Why honey is effective as a medicine. 1. Its use in modern medicine

Honey has been used as a medicine for thousands of years and its curative properties are well documented. However, modern medicine turned its back on honey and it is only now, with the advent of multi-resistant bacteria, that the antibiotic properties of honey are being rediscovered

Internet fragmentation, political structuring, and organizational concentration in transnational engineering networks

Is the internet at risk of fragmentation? Whereas the literature has examined this question with a focus on domestic policies, communication standards, and internet governance institutions, we analyze fragmentation and alternative outcomes in transnational engineering networks. These networks constitute the social foundations of the unified or ‘global’internet. Our contributions include (1) broadening the debate beyond fragmentation-related network outcomes to include political structuring and organizational concentration, and (2) new evidence from an important engineering network around the Internet Engineering Task Force comprising thousands of participants and over four decades. Our analyses reveal fast and continuous network growth as well as clear signs of growing concentration of the network around a few major companies. A key implication is that, at the level of engineering networks, concerns about internet fragmentation might be unfounded and might distract from more salient developments such as organizational concentration

Stories tell us? Political narrative, demes, and the transmission of knowledge through culture

This paper compares two institutions of storytelling, mainstream national narratives and self-represented digital storytelling. It considers the centenary of World War 1, especially the Gallipoli campaign (1915) and its role in forming Australian ‘national character’. Using the new approach of cultural science, it investigates storytelling as a means by which cultures make and bind groups or ‘demes’. It finds that that demic (group-made) knowledge trumps individual experience, and that self-representation (digital storytelling) tends to copy the national narrative, even when the latter is known not to be true. The paper discusses the importance of culture in the creation of knowledge, arguing that if the radical potential of digital storytelling is to be understood – and realised – then a systems (as opposed to behavioural) approach to communication is necessary. Without a new model of knowledge, it seems we are stuck with repetition of the same old story

Foundational stigma: place‐based stigma in the age before advanced marginality.

This paper joins the debate on the formation of territorial stigma by uncovering the existence of a form of “foundational stigma” that preceded place-based stigma of the era of advanced marginality. I show that not only were the traces of stigma present prior to the era of advanced marginality but that these early traces facilitate later forms of stigma by providing the necessary foundations upon which adhesive and detrimental stigma was operationalized. Following a critical discourse analysis approach, this paper examines coverage in the British press of Toxteth, Liverpool between 1900 and 1981 as a paradigmatic case study to show that this primitive stigma existed in three key ways: relating to inter-community strife, to crime, and to substandard housing conditions. These traces of stigma laid the foundations for later forms of stigma based on the presence of the poor, violent, deviant other that would be operationalized by dominant voices during the era of advanced marginality