Uncovering the motivations towards a profession may contribute to a better understanding of how the profession is chosen and will be pursued. However, the research on the attractiveness of the music teaching profession is rather limited and predominantly focused on identity development, thereby overlooking other aspects that may play a role. In pursuing a case study, my aim is to contribute to this field of research by investigating the views of pre-service music teachers enrolled at the University of Karlstad in Sweden. The results depict a unique motivational profile compared to their counterparts in other subjects. These differential aspects are threefold, indicating a high prevalence of ‘extrinsic motivations’ driving their choice of profession, that ‘altruistic reasons’ have lower significance as a motivating factor, and that there is a poor perceived relevance of these individuals’ future profession. In addition, this study provides evidence of the prevalence of ‘musician identities’ over ‘teaching identities’ and foresees the dependence between the participants’ motivation and their future students’ progression. Moreover, I hypothesise that career changes and Pygmalion effects are to be expected if intrinsic motivation towards the profession is not fostered or if this population’s motivation is linked to the progress of their students rather than the challenge of motivating them in the first place.

Amplifiers from Fender's so-called Tweed era (1948–60) are among the most valuable instruments in all popular music. Inside most Fender Tweed amplifiers is a piece of masking tape bearing the signature of the worker who hand-wired the amplifier's circuit. Today, collectors have elevated several of Fender's previously unknown Latina employees into legendary figures with near cultlike followings. In the absence of biographical information about these women, however, the contemporary discourse about them is often highly romanticized. In this article, I present novel historical information about Fender's Tweed-era employees to counter the misinformation surrounding them and Fender's mid-century Fullerton, California factory system more broadly. Analyzing contemporary discourses surrounding Fender's earliest employees, I also critique the persistence of gendered and racialized stereotypes about Fender's female employees being naturally equipped for labor-intensive assembly work due to their supposedly “nimble fingers.” This article also details the social processes through which Fender's Tweed amplifiers have been made “vintage,” and the company's mid-century mass-production techniques have since been attributed the same artisanal values associated with vintage string instrument making. Ultimately, I show how the builder-signatures contained within Fender's Tweed-era amplifiers have been central to the discursive production of value among collectors.

Amid the growing calls for the complete prohibition of the use by law enforcement authorities of live facial recognition (LFR) technology in public spaces, this article advocates for an incremental approach to regulating the use of the technology. By analysing legislative instruments, judicial decisions, deployment practices of UK law enforcement authorities, various procedural and policy documents, as well as available safeguards, the article suggests incremental adjustments to the existing legal framework instead of sweeping regulatory change. The proposed approach calls for adopting national legal rules governing watch lists and introducing spatial, temporal and contextual limitations on the deployment of technology based on the assessment of proportionality and necessity. To enhance the effectiveness of overt surveillance using LFR, the article recommends adopting a transparency procedure that promotes accountability without undermining the objectives of law enforcement. Alternatively, the overt use of the technology should be limited to deterring the commission of crimes and safeguarding public safety, where transparency does not undermine its effectiveness. Limiting the scope of overt use of LFR technology entails that law enforcement agencies primarily utilise covert surveillance, with prior judicial approval, except in urgent cases, as this would improve effective criminal investigation and public safety. The legal adjustments proposed in this article can be implemented through flexible secondary legislation or local policies, rather than rigid statutory rules.

Following the murder of Jîna (Mahsa) Amini on September 16, 2022, her parents decided—despite the threats and intimidation by security forces—to hold a public funeral. Protests were ongoing outside Kasra Hospital in Tehran as word spread across the capital of Jîna's murder.1 The family transferred her body to their hometown of Saqez the next day. Hundreds of people traveled to the Ayçî cemetery within hours of the announcement of the public funeral on social media. There, they helped bury Jîna among Kurdish chants and songs. Kurdish women threw their scarves in the air and chanted Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (Woman, Life, Freedom), among other slogans. In addition to the initial print reports about Jîna's murder by journalists Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi—both of whom remain imprisoned for their work— social media participated and propelled the protests. Photos, videos, and other types of testimony circulated online. The funeral, solidarity demonstrations in Kurdish cities, towns, and villages, and the observation of mass strikes in the following days captured the attention of Iranians all over the country.

This study aimed to determine lactoferrin (LF) in breast milk-based powders and formulas. Lactoferrin is an important whey protein in all mammalian milks and is responsible in large part for the known antimicrobial effects of human milk in particular. As breast feeding is not always possible, formulas based on cows milk have been developed in order to meet the nutritional needs of the newborn, while more recently human breast milk-based powders have been introduced to offer the biological functionality of human milk to pre-term and critically ill babies. In the present work, the amount of LF in commercial breast milk-based powders was tested by a validated RF-HPLC method for the determination of LF in breast milk in order to examine both the applicability of the method but at a second level the amount of LF in these commercial products. The detection of LF was possible but the complexity of the matrix lead us to the use the standard addition methodology in order to achieve quantification. The results indicated that breast milk-based powders had higher amount of LF than cows milk-based formulas, both non-fortified and fortified.

“Woman, Life, Freedom” (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi) is the main motto of the 2022 Iranian uprising that started in September. This revolutionary movement began after Mahsa Amini's murder while in custody of the Islamic Republic's “morality police” due to not wearing hijab “properly.” Iranian women have resisted the sexist policies of the Islamic Republic since its inception. They are protesting in the streets again, endangering their lives to call for structural political change. They have been deservedly recognized as heroes of 2022 in a Time Magazine article by Azadeh Moaveni, journalist, writer, and associate professor of journalism at New York University.1 Moaveni's approach departs from the Western imperialist and Orientalist image of Iranian and Muslim women as docile individuals, clad in black chadors, and isolated from public spaces. Yet her analysis results in a new misrepresentation of Iranian women: a counterimage that looks anti-imperialist yet projects another one-dimensional reductionist representation that also risks serving the Islamic Republic and fulfilling its need for international legitimacy.2

From 1923 to the present day, various studies have increasingly analysed the beginnings of the cult of Thomas Aquinas, as well as the authenticity of his works. Over the last century, the reception of Thomas Aquinas between these two poles of sanctity and the authority accorded to his works has shown itself to be a significant pairing, of which this article unpacks some important stages.

In a number of texts throughout his career, Thomas Aquinas identifies different senses of the term ‘esse’. Most notably, he notes that according to one sense, the term signifies the act of existence (actus essendi), which he famously holds is really distinct from essence in all beings other than God. Perhaps surprisingly, he also notes on a number of occasions that according to another sense, the term ‘esse’ can signify that very principle that he says is distinct from the act of existence, namely, essence. In light of Aquinas's semantic theory, this paper investigates how he coherently holds within his metaphysical system that this term ‘esse’ can signify in different ways both essence and the act of existence. More broadly, what it shows is how, for Aquinas, the metaphysician can look to the modes of signification (modi significandi) of terms and as well as their modes of predication (modi praedicandi) to draw careful conclusions about the modes of existence (modi essendi) of real beings. These considerations reveal that in Aquinas's view, although the grammarian and logician in their way are also concerned with these semantic modes, it is not their job to employ them to discern the various senses of the term ‘being’ or the fundamental modes of being. In the end, this is a task for the metaphysician.