Search

Background Non-traditional practice placements are a type of field education based on an innovation-oriented approach, in which students are expected to develop new activities or new projects that would not be realized without them. So, it is not a requirement to reproduce the work of other professionals but rather to experience something new. This “new” experience could be a program built along the lines of an existing program that has already been successful elsewhere, or it could include activities that an agency omitted due to insufficient staff to engage in them. In some case, students must venture on paths that are not beaten at all. Similar non-traditional placements are documented in the UK (Scholar et al., 2014) and in the USA, where they are sometimes developed according to a service-learning approach (Petracchi et al., 2016). In Italy, this type of practice placement is called Unconventional Practice Placement (UPP) to distinguish it from traditional ones. Such experiences currently exist in the Social Work Course of three Italian universities (Dellavalle, 2011; Cola, 2015; Calcaterra and Raineri, 2015). Chapter’s aims After a brief presentation about the general characteristics of these atypical practice placements, the chapter will present the Italian experience conducted in the Catholic University of Milan. The description will be based on first-hand knowledge of authors who have directly contributed towards the development of this model, informal information from practice teachers involved in UPPs supervision, and on data from a larger study about UPPs during ten academic years from 2008/9 to 2018/19. Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered through a self-administered questionnaire. 515 students answered about 450 UPPs. Qualitative data were analyzed to map the contents of various interventions, and a frequency distribution analysis of quantitative data was carried out. Main results from a survey Thanks to UPPs, many local communities could be

Background Non-traditional practice placements are a type of field education based on an innovation-oriented approach, in which students are expected to develop new activities or new projects that would not be realized without them. So, it is not a requirement to reproduce the work of other professionals but rather to experience something new. This “new” experience could be a program built along the lines of an existing program that has already been successful elsewhere, or it could include activities that an agency omitted due to insufficient staff to engage in them. In some case, students must venture on paths that are not beaten at all. Similar non-traditional placements are documented in the UK (Scholar et al., 2014) and in the USA, where they are sometimes developed according to a service-learning approach (Petracchi et al., 2016). In Italy, this type of practice placement is called Unconventional Practice Placement (UPP) to distinguish it from traditional ones. Such experiences currently exist in the Social Work Course of three Italian universities (Dellavalle, 2011; Cola, 2015; Calcaterra and Raineri, 2015). Chapter’s aims After a brief presentation about the general characteristics of these atypical practice placements, the chapter will present the Italian experience conducted in the Catholic University of Milan. The description will be based on first-hand knowledge of authors who have directly contributed towards the development of this model, informal information from practice teachers involved in UPPs supervision, and on data from a larger study about UPPs during ten academic years from 2008/9 to 2018/19. Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered through a self-administered questionnaire. 515 students answered about 450 UPPs. Qualitative data were analyzed to map the contents of various interventions, and a frequency distribution analysis of quantitative data was carried out. Main results from a survey Thanks to UPPs, many local communities could be

Accuracy in melanoma detection is important to recognize early curable melanomas and to minimize the unnecessary excision of benign lesions. The aim of this paper was to evaluate melanoma screening accuracy of Italian pigmented lesion clinics in terms of number needed to excise (NNE), melanoma thickness, and number of melanomas diagnosed during patient follow-up.

The aim of followup programs for patients diagnosed with melanoma is early detection of local, regional and distant metastasis, as well as early recognition of eventual subsequent primary tumors. Currently, no universally accepted recommendations exist for monitoring patients with cutaneous melanoma. The present recommendations have been developed on the basis of the experience of a group of clinicians affiliated to referral centers dealing with melanoma diagnosis and management in Italy. Clinical evaluation is mandatory at any stage and is intended to be lifelong, with time frequencies of followup visits depending on the specific stage of disease. Sonography of regional lymph nodes has been demonstrated to have the highest accuracy and highest diagnostic validity to detect early regional relapse, and can be considered once per year starting from stage I melanoma. Total body CT scan should be considered in the follow up of patients with higher risk of developing distant metastasis. In stage II and III it should be performed once per year, alternated with abdomen and lymph node ultrasonography. Our aim is to provide a simplified schedule for the routine follow up of melanoma patients. These recommendations are intended as an initial guideline that must be tailored on the individual patient needs.

Accuracy in melanoma detection is important to recognize early curable melanomas and to minimize the unnecessary excision of benign lesions. The aim of this paper was to evaluate melanoma screening accuracy of Italian pigmented lesion clinics in terms of number needed to excise (NNE), melanoma thickness, and number of melanomas diagnosed during patient follow-up.

A systematic investigation on the effects of auxotrophies on the performance of yeast in aerated fed-batch reactor was carried out. Six isogenic strains from the CEN.PK family of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, one prototroph and five auxotrophs, were grown in aerated fed-batch reactor using the same operative conditions and a proper nutritional supplementation. The performance of the strains, in terms of final biomass decreased with increasing the number of auxotrophies. Auxotrophy for leucine exerted a profound negative effect on the performance of the strains. Accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the cells of the strain carrying four auxotrophies and its significant viability loss, were indicative of an oxidative stress response induced by exposure of cells to the environmental conditions. The mathematical model was fundamental to highlight how the carbon flux, depending on the number and type of auxotrophies, was diverted towards the production of increasingly large quantities of energy for maintenance. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.

This paper studies the properties of a new lower bound for the natural pseudo-distance. The natural pseudo-distance is a dissimilarity measure between shapes, where a shape is viewed as a topological space endowed with a real-valued continuous function. Measuring dissimilarity amounts to minimizing the change in the functions due to the application of homeomorphisms between topological spaces, with respect to the $L_\infty$-norm. In order to obtain the lower bound, a suitable metric between size functions, called matching distance, is introduced. It compares size functions by solving an optimal matching problem between countable point sets. The matching distance is shown to be resistant to perturbations, implying that it is always smaller than the natural pseudo-distance. We also prove that the lower bound so obtained is sharp and cannot be improved by any other distance between size functions.