DISTANCE LEARNING AND SPECIFIC LEARNING DISORDERS: A UNIVERSITY DIMENSION

This work aims to analyze and observe the world of Specifc Learning Disorders (SLDs) within the context of Distance Learning (DL), by introducing and including all the components, expressions and even the consequences that impact on the individual, projected into this different educational dimension. Learning disorders, to date and in the past, have achieved a great resonance in education and training, reaching the possibility of being recognized and supported adequately and appropriately. People with Specifc Learning Disorders can generally encounter, in their path of growth and evolution, diffculties in the processes of reading, writing or computing automation, and it often happens that these peculiarities are associated with each other. Frequently, these problems are linked to an experience of failure, assuming a rather relevant relational-emotional confguration and profle. In this sense, the use of distance learning should not in any way weigh on and constrain the educational path of these students, both in school and university; the basic educational goal should in all cases lead to the subject’s well-being and overall balance. Consequently, this assumption brings with it that the structuring of a poorly functional and inadequate educational condition could cause and represent an obstacle to the subject’s growth and knowledge path

Monitoring the performance of residents during training in off-pump coronary surgery.

OBJECTIVE: Control charts (eg, cumulative sum charts) plot changes in performance with time and can alert a surgeon to suboptimal performance. They were used to compare performance of off-pump coronary artery bypass surgery between a consultant and four resident surgeons and to compare performance of off-pump coronary artery bypass surgery and conventional coronary artery bypass grafting within surgeons. METHODS: Data were analyzed for consecutive patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting who were operated on by one consultant or one of four residents. Conversions were analyzed by intention to treat. Perioperative death or one or more of 10 adverse events constituted failure. Predicted risks of failure for individual patients were derived from the study population. Variable life-adjusted displays and risk-adjusted sequential probability ratio test charts were plotted. RESULTS: Data for 1372 patients were analyzed; 769 of the procedures were off-pump coronary artery bypass operations (56.0%). The consultant operated on 382 patients (293 off-pump, 76.7%), and the residents operated on 990 (474 off-pump, 47.9%). Patients operated on by residents tended to be older, more obese, more likely to require an urgent operation, and more likely to need a circumflex artery graft but less likely to have triple-vessel disease. There were 7 conversions (consultant 5, residents 2). The overall failure rate was 8.5% (9.2% for consultant's operations and 8.2% for residents' operations), including 10 deaths (0.7%). Predicted and observed risks of failure were similar for all five surgeons. After 100 off-pump coronary artery bypass operations, performance was the same or better for the residents as for the consultant. For all surgeons, performance was the same or better for off-pump as for conventional coronary artery bypass grafting. CONCLUSIONS: Off-pump coronary artery bypass surgery can be safely taught to cardiothoracic residents. Implementation of continuous performance monitoring for residents is practicable

The ms 6.9, 1980 irpinia earthquake from the basement to the surface: a review of tectonic geomorphology and geophysical constraints, and new data on postseismic deformation

The MS 6.9, 1980 Irpinia earthquake occurred in the southern Apennines, a fold and thrust belt that has been undergoing post-orogenic extension since ca. 400 kyr. The strongly anisotropic structure of fold and thrust belts like the Apennines, including late-orogenic low-angle normal faults and inherited Mesozoic extensional features besides gently dipping thrusts, result in a complex, overall layered architecture of the orogenic edifice. Effective decoupling between deep and shallow structural levels of this mountain belt is related to the strong rheological contrast produced by a fluid-saturated, shale-dominated mélange zone interposed between buried autochthonous carbonates—continuous with those exposed in the foreland to the east—and the allochthonous units. The presence of fluid reservoirs below the mélange zone is shown by a high VP /VS ratio—which is a proxy for densely fractured fluid-saturated crustal volumes—recorded by seismic tomography within the buried autochthonous carbonates and the top part of the underlying basement. These crustal volumes, in which background seismicity is remarkably concentrated, are fed by fluids migrating along the major active faults. High pore fluid pressures, decreasing the yield stress, are recorded by low stress-drop values associated with the earthquakes. On the other hand, the mountain belt is characterized by substantial gas flow to the surface, recorded as both distributed soil gas emissions and vigorous gas vents. The accumulation of CO2-brine within a reservoir located at hypocentral depths beneath the Irpinia region is not only interpreted to control a multiyear cyclic behavior of microseismicity, but could also play a role in ground motions detected by space-based geodetic measurements in the postseismic period. The analysis carried out in this study of persistent scatterer interferometry synthetic aperture radar (PS-InSAR) data, covering a timespan ranging from 12 to 30 years after the 1980 mainshock, points out that ground deformation has affected the Irpinia earthquake epicentral area in the last decades. These ground motions could be a result of postseismic afterslip, which is well known to occur over years or even decades after a large mainshock such as the 23 November 1980, MS 6.9 earthquake due to cycles of CO2-brine accumulation at depth and its subsequent release by Mw ≥ 3.5 earthquakes, or most likely by a combination of both. Postseismic afterslip controls geomorphology, topography, and surface deformation in seismically active areas such as that of the present study, characterized by ~M 7 earthquakes. Yet, this process has been largely overlooked in the case of the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, and one of the main aims of this study is to fill such the substantial gap of knowledge for the epicentral area of some of the most destructive earthquakes that have ever occurred in Italy

Civil structures made entirely from FRP pultruded beams

The aim of this paper is to present the main problems connected to the design of a civil structures made from composite materials, starting from the initial choice of the material up to the choice of the opportune procedure for designing and verifying the FRP elements. Finally, the authors carried out an example of rehabilitation of a roofing structure consisting in replace totally the latter with a new one made entirely from FRP pultruded profiles. The new roofing structure is truss-frame type with a length equal to twelve meter whose connections are realized with steel bolts. The material used consist of glass FRP and the geometrical and mechanical properties are given by technical data sheets edited by the manufacturer

Effects of Water Volume and Nitrogen Fertilization on Yield and Quality Traits of Air-cured Burley Tobacco (Nicotianatabacum L.)

AbstractBased on a two-year field trial in the region of Campania (Southern Italy) the effects of water volume and nitrogen fertilization on the yield and quality of Burley tobacco (Nicotianatabacum L.) were investigated with reference to the following traits: cured leaf yield, price index, yield value, leaf area, specific leaf weight, burning capacity, color parameters, total alkaloid, nitrate and chloride leaf content. The experimental design was a factorial comparison among three water volumes (40, 80 and 120% evapotranspiration (ET)), four nitrogen fertilization levels (0, 80, 160 and 240 kg ha-1) and two genotypes (cv TN86 and the hybrid R7-11). The yield of cured leaves rose with the increase in water and nitrogen availability, albeit at a decreasing rate. With the increase in water volume, the price index, burning capacity, specific leaf weight, total alkaloid and nitrate content decreased, while leaf area and chloride content increased. Up to a rate of 160 kg ha-1, nitrogen fertilization increased the price index, yield value, burning capacity, leaf area, specific leaf weight, total alkaloid and nitrates, and reduced leaf chloride content especially at 40% ET water volume. Both, nitrogen fertilization and water volume had little influence on leaf color. The year had considerable effects on yield, leaf area and color parameters, with higher values in the rainier season. In the two years, genotype TN86 showed higher stability for yield and yield value, lower alkaloid and higher nitrate content in the leaf than the R7-11 hybrid

Experimental and numerical investigation of the Refined Zigzag Theory for accurate buckling analysis of highly heterogeneous sandwich beams

The Refined Zigzag Theory (RZT) is a structural theory developed for the analysis of composite multilayer and sandwich beams. However, the accuracy of RZT for buckling analysis of sandwich beams has not been experimentally investigated, and for RZT and Timoshenko Beam Theory (TBT) the effect of the degree of heterogeneity on their accuracy requires further study. The aim of this work was to validate the use of the RZT for predicting the critical buckling loads of sandwich beams, even with highly heterogeneous material properties, and to assess the use of the TBT for the same application. Buckling experiments were conducted on five foam-core sandwich beams, which varied in geometry and included highly heterogeneous configurations. For each beam, two finite element (FE) models were analyzed using RZT- and TBT-beam FEs. The comparison between the numerical and the experimental results highlighted a major capability of RZT to correctly predict the critical buckling load for all the beams considered. The dependence of the TBT results on the beam characteristics was further investigated through a parametric analysis, which showed the dominant effect to be a close to linear relationship between the TBT error and the beam face-to-core thickness ratio. The work demonstrated the outstanding accuracy of the RZT predictions, including the superior capabilities with respect to TBT, and has application for rapid and accurate analysis of industrial structures

A Template Analysis of Intimate Partner Violence Survivors’ Experiences of Animal Maltreatment: Implications for Safety Planning and Intervention

This study explores the intersection of intimate partner violence (IPV) and animal cruelty in an ethnically diverse sample of 103 pet-owning IPV survivors recruited from community-based domestic violence programs. Template analysis revealed five themes: (a) Animal Maltreatment by Partner as a Tactic of Coercive Power and Control, (b) Animal Maltreatment by Partner as Discipline or Punishment of Pet, (c) Animal Maltreatment by Children, (d) Emotional and Psychological Impact of Animal Maltreatment Exposure, and (e) Pets as an Obstacle to Effective Safety Planning. Results demonstrate the potential impact of animal maltreatment exposure on women and child IPV survivors’ health and safety

Children exposed to intimate partner violence: Identifying differential effects of family environment on children\u27s trauma and psychopathology symptoms through regression mixture models

The majority of analytic approaches aimed at understanding the influence of environmental context on children\u27s socioemotional adjustment assume comparable effects of contextual risk and protective factors for all children. Using self-reported data from 289 maternal caregiver-child dyads, we examined the degree to which there are differential effects of severity of intimate partner violence (IPV) exposure, yearly household income, and number of children in the family on posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTS) and psychopathology symptoms (i.e., internalizing and externalizing problems) among school-age children between the ages of 7–12 years. A regression mixture model identified three latent classes that were primarily distinguished by differential effects of IPV exposure severity on PTS and psychopathology symptoms: (1) asymptomatic with low sensitivity to environmental factors (66% of children), (2) maladjusted with moderate sensitivity (24%), and (3) highly maladjusted with high sensitivity (10%). Children with mothers who had higher levels of education were more likely to be in the maladjusted with moderate sensitivity group than the asymptomatic with low sensitivity group. Latino children were less likely to be in both maladjusted groups compared to the asymptomatic group. Overall, the findings suggest differential effects of family environmental factors on PTS and psychopathology symptoms among children exposed to IPV. Implications for research and practice are discussed