Dentistry in Brazil: Its History and Current Trends

The objectives of this article are to provide a short history of dentistry and dental education in Brazil and to analyze the nature of its development to date. The databases consulted are those provided by the Brazilian Federal Council of Dentistry, Brazilian Ministry of Health, Brazilian Ministry of Education, National Institute of Studies and Educational Research Anisio Teixeira, and Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Formal dental education in Brazil started in the late nineteenth century with the creation of courses annexed to existing schools of medicine in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia. Today, there are 191 institutions of higher education nationwide granting degrees in dentistry (137 private [71.7 percent] and fifty-four public [28.3 percent]), with a total of 17,157 student positions offered annually. These schools graduate around 10,000 professionals per year-one of the highest rates in the world. Both the distribution of schools of dentistry and of dentists varies among the regions of the country, with the greatest concentrations in major metropolitan centers with high population density, resulting in limited coverage in the more deprived regions. A review of epidemiological data for oral health and distribution of dentists in Brazil indicates that there is a lack of systematic planning for the allocation of the dental workforce and a lack of consideration of regional needs in the development of dental training programs in Brazil today.

Civic Discipline: Geography in America, 1860-1890

Civic Discipline argues that the story of the origins of American geography is a distinctly "New York story." Wealthy businessmen began America's first geographical society - the American Geographical Society - in 1851, inspired by what geographical knowledge of the globe could offer an expanding American commercial Empire at home and abroad. AGS meetings were spectacularly popular among the public and press. At them, geography was cast as a science in the service of the public and civic good. Meanwhile though, AGS men's spatial and financial "missions" became closely linked. They helped improve derelict spaces in New York City and weighed in on controversial scientific questions of the day in the Arctic, yet the geographical knowledge they advanced - such as in the American West and in Central Africa - also created enormous personal wealth. Civic Discipline shows that it was not just that historical events shaped geography, but rather, that geography shaped historical events.

Spring temperature variability and eutrophication history inferred from sedimentary pigments in the varved sediments of Lake Żabińskie, north-eastern Poland, AD 1907–2008

Varved lake sediments are excellent natural archives providing quantitative insights into climatic and environmental changes at very high resolution and chronological accuracy. However, due to the multitude of responses within lake ecosystems it is often difficult to understand how climate variability interacts with other environmental pressures such as eutrophication, and to attribute observed changes to specific causes. This is particularly challenging during the past 100 years when multiple strong trends are superposed. Here we present a high-resolution multi-proxy record of sedimentary pigments and other biogeochemical data from the varved sediments of Lake Żabińskie (Masurian Lake District, north-eastern Poland, 54°N–22°E, 120 m a.s.l.) spanning AD 1907 to 2008. Lake Żabińskie exhibits biogeochemical varves with highly organic late summer and winter layers separated by white layers of endogenous calcite precipitated in early summer. The aim of our study is to investigate whether climate-driven changes and anthropogenic changes can be separated in a multi-proxy sediment data set, and to explore which sediment proxies are potentially suitable for long quantitative climate reconstructions. We also test if convoluted analytical techniques (e.g. HPLC) can be substituted by rapid scanning techniques (visible reflectance spectroscopy VIS-RS; 380–730 nm). We used principal component analysis and cluster analysis to show that the recent eutrophication of Lake Żabińskie can be discriminated from climate-driven changes for the period AD 1907–2008. The eutrophication signal (PC1 = 46.4%; TOC, TN, TS, Phe-b, high TC/CD ratios total carotenoids/chlorophyll-a derivatives) is mainly expressed as increasing aquatic primary production, increasing hypolimnetic anoxia and a change in the algal community from green algae to blue-green algae. The proxies diagnostic for eutrophication show a smooth positive trend between 1907 and ca 1980 followed by a very rapid increase from ca. 1980 ± 2 onwards. We demonstrate that PC2 (24.4%, Chl-a-related pigments) is not affected by the eutrophication signal, but instead is sensitive to spring (MAM) temperature (r = 0.63, pcorr < 0.05, RMSEP = 0.56 °C; 5-yr filtered). Limnological monitoring data (2011–2013) support this finding. We also demonstrate that scanning visible reflectance spectroscopy (VIS-RS) data can be calibrated to HPLC-measured chloropigment data and be used to infer concentrations of sedimentary Chl-a derivatives {pheophytin a + pyropheophytin a}. This offers the possibility for very high-resolution (multi)millennial-long paleoenvironmental reconstructions.