The Name of Cannabis: A Short Guide for Nonbotanists

The genus Cannabis (Family Cannabaceae) is probably indigenous to wet habitats of Asiatic continent. The long coexistence between mankind and Cannabis led to an early domestication of the plant, which soon showed an amazing spectrum of possible utilizations, as a source of textile fibers, as well as narcotic and psychoactive compounds. Nowadays, the specie(s) belonging to the genus Cannabis are represented by myriads of cultivated varieties, often with unstable taxonomic foundations. The nomenclature of Cannabis has been the object of numerous nomenclatural treatments. Linnaeus in Species Plantarum (1753) described a single species of hemp, Cannabis sativa, whereas Lamarck (1785) proposed two species of Cannabis: C. sativa, the species largely cultivated in Western Continent, and Cannabis indica, a wild species growing in India and neighboring countries. The dilemma about the existence of the species C. indica considered distinct from C. sativa continues up to present days. Due to their prevalent economic interest, the nomenclatural treatment is particularly important as far as it concerns the cultivated varieties of Cannabis. In this context, we propose to avoid the distinction between sativa and indica, suggesting a bimodal approach: when a cultivar has been correctly established. It could be advisable to apply a nomenclature system based on the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP): it is not necessary to use the species epithets, sativa or indica, and a combination of the genus name and a cultivar epithet in any language and bounded by single quotation marks define an exclusive name for each Cannabis cultivar. In contrast, Cannabis varieties named with vernacular names by medical patients and recreational users, and lacking an adequate description as required by ICNCP, should be named as Cannabis strain, followed by their popularized name and without single quotation marks, having in mind that their names have no taxonomical validity

Social entrepreneurship, and the technopolitics of millennial development in Cape Town

In Cape Town, as in many other cities of the Global South, a range of new developmental experiments have emerged around the idea that, by empowering entrepreneurs, poverty can be fought with profit. Social enterprises, for example, are being promoted by global institutions as organisations that, by seeking both financial profit and social good, are ideal vehicles for meeting the demands of contemporary development. As a result, local authorities, NGOs, and other developmental agencies have all embraced social entrepreneurship as one of the devices that have the capacity to yield market solutions to poverty. Bringing together insights from postcolonial human geography and critical ethnography, this research examines how social entrepreneurship functions as a political technology of ‘millennial development’, by tracing the experiments through which ingrained issues such as racialised poverty and urban marginality are framed as domains of entrepreneurial innovation. Hence this work asks: what does seeing social entrepreneurship as a system of developmental expertise reveal about the claim that social enterprises are empowering? What kind of technical and political regimes are mobilised, invented, and experimented to address economic marginality in a postcolonial, post-apartheid city? To address these questions, this dissertation follows a network of very diverse sites of expertise, where social entrepreneurship is put into action in material ways. The empirical core of this research combines ethnographic and interview material gathered between March and November 2015. Drawing on fieldnotes and documentary evidence, this dissertation argues that it is through tentative, material and failure-ridden experiments that social entrepreneurship becomes a viable technology of development expertise. The findings of this research also show that the technopolitics of millennial development in Cape Town are not only centred around finding market solutions to poverty. Social entrepreneurship, while opening new frontiers for capitalist expansion, is also a terrain of diverse opportunities, where distinct technical, economic, and ethical regimes are cultivated. This dissertation thus concludes that examining social entrepreneurship as a political technology reveals its spatial, material and performative qualities in reproducing the promises of millennial development, as well as the possibility for alternative politics of entrepreneurial empowerment

Spectrophotometric study of the Boron- Curcumin system

In the present research project an attempt has been made to determine the mechanism of the reaction followed in the curcumin spectrophotometric method for boron determination using a modification of Naf\u27tel\u27s method

The Two Cultures of Pedagogy: Teaching and Learning in the Natural Sciences and the Humanities

. . . there are philosophical and methodological differences among various disciplines that make a difference in the ways disciplines are thought about and, more importantly for present purposes, how they are taught