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Some disability rights advocates criticise prenatal testing and selective abortion on the grounds that these practices express negative attitudes towards existing persons with disabilities. Disability rights advocates also commonly criticise and oppose physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and euthanasia on the same grounds. Despite the structural and motivational similarity of these two kinds of arguments, there is no literature comparing and contrasting their relative merits and the merits of responses to them with respect to each of these specific medical practices. This paper undertakes such a comparison. My thesis is that a number of potentially significant weaknesses of the expressivist argument against reproductive technologies are avoided when the argument is used against PAS. In particular, I try to show that three common criticisms of the expressivist argument applied to reproductive technologies, whatever merit they have, have even less merit when they are used to reply to the expressivist argument applied to PAS. This is important because the expressivist argument applied to the end of life scenario does not get as much attention as the argument applied to the beginning of life scenario, and yet it has a relatively stronger position.

We live in a technological age and the impacts of technology on the individual, society, and environment are great. Technology is the study of the human quest for solutions to problems involving the design and production of artifacts, systems, and environments. Society needs professionals who understand technological forces and are prepared to help people manage those forces. Students in either the technology education (technology and pre-engineering education) or Mathematics/Science/Technology-M/S/T (NJDOE approved academic major for education) major study a variety of themes including historical and contemporary influence of designed objects on end users and society, design style, product development, human factors engineering, product modeling, problem-solving techniques, communication, computers, and robotics. Emphasis is placed on understanding and applying core technological/pre-engineering/ mathematical/and scientific principles to develop design and problem-solving skills. Courses are conducted in modern classroom/laboratories housed in the School of Engineering. "Technology Education" is a broad term used in the United States to describe a curriculum that addresses the need to educate students about the many ways that technology affects their lives. At The College of New Jersey's School of Engineering, this area of certification has been redesigned to include K-12 technological and preengineering principles. The goal of the program is to prepare teachers who can explain to students how objects that they interact with on a daily basis have been conceived of, designed, and fabricated by another person or group of people-an engineer, architect, graphic/fashion or industrial designer. These objects run the gamut from the design of the package that contains their cereal to the fabrication and fashion design of their clothing, to the water supply system that allows them to wash in the morning, to the myriad of engineering advances that allow them to play MP3s on their PC and instant message friends from their mobile phones while sitting comfortably in their climate-controlled houses. New "Standards for Technological Literacy: Content for the Study of Technology" were published in 2000. The National Science Foundation (NSF), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and most recently the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) have recognized technology education/pre-engineering as a new field of study and as an important element of school reform. Continuing its commitment to providing New Jersey's children with an education that enables them to succeed in the new economy, the New Jersey Department of Education established a new Core Content Standard #8 for "Technological Literacy." Students in the Department of Technological Studies with a teacher-education specialty in either Technology Education or M/S/T receive provisional certification to teach in New Jersey schools. Most states recognize teacher candidates from these NCATE nationally accredited program. Students graduating from the pro...

Background & purpose Pandemics such as COVID-19 can lead to severe shortages in healthcare resources, requiring the development of evidence-based Crisis Standard of Care (CSC) protocols. A protocol that limits the resuscitation of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) to events that are more likely to result in a positive outcome can lower hospital burdens and reduce emergency medical services resources and infection risk, although it would come at the cost of lives lost that could otherwise be saved. Our primary objective was to evaluate candidate OHCA CSC protocols involving known predictors of survival and identify the protocol that results in the smallest resource burden, as measured by the number of hospitalizations required per favorable OHCA outcome achieved. Our secondary objective was to describe the effects of the CSC protocols in terms of health outcomes and other measures of resource burden. Methods We conducted a retrospective cohort study of adult patients in the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES) database. Non-traumatic OHCA events from 2018 were included (n = 79,533). Candidate CSC protocols involving combinations of known predictors of good survival for OHCA were applied to the existing dataset to measure the resulting numbers of resuscitation attempts, transportations to hospital, hospital admissions, and favorable neurological outcomes. These outcomes were also assessed under Standard Care, defined as no CSC protocol applied to the data. Results The CSC protocol with the smallest number of hospitalizations per survivor with a favorable neurological outcome was that an OHCA resuscitation should only be attempted if the arrest was witnessed by emergency medical services or the first monitored rhythm was shockable (number of hospitalizations: 2.26 [95% CI: 2.21–2.31] vs. 3.46 [95% CI: 3.39–3.53] under Standard Care). This rule resulted in significant reductions in resource utilization (46.1% of hospitalizations and 29.2% of resuscitation attempts compared to Standard Care) while still preserving 70.5% of the favorable neurological outcomes under Standard Care. For every favorable neurological outcome lost under this CSC protocol, 6.3 hospital beds were made free that could be used to treat other patients. Conclusion In a pandemic scenario, pre-hospital CSC protocols that might not otherwise be considered have the potential to greatly improve overall survival, and this study provides an evidence-based approach towards selecting such a protocol. As this study was performed using data generated before the COVID-19 pandemic, future studies incorporating pandemic-era data will further help develop evidence-based CSC protocols.

Community college faculty have experienced a shift in focus from access to access and student success. Given this shift in responsibility for student learning, community college faculty should be sufficiently prepared to teach a diverse student body and subsequently uphold beliefs regarding their ability to bring about desired outcomes of student engagement and learning. Given preparedness is a measure of self-efficacy, professional development for community college faculty is a critical investment in the support and development of teacher efficacy and faculty skill.Social learning theory specifically speaks to a means of increasing self-efficacy. As a professional development practice, social learning allows for participants to share problems, ideas, viewpoints, and collaboration towards solutions. Faculty development grounded in social learning theory may serve as a viable option for community college faculty to learn best practices in teaching and learning via social influence and social reinforcement. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the effect, if any, of professional development modeled upon social learning theory on community college teacher efficacy. Administrators and faculty developers may find the results of this study useful as they make decisions about program design and resource allocation.iii A pre-experimental, one-group pre-and post-test research design using the Teacher's Sense of Efficacy Scale was used to measure the effectiveness of a faculty development treatment on teacher efficacy beliefs in the constructs of classroom management, student engagement, and instructional strategies. This method enabled a comparison of efficacy levels prior to and after participation in faculty professional development as a means to determine any potential influence.Data were analyzed by employing dependent and independent sample t-tests to determine differences in teacher efficacy mean scores over time. Findings indicated no significant differences in pre-and post-test scores for overall teacher efficacy and efficacy in the constructs of classroom management, student engagement, and instructional strategies. However, there was a significant difference in overall teacher efficacy scores after participating in the faculty development treatment between new and experienced faculty. From these findings, three themes were drawn that provide specific recommendations for community college faculty development program design. iv