Thailand has a vast number of plant species. Up to 3000 of them are believed by traditional Thai medicine to possess some biological activity with which researchers have attempted for many years to identify and formulate new drugs. Many chemical compounds from Thai plant species are identified and tested for biological activity that may enable them to be declared lead compounds in drug discovery. Modern methods of drug discovery are rarely used to rationalize and speed-up the process. Within this decade, the first structural database of Thai medicinal plants, Chemiebase, has been built as a platform for virtual screening, using knowledge from Thai traditional medicine. Although this effort is a promising protocol which can be used to validate Thai traditional medicine, there exists another problem that should be resolved before proceeding: It is almost impossible to trace the knowledge to its primary source. Thai traditional knowledge has been passed on orally or - less frequently - in ancient texts. We have built another database, the Thai Herbal Repository Access Initiative (THRAI) database, in order to compile the traditional knowledge into electronic format suitable for the drug design process. Three examples using data from these databases and other computer-aided drug discovery methods to rationalize Thai traditional medicine are presented here, starting with virtual screening exercised on anti-HIV-1 reverse transcriptase, anti-HIV-1 protease, anti-influenza A neuraminidase, and anti-cyclooxygenase (COX), candidates. The second example consists of the use of molecular modeling to propose drug mechanism for anti-tumor compounds. The last one is the study on toxicity assessment of some compounds from Thai medicinal plants.

In our digital era, fandom has become a social and cultural phenomenon, notably in Thailand. Fans are dedicated, and creating fan text (i.e., text production made by fans about their object of fandom) is one way of showing dedication and passion to the fan base. This article explores how Thai fans engage with fan text on popular social media platforms such as Twitter, and how fandom relates to identity construction among Thai fans who are online media users. The results from a selected sample comprising 100 fan tweets from four different sources, suggests five types of fan tweets, including: hypothetical interpretation, fan art, narrative concerning an anecdote regarding the source text, expression of personal opinions and feelings, and fan parody. Moreover, this article discusses fans’ shared lexicon called ‘fan talk,’ and how fans position themselves as relatives and friends of the source texts. This article further discusses the humorous nature and the transcultural elements found in fan tweets, especially the ‘Thai-ifize’ method that fans use in creating fan tweets.

This article investigates the performance of identity and the concept of a ‘good’ leader reflected in the discourse of the former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a controversial yet significant politician in Thai contemporary politics. The analysis focuses on how Thaksin constructed his political self, and how it redefined the Thai political field and the relevant practices. The article traces the discursive construction of his political identity in the radio program PM Thaksin talks to the people aired in 2001–2005. The findings indicate that Thaksin’s discourse constructed an ambivalent political identity through heterogeneity and dynamic use of ‘we’. Various mechanism of legitimization secured his popularity and created a lasting bond with the people. The discussion argues that while the discourse projecting a leadership style that is both confident and defiant strengthened the bond between Thaksin and his supporters, it increasingly pushed the ‘others’ away, leading to a growing ideological gap and later an adversarial sense among Thais, a fracture that still dominates the contemporary Thai political and social landscape.

This paper aims at investigating (1) whether young Thai adults can distinguish between straight male and gay-sounding speech and (2) how listeners feel about speech sounds performed by Thai straight and gay speakers in varying situations in terms of likeability and annoyance. Two experiments were conducted: first, straight males, gay males and females listened to voice stimuli of self-identified straight males and gay males and were asked to identify the sexual orientation of the speakers; second, another three groups of listeners were asked to rate the speakers’ levels of likeability and annoyance using a 5-point Likert scale. The findings indicate that there exist voice characteristics of gay- as opposed to straight-male sounding speech. Regarding the listeners’ perception in relation to speech style in four varying situations, the results indicate that listeners’ perception is not affected by situations in which the speech is delivered.

This paper explores what factors contribute to distinguishing gay sounding and straight man sounding speech; linguistic cognate or social knowledge and whether the gender of listeners also determines ability in identification. To answer these questions, 286 participants were classified by nationality into 3 groups of participants: Thai listeners as a control group, Zhuang, and Other listeners. They were asked to listen to 12 voice stimuli in Thai from straight and gay men and identify the gender of the speakers. The outcome revealed that the accuracy rate in identifying a speaker’s gender varied among the 3 groups of listeners with Thai listeners scoring the highest in gender identification, followed by the Others and Zhuang respectively. This indicates that social knowledge gained from one’s presence Thailand is more important than linguistic cognate. Gender identification may have been made based on the expectation of the ‘typical’ social scene such as the high visibility of gay men in Thailand. The results also suggest that gender of the listeners does not have a significant bearing on the ability to differentiate gay and straight male voices.