Is Chinese Competition Causing Deindustrialization in Brazil?

There has been a lively debate in Brazil in recent years, involving sectors of business, the labor movement, and academics, over deindustrialization and the future of the manufacturing sector. This is often linked to the growing relation between Brazil and China, which is now the country’s most significant trade partner. Brazil has experienced relative deindustrialization in the sense of a declining share of the manufacturing sector in gross domestic product that is mainly attributable to the changes in the country’s trade balance in manufactures. The direct and indirect impacts of China on Brazilian manufacturing have contributed to this relative deindustrialization

Surface runoff and accelerated erosion in a peri‑urban wellhead area in southeastern Brazil

Degradation of hydrological conditions can adversely impact water resource quality and quantity. This degradation can generate social and economic losses, including losses for users outside the basin area. Therefore, studies focusing on surface runof and accelerated erosion processes are needed to enable interventions that address degradation-induced challenges. In the present study, the surface runof and accelerated erosion potential of the Feijão River basin were presented in charts at a 1:50,000 scale. The Feijão River basin has an area of 243.16 km2 and is used as the main water source for the city of São Carlos, Brazil. Geoenvironmental attributes, such as substrate, climate, relief, soil, water bodies and land cover and use, were integrated and assessed in a GIS environment, using a multicriteria analysis and weighted sum tool. The results show that a large part of the area (86.12% of the basin) exhibits a low surface runof potential and a moderate accelerated erosion potential. Accelerated erosive processes are triggered by changes in soil cover and have a direct relationship with the removal of existing vegetation and implementation of anthropogenic activities. In this case, as well as for most of the areas in southeastern Brazil, extensive grazing followed by sugar cane cultivation was the main driving force of erosion, acting as trigger for accelerated erosive processes at the water source area

A Lexical Simplification Tool for Promoting Health Literacy

This paper presents MedSimples, an authoring tool that combines Natural Language Processing, Corpus Linguistics and Terminologyto help writers to convert health-related information into a more accessible version for people with low literacy skills. MedSimplesapplies parsing methods associated with lexical resources to automatically evaluate a text and present simplification suggestions thatare more suitable for the target audience. Using the suggestions provided by the tool, the author can adapt the original text and makeit more accessible. The focus of MedSimples lies on texts for special purposes, so that it not only deals with general vocabulary, butalso with specialized terms. The tool is currently under development, but an online working prototype exists and can be tested freely.An assessment of MedSimples was carried out aiming at evaluating its current performance with some promising results, especially forinforming the future developments that are planned for the tool