Percutaneous ablation holds the potential to substitute for surgery as first choice treatment for symptomatic benign thyroid nodules.

Sir,We read with interest the letter by Tez M. regarding our article recently published in International Journal of Hyperthermia entitled "Benign thyroid nodules treatment using percutaneous laser ..

Is operators' experience more important than the ablation technique in image-guided thermal ablations?

n/

Unexpected Perinatal Loss versus Sids-a Common Neuropathologic Entity

Objective: To evaluate the involvement of alterations of the central autonomic nervous system, particularly of the brainstem and cerebellum, in a wide set of victims of sudden and unexplained perinatal and infant death

The encoding of irrelevance in discourse: tanto between concession and justification

This paper sets out to investigate the linguistic expression of irrelevance in discourse, by focusing on the functions and uses of the marker tanto in present-day Italian. The marker encodes the irrelevance of a given condition, thus conveying a concessive meaning not distant from the value expressed by concessive conditionals or ‘no matter’ predicates. In the construction [p, tanto q], the marker tanto conveys the fact that q holds in any case, namely whether p, non-p,or any value of p is the case. After discussing how the notion of irrelevance has been treated in the literature on condition-als, concessives and predicates of indifference, we will discuss the results of a corpus-based study on spoken Italian, identifying and annotating all the occurrences of irrelevance-tanto. We will show that irrelevance may be expressed by a number of different discourse patterns, explicitly mentioning the irrelevant proposition, the null-effect and the motivation for irrelevance, or omitting one or more of these components. It will be argued that the cases in which speakers simply refer to the irrelevance of a given proposition are rare in our sample, whereas it is more frequent that they also mention the motiva-tion underlying irrelevance, justifying their indifference and thus crucially acting at the intersubjective level. We will show that tanto may also be used alone as a discourse marker encoding the speaker’s attitude of indifference: in these cases, tanto is pronounced with suspensive intonation, and subsumes under its semantics the adversative, justificative, and indiscriminative value, activating meanings that speakers are supposed to share

Incorporando la experiencia profesional en la discusión mediada por un entorno blended-learning: ¿cómo y qué aprenden los profesores?

We discuss the results of a study aimed at shedding light on the influence that the sharing of professional teaching experiences may have on teachers’ professional learning. The focus is on the uses that participants make of their notes about their lesson planning experience in an in-service blended learning course, and the mediation strategies undertaken by the tutor in the virtual sessions. The study suggests that bringing in professional experience, which is generally well accepted, appears to be irrelevant, or may show a modest impact on professional learning development. Specific expertise is necessary for tutors to be able to support the meaning making process and effectively help in-service teachers to move from the mere exchange of experiences towards the appropriation of the target concepts.Discutimos los resultados de un estudio cuya finalidad es profundizar en la comprensión de cómo la compartición de experiencias profesionales de enseñanza puede influir en el aprendizaje profesional del profesorado. El foco incide en los usos que hacen los docentes, en un curso blended-learning, de las anotaciones sobre su experiencia de planificación de las clases y las estrategias de mediación llevadas a cabo por el tutor en las sesiones virtuales. El estudio sugiere que incorporar las experiencias profesionales al proceso formativo recoge una buena aceptación general, pero puede ser irrelevante o producir un impacto modesto en el desarrollo del aprendizaje profesional. Los tutores necesitan de competencias específicas para poder apoyar el proceso de construcción de significados y ayudar efectivamente a los docentes para que logren progresar desde del mero intercambio de experiencias hacia la apropiación de los nuevos conceptos

Intraductal Proliferative Lesions of the Breast—Terminology and Biology Matter: Premalignant Lesions or Preinvasive Cancer?

Morphological criteria for the diagnosis of intraductal proliferative lesions of the breast have been an object of research and much controversy, and its terminology is rather confusing. Knowledge of the molecular aspects of this disease probably necessitates further research to clarify if these entities can be identified as breast cancer precursors or as a malignant preinvasive disease. These issues are of great interest not only for their biological implications, but also to the clinician who must understand the disease and direct therapies. Molecular studies have shown that epitheliosis (usual ductal hyperplasia) is not monoclonal, while malignant lesions (atypical ductal hyperplasia, flat epithelial atypia, low-grade and high-grade intraductal carcinoma) constantly show these characteristics. These malignant lesions, classified with a DIN grading system (ductal intraepithelial neoplasia), are not obligate precursors of invasive ductal carcinoma and do not represent different evolving grades in a linear model of cancerogenesis. Breast cancerogenesis probably has different pathways with different morphologic precursors

Bringing in professional experience to a discussion mediated by a blended-learning environment: how and what do teacher learn?

We discuss the results of a study aimed at shedding light on the influence that the sharing of professional teaching experiences may have on teachers’ professional learning. The focus is on the uses that participants make of their notes about their lesson planning experience in an in-service blended learning course, and the mediation strategies undertaken by the tutor in the virtual sessions. The study suggests that bringing in professional experience, which is generally well accepted, appears to be irrelevant, or may show a modest impact on professional learning development. Specific expertise is necessary for tutors to be able to support the meaning making process and effectively help in-service teachers to move from the mere exchange of experiences towards the appropriation of the target concepts.We discuss the results of a study aimed at shedding light on the influence that the sharing of professional teaching experiences may have on teachers' professional learning. The focus is on the uses that participants make of their notes about their lesson planning experience in an in-service blended learning course, and the mediation strategies undertaken by the tutor in the virtual sessions. The study suggests that bringing in professional experience, which is generally well accepted, appears to be irrelevant, or may show a modest impact on professional learning development. Specific expertise is necessary for tutors to be able to support the meaning making process and effectively help in-service teachers to move from the mere exchange of experiences towards the appropriation of the target concepts

Evoluzione agraria e storia sociale in una proprietà ecclesiastica: i beni del monastero di S. Maria Teodote nella zona di Borgo S. Donnino nei secoli XIV e XV_PRIMA PARTE

Questo studio costituisce un importante contributo alla storia agraria del basso medioevo. Muovendo dall'analisi di una parte del patrimonio appartenuto all'importante monastero pavese, l'autrice analizza la trasformazione della proprietà fondiaria, delle modalità di gestione e del profilo sociale di concessionari e affittuari

Effects on Folsomia candida Willem, 1902 of products resulting from anaerobic digestion of biomass tested at different soil pH

In recent years, it has become increasingly important to reduce the production and impact of wastes on the environment, and to save and restore natural resources. A way of disposing industrial, agro-industrial and urban wastes is their treatment by anaerobic digestion, with the production of biogas and residual organic material. The latter is commonly called digestate and can be used in agriculture as fertilizer, soil improver or adsorbent material, but only scarce or no evaluations of its biological effects on soil organisms are presently available. The aim of the present research was to study the effects of digestate, when added to soils with different pH values, on the survival and reproduction of the collembolan Folsomia candida. The digestate investigated in this study was obtained from agro-industrial wastes mixed with biological sludge. We exposed springtails to two different concentrations of digestate (2.5%; 5%) in two artificial soils with pH values of 6 and 4.5. The addition of digestate resulted in an increase of experimental-soil pH values, depending on the concentration and original pH value of the artificial soil used. The negative effects of digestate detected on the survival and reproduction of F. candida was mainly attributed to pH values > 6. The high pH value, however, does not explain by itself the strong decrease in number of juveniles in the experimental soil when the highest concentration of digestate was combined with the highest pH value reached: in this case it is possible to assume a combined effect of pH and other digestate characteristics such as nitrogen content and salinity, currently under study

Evoluzione agraria e storia sociale in una proprietà ecclesiastica: i beni del monastero di S. Maria Teodote nella zona di Borgo S. Donnino nei secoli XIV e XV_PRIMA PARTE

Questo studio costituisce un importante contributo alla storia agraria del basso medioevo. Muovendo dall'analisi di una parte del patrimonio appartenuto all'importante monastero pavese, l'autrice analizza la trasformazione della proprietà fondiaria, delle modalità di gestione e del profilo sociale di concessionari e affittuari