Our picksWhat’s different about the Sri Lanka attacks; FBI’s facial recognition accuracy falls short; Greenland is falling apart, and more

Published 23 April 2019

·  Greenland is falling apart

·  Anti-vaxxers ‘educated just well enough to make terrible decisions for their children’

·  A scholar of extremism on how religious conflict shapes Sri Lanka

·  What people don’t get about why planes crash

·  70+ new measles cases reported across the U.S.

·  Climate change: Slightly stronger but fewer hurricanes, one expert says

·  New Mexico border militia leader allegedly said group planned to assassinate Obama, Clinton

·  Say freeze? FBI’s facial recognition accuracy unmeasured for three years, warns watchdog

·  What’s different about the attacks in Sri Lanka

Greenland is falling apart (Robinson Meyer, Defense One)
Its ice sheet, which holds enough water to raise sea level by 25 feet, may now be melting from the bottom.

Anti-vaxxers ‘educated just well enough to make terrible decisions for their children’ (Alfred Lubrano, Hamilton Spectator)
Rebel forces in America’s latest culture war are often white, college-educated, and they believe that their thinking supersedes that of doctors.
If you’re against vaccinating your child, there’s a good chance you’re a college-educated white woman making decent money.
The rebel forces in America’s latest culture war — the so-called anti-vaxxers — are often described as middle- and upper-class women who breastfeed their children, shop at Whole Foods, endlessly scour the web for vaccine-related conversation, and believe that their thinking supersedes that of doctors. Typically their families earn more than $75,000 a year.
That’s based on findings from various studies, including the National Immunization Surveys conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. It’s also echoed by doctors, sociologists and anthropologists who follow the vaccination debate raging around the country at a time when measles outbreaks have hit several states, including New Jersey, New York, California and Michigan.
….
Doctors don’t mince words about anti-vaxxers.
“Frankly, these Caucasian, suburban, educated parents believe they can Google the word vaccine and get as much information as anybody,” said Paul Offit, a professor of pediatrics and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“These people are educated just well enough to make terrible decisions for their children.”

Epidemiologist Neal Goldstein at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health agreed.
“The affluent classes tend to be more hesitant about vaccinating,” he said. But that’s based “on wrong information that leads them down a rabbit hole of falsehoods. I can spot credible data online, but the general public doesn’t have my training.”
Vaccine resistance has become a “form of privilege,” Reich said. Educated mothers develop a sense of entitlement that helps them decide which vaccines are unnecessary, Reich said, adding, “They focus on organic foods, health-promoting practices at home — ways they see of mitigating disease risk.”
Moms see their efforts as superior to those of doctors who don’t know their children. But, Reich said, maternal vigilance “cannot control infectious disease.”
…. (cont.)