Factual Dispatch

With everyone terrified that their job is going to be automated in approximately the next five minutes, teachers, professors, career coaches, and motivational speakers have produced a plurality of pedagogy updates to give their students a leg up in this new digital hellscape. Most are nothing more than marketing ploys or e-commerce strategies, but one field of thought has emerged that might have some legs. Called Humanics, it's a utility belt of literacies and cognitive skills that are difficult to automate, at least with current technical projections. The Three Literacies are:

• Technical literacy - Working alongside robots, not just above or below them, will become mundane. Those who can sync with machines or digital systems, will outstrip 100% organic teams in every relevant measure.

• Data literacy - Those able to critically evaluate data, process it into information, filter misinformation, and use those insights to inform purchases and high-level strategy, will quickly become worth their weight in gold.

• Human literacy - Robots and robotic engineering types simply won't have the empathy, creativity, and non-specific intelligence that businesses, governments, the military, and non-profit organizations across the world will continue to need into the far future.

The Four Cognitive Skills robots will suck for little while longer at:

• Critical Thinking - The ability to judge baskets of incompatible information and make judgments is essentially impossible for even the most advanced supercomputing systems.

• Systems Thinking - Subject matter experts excel at discipline-specific thinking, but are blown out of the water by reference systems and weak AI. The ability to understand how multiple divergent systems integrate with each other is a much harder solve & will continue to be in demand for decades to come.

• Entrepreneurship - High-frequency trading algorithms may be able to carve out better performance than an active manager, but the active manager can go start his own business with better data scientists and maintain an edge in ways that systems may not ever be able to.

• Cultural Agility - Anything from being culturally aware of how to not commit faux pas while doing business in Asia, to understanding why your Muslim employees may need time off during Ramadan, the planet's increasingly connected and those who aren't able to globalize their horizons will soon find themselves left behind.

With the disclosure that Keith Flint's death was allegedly a suicide, we need to stop pretending that being rich, famous, or loved can inoculate someone against depression, self-harm, or suicidal ideation.  This week, the CDC disclosed that the number of deaths from suicide, drug & alcohol overdose have hit the highest levels since we started recording that data in 1999. We ned to get serious about developing policy that reflects the research, asthe things we think we know about suicide prevention are usually wrong. Marches, vigils, and memorials help with grief, but don't actually reduce suicide rates, nor do "anti-stigma" campaigns, which aim to help make people more comfortable talking about suicide. Instead of focusing on means reduction, which attempts to keep lethal means out of the hands of those at risk of self-harm, we still look for traditional markers, like talk of self-harm and other traditional factors. But in this era of "deaths of despair", we must to figure out how to keep people from killing themselves slowly, in addition to doing much more to prevent them from killing themselves quickly. (For more, take a look at this great thread by Dr. Sarah Taber, examining the spate of farmer suicides in the heartland, and how culture exacerbates their problems.)

Over the border from Xinjiang, lies a curious place in Kazahkstan. The closest town to the place dubbed the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility is a place called Khorgos. A tiny city within an impoverished post-Soviet satellite, made famous by that guy yelling MY WIFE, has become crucial to the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative. A sprawling infrastructure partnership project with dozens of countries as partners, it's been called everything from the future of the world to predatory debt traps at scale. Khorgos is situated at the border between Kazakhstan and China, and will be one of the first border crossing sites along their proposed new Belt, an overland trading pathway that China proclaims will be one of the greatest in the world. Its throughput matches the 26th busiest port in the USA, but it's also being used by the (Muslim) Kazakhs to smuggle things back and forth, especially given its proximity to the internment camps based in Xinjiang. As China's reputation on the world stage grows, pressure to ensure the BRI is successful increases, as it's known to be Xi Jinping's signature policy, so screw ups are not allowed. Which has resulted in some of the more restless detainees in Xinjiang being moved to Inner Mongolia, and also considerable expansion of the security state and mass internment in Xinjiang, with some Uighurs and Kazakhs finding secure employment as members of that security apparatus.It's one thing to intern citizens of your own country, but now the Chinese are beginning to arrest and intern Kazakhs in these camps, over the border in Xinjiang. The Kazakhs are starting to fight back, and it might be having an effect. Some have been granted asylum after the Kazakh government has successfully lobbied for their citizens to be released. The status of others, like Sayragul Sauytbay, the only whistleblower who worked inside the camps before illegally crossing the border, is much less secure. The world is starting to notice, with even a bipartisan group in the Congress starting to demand SecState Pompeo do literally anything. But given that China repeatedly invokes the US War on Terror as inspiration and excuse for their actions, I don't expect us to be able to get much done on the human rights front. Another 28 countries that have their hands in the cookie jar are also less likely to talk shit about Muslim internment camps, and with the G-7 member Italy flirting with joining the BRI, this is going to get worse before it gets better.

Eye-Watering Data Visualization of the Week: 

A great look at the how the US population grew since essentially its inception. And, for all you NYC data wonks, my esteemed colleagues over at Comparative Advantage Research produced this fantastic map tabulating the recent special election for Public Advocate.

Vaguely Dystopian News of the Week: Evidence of climate change has reached such an overwhelming point, it's been proven to the same degree as the existence of the Higgs-Boson, earning a five-sigma level of statistical confidence. In non-dork, this means (I am paraphrasing grad school stats, so please don't pillory me stats nerds) that climate change is real, with a 1-in-1,000,000 chance that they're misinterpreting the info and climate change is a statistical aberration in the data."Huh, Interesting" Read of the Week: Innovations in synthetic DNA added 4 new "letters" to the genetic alphabet. Also, NASA is evaluating this weird "mud-like" substance coating this new island that grew out of volcanic activity, which surfaced back in 2015.Annoying-But-Correct Take of the Week: Yes, the blockchain is hackable. No, your HODL'ing friends won't shut up about how it still remains "the future."Dunk of the Week:

How many years until Spring Cleaning includes shoveling snow?T