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Objective: To evaluate emergency physician (EP) attitudes toward smallpox vaccination, the treatment of patients with suspected smallpox, and the threat of a bioterrorist attack. Methods: This was a prospective study utilizing a standardized survey instrument that was distributed on November 16, 2002, and collected by February 1, 2003. EPs from a sample of 50 accredited emergency medicine programs were surveyed regarding their perspectives on smallpox vaccination. Results: A total of 989 surveys were collected from 42 emergency medicine programs. Of the respondents, 43.4% would currently volunteer for smallpox vaccination. EPs previously vaccinated against smallpox were 1.46 times more likely to volunteer for vaccination (95% CI = 1.14 to 1.93). EPs who believed they were at risk for complications were less than half as likely to volunteer for vaccination. EPs who perceived a significant risk of a bioterrorist attack were 2.7 times more likely to volunteer for the vaccine compared with those who thought the risk was minimal (95% CI = 2.06 to 3.47). Of the respondents, 34.4% believed the risks of the vaccination outweighed the benefits, 33% did not, and 32.6% were unsure. Conclusions: Currently, fewer than half of EPs surveyed would volunteer for smallpox vaccination. Factors associated with a willingness to be vaccinated include previous smallpox vaccination and the perceived threat of a bioterrorist attack. The variation in EP attitudes toward smallpox vaccination may be due to uncertain risk‐to‐benefit ratio. The opinions and actions of EPs may be influential on current and future government policy and public opinion.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015) highlighted technologybased personalised learning (PL) as a means of providing equitable learning experiences for all students. Many states have put forward guidance in their ESSA plans to inform professional development (PD) that empowers educators with skills that maximize PL for students. This brief analysed data from state ESSA plans to better understand how states provided guidance to prepare educators to implement technology-based PL. Results showed that some states provided guidance on preparing educators to leverage technology for PL implementation; other states initiated efforts to provide personalised PD for educators supported through technology. Opportunities of PDPL and PPD for technology-based PL were discussed.

This article discusses Twitter bots that generate textual outputs for aesthetic effect. It considers in-detail a specific instance, The Ephemerides ( @the_ephemerides ) by Allison Parrish, and presents a critical assessment of how its functional and thematic attributes meditate self-reflexively upon their operational contexts within digital infrastructure. This mode of reading is then presented as having value for analysing generative Twitter bots more widely. The initial balance of this article will concern the broader question of how generative digital writing can be assessed critically, debating key claims made by Simanowski (2011), before presenting a model in which the salient quality of this art form is the distinctly machinic modes of expression it makes available, revealing the software itself to be an active agent in the reading encounter. The remainder of this article will then apply this perspective to a reading of The Ephemerides, considering its meditation on the functional and aesthetic relationship between technical systems that are unobtrusively efficient versus those that are vividly breaking down – with the latter making manifest the contingency that is inherent to the processes of coming to know and act on the world through technology. The goal of this discussion is to consider not only how the generative operations of Twitter bots might be approached fruitfully, but to demonstrate also that such analyses constitute a worthwhile pursuit in the first instance – that even these tightly constrained instances of digital creativity can offer forms expression that reward extended academic criticism.