Indigenous school education as contested spaces: the Brazilian experience in São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul

Indigenous schools are spaces for the convergence of different worldviews and to demonstrate how the creativity of each ethnic group challenges exogenous and established concepts and methodologies. This article examines main trends and pending gaps related to indigenous education in Brazil between the years 2007 and 2019. Issues such as the characterisation of indigenous schools, teachers and students are analysed, with a focus on the evolution of the number of students enrolled, infrastructure, language and pedagogic approaches. The analysis is focused on the states of Mato Grosso do Sul, which has a large indigenous population and an economy based on export-oriented agribusiness, and São Paulo, the main economic, demographic and political centre of Brazil with a much smaller indigenous population. The results demonstrate concrete improvements, especially the expansion of the number of schools and the student population. A growing number of schools are now dedicated to serve indigenous populations and make use of specific teaching material (although this material is of uneven quality). However, many problems remain unresolved, including threats to funding and uncertain administrative support from public authorities, a situation that has been aggravated in recent years with the growing adoption of elitist, anti-indigenous government policies

Collision skin lesions-results of a multicenter study of the International Dermoscopy Society (IDS)

Background: Collision lesions as two independent and unrelated skin tumors often manifest an atypical morphology. Objective: To determine the combinations of collision skin lesions (CSLs). Methods: Twenty-one pigmented lesion clinics in nine countries included 77 histopathologically proven CSLs in this retrospective observational study. Results: Seventy-seven CSLs from 75 patients (median age 59.8 years) were analyzed; 24.7% of CSLs were located on the head and neck area, 5.2% on the upper extremities, 48.1% on the trunk, and 11.7% on the lower extremities; 40.3% revealed a melanocytic component (median age 54.7 years), followed by 45.5% with a basal cell carcinoma (BCC) (median age 62.4 years) and 11.7% with a seborrheic keratosis (median age 64.7 years). CSLs with a BCC component were more often found on the head and neck area compared to tumors with a melanocytic component (34.3% versus 16.1%). Lesions with a melanocytic component were more often detected on the trunk compared to lesions with a BCC (64.5% versus 37.1%). Patients with CSLs with epidermal-epidermal cell combination were older than patients with epidermal-dermal cell combination (63 versus 55.2 years), were more often male than female (63% versus 43.3%), more often had the lesion on the head and neck area (32.6% versus 13.3%), and less often on the upper (2.2 % versus 10%) or lower extremities (8.7% versus 16.6%). Conclusions: CSLs consist of a heterogeneous group of lesions of varying cell types. They are associated with advancing age and cumulative UV-exposure. CSLs manifest a complex morphology making it challenging to diagnose correctly

Pervasive gaps in Amazonian ecological research

Biodiversity loss is one of the main challenges of our time,1,2 and attempts to address it require a clear un derstanding of how ecological communities respond to environmental change across time and space.3,4 While the increasing availability of global databases on ecological communities has advanced our knowledge of biodiversity sensitivity to environmental changes,5–7 vast areas of the tropics remain understudied.8–11 In the American tropics, Amazonia stands out as the world’s most diverse rainforest and the primary source of Neotropical biodiversity,12 but it remains among the least known forests in America and is often underrepre sented in biodiversity databases.13–15 To worsen this situation, human-induced modifications16,17 may elim inate pieces of the Amazon’s biodiversity puzzle before we can use them to understand how ecological com munities are responding. To increase generalization and applicability of biodiversity knowledge,18,19 it is thus crucial to reduce biases in ecological research, particularly in regions projected to face the most pronounced environmental changes. We integrate ecological community metadata of 7,694 sampling sites for multiple or ganism groups in a machine learning model framework to map the research probability across the Brazilian Amazonia, while identifying the region’s vulnerability to environmental change. 15%–18% of the most ne glected areas in ecological research are expected to experience severe climate or land use changes by 2050. This means that unless we take immediate action, we will not be able to establish their current status, much less monitor how it is changing and what is being lostinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio