From the phonograph of the 19th century to the iPod today, music technologies have typically isolated the auditory dimension of music, filtering out nonacoustic information and transmitting what most people assume is the essence of music. Yet many esteemed performers over the past century, such as Judy Garland and B.B. King, are renowned for their dramatic use of facial expressions (Thompson, G...

In any distance-education situation students and tutors are at a distance from each other at least in the sense that they are not in the same room while learning and teaching. This means that distance education relies on media. It has two constituent elements, on the one hand the presentation of learning matter, which can be described as one-way traffic, on the other hand interaction between st...

In 1977, the Voyager interplanetary probes 1 and 2 were launched into space. Their mission was to send back to the Earth information about the outer planetary system and the limits of the solar system. Although their transmissions were not meant to last more than a few decades, the Voyagers also carry a more long lasting idea: to project our communication with the future. Both spacecrafts inclu...