish that then migrate back to the paddies when these fill with water.

The fish is a valuable source of proteins for landless laborers and greatly help control the population of malaria causing mosquitoes who breed in the rice paddies. The vegetation around the wallows are breeding and hunting grounds for snakes and water monitor lizards who prey...

...on rats that eat the rice and the crabs that burrow into the sides of the rice paddies eventually causing them to lose integrity, leading to collapses of entire paddy systems.

Without the water buffalo wallows, villagers no longer had a place to soak the palm fronds they needed to thatch their roofs, leading them to rely on locally made clay roof tiles, which caused massive deforestation as trees were cut down to fuel the tile kilns.

In the 90s I was a host on a talk radio station in LA, the same that aired Rush. I was president of LA NOW, & the liberal wkend host when he visited the station. He was so vilified by my then-crowd, I expected a monster. Instead, I met a remarkable, kind and encouraging man... 1/

He was gregarious & generous when we met. He shook my hand & I was shocked that he was nice & genuinely curious about my radio work and activism. I realized I was going to have a fascinating conversation 2/

There were many events during this time as a radio talk show host that changed me. It was my first job in the medium starting in 1993. My meeting Rush & our conversations made me realize the left had been lying to me about many things... 3/

Rush was not a monster, he wasn’t evil, he did not mean people harm, he wasn’t a bigot, or any of the other smears lobbed against him by my leftist associates. I liked him very much, and while we disagreed on many things (then) he was nothing has he had been painted 4/

In my conversations with him, we talked about the issues and despite the disagreements, he also took time to give me advice about hosting, style, connecting w the audience, etc. He encouraged me and gave me advice that made a huge difference in my career… 5/

This has been going around, links to support. At this point we should all be digging!

(1) “TEXAS something is not sitting right with me with Texas and it’s not just the weather.
I mean it really bothers me these millions of Texas families are suffering.
I couldn’t sleep actually...

(2) So I woke up this morning, made coffee and got to researching.
I started pulling Biden’s EO’s this morning and I found something buried in the Keystone Pipeline EO..... way towards the end of the doc.

(3) It turns out that the same day Biden shut down the Keystone Pipeline, he also lifted the security on our power grid for 90 days (Trump’s EO the year prior secured our power grid by giving China no access.)

(4) Here below is the snippet buried in Biden’s Keystone pipeline EO.
“c) Executive Order 13920 of May 1, 2020 (Securing the United States Bulk-Power System), is hereby suspended for 90 days.