By TOM MARINER // A “blast from the past” from your most recent newsletter: A few years after Ray Kurzweil introduced the first Reading Machine, he cranked out his first “music synthesizer” with Stevie Wonder – a product of Kurzweil’s fertile brain and (in theory) a bet between the two that electronic stuff could not sound like a concert grand piano. The technical challenge was that large memory chips that digitally hold millions of pieces…

By MATTHEW WRIGHT // Has higher education gone soft on coding? Isolated in our computer science departments, it’s not reaching the wider student audience I believe it should. At Adelphi University, where I chair the Physics Department, teaching coding to all students – STEM majors, humanities majors and health-profession majors – is an experiment I have tried and have personally seen succeed. Computer programming is in high demand in the workplace, and it’s a 21st…