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Review of David Robert Grimes: The Irrational Ape - why flawed logic puts us all at risk and how critical thinking can save the world. Simon & Schuster, 400 pp, €25, ISBN: 978-1471178252

The Sunday Tribune’s 30-year-story starts with Hibernia’s demise, as an attempt to continue by other means that magazine’s dissenting journalism. Set up by an unlikely partnership of John Mulcahy, proprietor-editor of Hibernia, and Hugh McLaughlin, commercial magazine publisher and Sunday World co-founder, the Sunday Tribune went through several distinct phases in its three decades: 1980- 82, under the control of McLaughlin, with various associates; 1983-94, under the editorship and partial control of Vincent Browne, with changing investment partners, finally Independent Newspapers; 1994-2011, under the effective control of Independent Newspapers, with a succession of four editors. This chapter concentrates on the first two phases, from the founding years through Vincent Browne’s editorship. In these 13 years, the Tribune sought to maintain a structure and perspective that was independent and distinct within the mass-market media of the time. We review several key features of the Sunday Tribune of that period, and present a portrait of a newspaper that has a particular place in the history of Irish journalism and newspaper publishing. But we also describe the pervasive uncertainty about the Tribune’s commercial potential and even its survival, as investors and senior executives came and went frequently, with unsettling effects on the continuing production of the newspaper.

Les métaphores spatiales s’imposent d’elles-mêmes quand on parle de technologie et de culture du World Wide Web. Selon Tim Berners-Lee, à qui on attribue « l’invention » du Web, il a été conçu comme un « espace commun d’information ». Les premiers développements de babillards et de banques de textes dus à la technologie de l’Internet ont inspiré au romancier William Gibson une expression qui a fait fortune : « cyberspace » (espace cybernétique). Section 1. UN NOUVEL ESPACE POUR LE JOURNALISME...

This commentary considers the separate but interconnected evolution of science communication and environmental communication as fields of research and practice, and argues for better mutual understanding between the fields, including an understanding of necessary differences. It notes that the repertoires of science communication and environmental communication overlap but have different emphases. Environmental communication emphasises public allegiances with a view to persuasion; science communication has focussed on public understanding and appreciation of science. The potential and the need for closer cooperation are growing as the authority of science is challenged in political arenas. Both fields recognise the important contributions of science to public sense-making and informed decision-making on major issues. Increasing engagement with the science that underpins environmental issues could benefit environmental communicators. In political contexts, science communication could learn from environmental communication’s greater attention to advocacy and symbolic representations.

for panel discussion at the conference PCST 2016 - Public Communication of Science and Technology, Istanbul. Abstract can be found at page 51.

The European Science Communication Network, between 2005 and 2008, created and delivered original communication training workshops to more than 170 researchers, primarily early-career scientists, to empower them to perform reflexive public engagement activities in various communication situations. The program designed 12 original teaching modules for science communication that not only delivered skills training, including writing for popular audiences and media interview skills, but also developed capacity in, among other areas, risk communication, communicating science in dialogue, and examining controversies within the scientific community. The workshops aimed to encourage scientists to reflect critically on the social, historical, cultural, and ethical dimensions of science.

Originating in science outreach and influenced by social studies of science, science communication is now an established field of graduate education, of empirical and applied studies and of theoretical reflection. The establishment of this field has been marked inter alia by the publication of dedicated journals, reference books and handbooks, and the organisation of regular international conferences and professional networks. The process reflects developments in science-society relations as expressed, for example, in notions of post-academic, post-normal, or mode-2 science, all of which posit the permeability of the previously conceived boundaries, leading to more communication between institutions and between the cultures of science and of institutions and the culture of the wider society. In this article we have selected ten terms that are frequently used in the public, professional and policy discussions about questions of science in society.