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This special issue of JCOM features six commentary articles from the research stream of the Australian Science Communicators conference, held in February 2020. These opportunistic assessments and deliberate analyses explore important themes of trust, engagement, and communication strategy across a diverse range of scientific contexts. Together, they demonstrate the importance of opportunities to come together and share the research that underpins our practice. The conference and these commentaries enable us to engage in professional development during these exceptional times when successful evidence-based science communication is of critical significance Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The last three decades have seen extensive reflection concerning how science communication should be modelled and understood. In this essay we propose the value of a cultural approach to science communication — one that frames it primarily as a process of meaning-making. We outline the conceptual basis for this view of culture, drawing on cultural theory to suggest that it is valuable to see science communication as one aspect of (popular) culture, as storytelling or narrative, as ritual, and as collective meaning-making. We then explore four possible ways that a cultural approach might proceed: by mobilising ideas about experience; by framing science communication through identity work; by focusing on fiction; and by paying attention to emotion. We therefore present a view of science communication as always entangled within, and itself shaping, cultural stories and meanings. We close by suggesting that one benefit of this approach is to move beyond debates concerning ‘deficit or dialogue’ as the key frame for public communication of science. Science stories as culture: experience, identity, narrative and emotion in public communication of science Copyright The Author(s). This article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution — NonCommercial — NoDerivativeWorks 4.0 License.

Written in response to a previous article by Weingart and Guenther [2016]in JCOM, this letter aims to open up some critical issues concerning the‘new ecology of communication’. It is argued that this evolving ecologyneeds to be openly explored without looking back to a previous idyll of‘un-tainted’ science.

Genetic Modification (GM) has been a topic of public debates during the 1990s and 2000s. In this paper we explore the relative importance of two hypothesized explanations for these controversies: (i) people's general attitude toward science and technology and (ii) their trust in governance, in GM actors, and in GM regulations, in explaining the Dutch public's Attitude toward GM applications, and in addition to that, the public's GM Information seeking behaviour. This will be conducted through the application of representative survey methodology. The results indicate that Attitudes toward GM applications are best predicted by both the attitude toward science and technology and three trust measures. GM information seeking is predicted by gender and educational level, as well as attitude toward science and technology, trust in organisations and trust in regulations (negative). Overall, psychological variables seem better predictors than demographics. Implications for future research on information seeking behaviour are discussed.

Science communication, whether internally or to the general public depends on trust, both trust in the source and trust in the medium of communication. With the new 'ecology of communication' this trust is endangered. On the one hand the very term of science communication has been captured by many different actors (e.g., governments, PR experts, universities and research institutions, science journalists, and bloggers) apart from scientists themselves to whom science communication means different things and whose communication is tainted by special interests. Some of these actors are probably more trusted by the general public than others. On the other hand, the channels that are used to communicate science are also not trusted equally. Particularly the widespread use of social media raises doubts about the credibility of the communication spread through them.

This article analyses the core critiques on institutional change theories within the neoinstitutional research agenda in comparative political science. If offers an explanatory typology using analytical challenges for the development of theories with new institutional approaches. This typology provides key critical issues that should be seriously considered by political scientists when analyzing change. The framework suggests that the analytical challenges be posed in five interwoven dimensions: a) inclusion of institutional variables; b) agency and cognition; c) contextual sensitivity; d) increasing precision in the concept of institution (and institutional change); and, e) recursive interaction between agents and institutions in the process of institutional change. Based on these challenges, the article conducts a comparative analysis of the theories of change suggested by North and Aoki to understand how they deal with such issues.

Pressurized cavities are commonly used to compute ground deformation in volcanic areas: the set of available solutions is limited and in some cases the moment tensors inferred from inversion of geodetic data cannot be associated with any of the available models. Two different source models (pure tensile source, TS and mixed tensile/shear source, MS) are studied using a boundary element approach for rectangular dislocations buried in a homogeneous elastic medium employing a new C/C++ code which provides a new implementation of the dc3d Okada fortran code. Pressurized triaxial cavities are obtained assigning the overpressure in the middle of each boundary element distributed over the cavity surface. The MS model shows a moment domain very similar to triaxial ellipsoidal cavities. The TS and MS models are also compared in terms of the total volume increment limiting the analysis to cubic sources: the observed discrepancy (~10%) is interpreted in terms of the different deformation of the source interior which provides significantly different internal contributions (~30%). Comparing the MS model with a Mogi source with the some volume, the overpressure of the latter must be ~37% greater than the former, in order to obtain the same surface deformation; however the outward expansion and the inner contraction separately differ by ~±10% and the total volume increments differ only by ~2%. Thus, the density estimations for the intrusion extracted from the MS model and the Mogi model are nearly identical.

Health promotion has a key role to play in preventing disease and promoting healthy lifestyles. Health promotion work is part science and part art. The science emerges from research and theory and the art emerges from our professional intuition and experience. The goal is to apply the science to achieve the best health promotion outcomes. However, an application of the theory, models and even the evidence, does not guarantee a desired outcome. To achieve this is an art and something that is often missing in practice. An understanding of how best to apply the ‘art and science’ of health promotion requires an appreciation that it is not only about being scientifically right but also about being real. The challenge for health promoters is to understand how they can use their judgement to best apply the available science to deliver successful approaches.

Este artigo analisa três inovações analíticas produzidas pela segunda geração do novo institucionalismo histórico sobre o problema da mudança na ciência política comparada. A análise reside na compreensão das alternativas encontradas para superar os limites tradicionais dos modelos centrados em premissas de estabilidade e ênfase causal nos fatores exógenos. O argumento é de que a segunda geração de pesquisas tem produzido um conjunto de sensíveis transformações analíticas e conceituais, incluindo novos conceitos, categorias analíticas e mecanismos causais para compreender a mudança de forma mais apropriada. This paper explores three core analytical innovations: Lieberman (2002), Greif (2006), and Mahoney and Thelen (2010), produced by the second generation of historical new institutionalism about endogenous institutional change. It explores the logic of the key conceptual and analytical transformations in the recent methodological debate over issues on how to expand the explanatory powers of traditional models overcoming the exogeneity and stability bias problems. The main argument is that there is a substantial set of transformations coming through in the new institutional agenda via the introduction of new conceptualizations, theoretical frameworks and, fundamentally, through the consideration of a new set of causal mechanisms that allows new models to expand and deepen the analysis of institutional change mainly taking into account institutional causes. Cet article analyse trois innovations analytiques produites par la seconde génération du nouvel institutionnalisme historique à propos du problème du changement dans la science politique comparée. L'analyse réside sur la compréhension des alternatives rencontrées pour dépasser les limites traditionnelles des modèles centrés sur des prémisses de stabilité et de l'accent de causalité sur les facteurs exogènes. L'argument est celui selon lequel la seconde génération de recherches produit un ensemble d'importantes transformations analytiques et conceptuelles, incluant de nouveaux concepts, des catégories analytiques et des mécanismes de causalité pour comprendre le changement de forme le plus appropriée.

La tarea de modelado conceptual no es sencilla y comprende un proceso iterativo, durante el cual se comienza con una versión inicial, la que va sufriendo transformaciones que terminan generando la versión definitiva. El modelo obtenido finalmente representa la información del problema a resolver y las necesidades del usuario. El diseño conceptual tiene diferentes enfoques. El utilizado por la cátedra de Introducción a las Bases de Datos de la Facultad de Informática es el propuesto por [1], el cual actualmente carece de soporte de una herramienta de software. De esta forma, el proceso de definición de un modelo conceptual se transforma en una tarea manual muy tediosa, utilizando solo papel y lápiz, o basándose en herramientas de edición gráfica que no están diseñadas para trabajar con un modelo de datos que se ajuste en forma precisa a los conceptos teóricos vistos en la cátedra. En este marco se establece la necesidad de implementación de una herramienta que se incorpore en los trabajos prácticos de la materia, y de ese modo, provea soporte en la generación de modelos conceptuales., Facultad de Informática