We know from monitoring children's development for almost a decade that despite lots of money being spent in the early years, standards of early reading and mathematics development haven't increased.

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Lands' End also provides a good example of how technological development and increasingly clever mathematics are bringing new services to the internet.

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And of all the artifacts that have aided cognition, the most important is the development of writing, or more properly, of notational systems: number systems, writing, calendars, notational systems for mathematics, engineering, music and dance.

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