As producing written work and writing essays is such a commonly requested academic task of university programmes, this chapter focuses on delivering strategies students with dyslexia say they find useful for essay planning and techniques they find effective for writing. As such, essay planning techniques include utilising university resources, starting written assignments early in the term, making plans and writing guides by using mind maps to visually see the links between ideas, breaking the main essay question down into a series of smaller questions to provide hooks for gathering the right type of information, and using mind-mapping software and technology. Effective techniques that students with dyslexia say they use to support writing tasks covered in the chapter, involve setting small goals by breaking up the required word length of the essay, using subheadings to help with essay structure, applying the point, example / evidence, comment /criticism (PEC) method of writing to ensure that paragraphs are well composed, designating proof-readers to check through written work, and using assignment cover sheets on coursework submission to ensure examiners are aware that the student is dyslexic.

This chapter considers Puccini’s interest in technology of various types. It examines, first, his passion for speed, encapsulated in an early enthusiasm for motoring. The author discusses the models of car owned by Puccini as well as his various motorboats. Puccini’s enthusiasm for hunting is discussed from a technological perspective. The chapter considers how technology even had an impact upon Puccini’s compositional output, discussing various attempts the composer made to harness electricity for musical purposes, even attempting to invent new instruments to make particular sonic effects. The gramophone played a vital role in disseminating Puccini’s works, though his enthusiasm for the medium of recording was tempered by the difficulties he experienced in recouping royalties. Finally, embryonic radio technology was a source of fascination to the composer.

Metal music has been undergoing a remarkable sonic development. Pioneering releases of the early 1970s by Black Sabbath already contained all essential ingredients of metal’s sonic signature. The growing need for heavier sounds was afforded by a rapidly advancing recording technology, alongside the exploration of production techniques and aesthetics. This chapter traces significant developments in metal music production from the 1970s to the 1990s by looking at key artists, albums and audio professionals to outline how heaviness in recorded form developed in the genre. Many of the analysed engineering practices were adopted, improved and have become standard in contemporary metal production. In this process, production was brought to the fore, making it an increasingly fundamental element of the music, even an art form in itself. This development led to what has become metal’s standard hyper-real aesthetic, which will most likely be pushed further in the ongoing and genre-defining quest for greater heaviness.

This chapter explores the direct experiences of renowned record producers, working with metal music, to construct an in-depth understanding of the genesis, and development, of recorded metal music. Technological democracy has changed the experience of making metal records, affording creative flexibility and control that would historically have been out of reach, technologically and financially. Multitrack technologies and fragmented production processes are also examined. Framed by the experiences of producers that have shaped the recording careers of artists such as Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, this chapter links the direct experiences of record-making to musical, sociocultural and technological development.

This chapter reflects on the changes in written communication associated with digital technology using some of the perspectives developed in earlier chapters. In particular, it focuses on differences in materiality and changes in display and design. When considering digital communication, there is plenty of evidence that writing is in ascendency, and that there is increased diversification in what we write and how we write it. New questions about who finds a voice and how we evaluate what is written have arisen. In times of post-truth, populism, political and religious extremism, writing can still be dangerous but it can also work to unite and consolidate, as it has done in the recent pandemic. If writing plays such a significant role in our social and cultural life, using it wisely is crucially important.

This chapter begins with an overview of the key components of lesson planning and what this looks like in the context of a mathematics lesson. We consider approaches to planning that focus on developing a sound conceptual understanding of important mathematical concepts. We then look at how the use of technology can be planned for and capitalised on to support students’ learning, including in an online environment, and within the context of a 21st century classroom. The latter part of the chapter uses classroom snapshots and case studies to show how mathematical skills, knowledge and understanding can be developed through the use of inquiry over a series of lessons.

In 1995 Italy’s labor productivity was above that of the USA. In the following quarter-century Italian productivity almost stagnated. This long relative decline of an advanced country has no parallel in modern economic history. The slow adaptation to the second globalization and digital technology is ascribed to financial and political uncertainty. The chapter identifies the areas in which adaptation to the new global environment was too slow (education, R&D, reliance on SME, inefficient bureaucracy, and judiciary). We also emphasize social and political weaknesses resulting in the large public debt. Uncertainty held back domestic and foreign investments. A brief window of opportunity in the early 2000s showed Italy’s potential resilience, when economic decline could have been reversed.

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of transformative novel technologies in the context of the contemporary global environmental crisis. It discusses how technology is central to the crisis as well as its potential resolution, although its status is frequently ambiguous and contested. The chapter makes the case that governance solutions, including at the international level, are indispensable in order to capitalize on the potential benefits of transformative novel technologies, to avoid their various potential downsides, or both. The empirical case studies of the book are then previewed: biotechnology, specifically novel methods for large-scale biological control as well as the utilization of digital sequence information in research, development and innovation; climate engineering, a series of proposed methods for large-scale intervention into the climate system; and mining beyond national jurisdictions, where various technological developments increasingly enable the extraction of metals critical to a global sustainability transition from areas that were previously inaccessible.

We use proportional reasoning every day, often without being aware that we are reasoning in terms of two quantities that vary in relation to each other – that is, as one quantity increases or decreases, so does the other. I may decide to buy two tins of tomatoes. The price of each tin is the same, so if I purchase double the number of tins, the amount I pay also doubles. Despite using this thinking informally quite regularly, it is surprising how many people have trouble with this concept. Doubling or trebling a quantity is one thing, but what about wanting one-and-a-half times, or only needing one-fifth of something? These calculations can become very tricky. Often we make some kind of estimate and end up with either too little or too much of something.

Proportional reasoning is used widely to solve a range of everyday problems from ‘best buys’ to understanding data presented in tables. It underpins scaling problems such as scale drawings of house plans and currency conversions, and appears in many other situations, including the Australian electoral system.

This chapter considers some practical applications of STEM in the primary classroom with a particular emphasis on STEM’s relationship to mathematics outcomes and the integrity of the mathematics as taught in the STEM context. This will extend to an exploration of Education for Sustainability (EfS) in the primary mathematics classroom, and opportunities for STEM tasks that are based on inquiry within the EfS space.

The introduction sets out the aims and scope of the book, explaining why this is an important time to take stock of writing – a time in which digital technology is urging us to re-think how we communicate. The chapter argues for thinking about writing as the most developed form of human communication, one that has achieved enormous power and reach. The central idea of the ‘double technology of writing’ is introduced here. Writing combines: a) material technologies of production (pen and ink, keyboard and screen) with b) mnemonic technologies to store and retrieve information. The chapter concludes with an explanation of the sociomaterial approach to writing that is adopted throughout the book.

A comparison of disciplines is helpful for teaching creativity to identify similarities and differences in the creative process. A challenge for all disciplines is to create a balance between teaching higher-level abilities, such as creativity, and the lower-level technical skills required by the discipline. But there are also differences among disciplines. Scientific training emphasizes avoiding mistakes so it is more risk-aversive than training in the arts in which taking risks is often encouraged. Research on science and mathematics learning includes evaluating the effects of exposing preservice elementary teachers to multiple representations, measuring scientific creativity in elementary school students, identifying competencies for scientific reasoning in junior high school, and designing instruction on complex systems at all levels in the curriculum. TRIZ, an acronym for the Russian phrase ‘theory of inventive problem solving’, has influenced the design and evaluation of curricula for engineering students.

This chapter considers some of the new technologies that make undercover investigations easier, and considers the benefits and dangers of these advances.

Chapter 4 proceeds to the first published, but chronologically last, installment of the trilogy, Gravity’s Rainbow, and begins with an analysis of the multiple temporalities of that novel, which are discussed in dialogue with the historiographical theories of Reinhart Kosseleck. It then examines Pynchon’s both bleak and desperately funny depiction of how modernity reached its dark apogee in World War II, where humanity’s romantic affair with technology was finally fully consummated. In particular, this theme is traced through a meticulous analysis of the theme of immachination, which runs through all three novels but reaches its natural (or unnatural) culmination in Gravity’s Rainbow. In dialogue with important critical work by Ali Chetwynd as well as Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger, the chapter concludes by revisiting the pervasive metaphor of the crossroads and the related theme of complicity in order to discuss whether the novel – and the global trilogy in general – is as relentlessly negative as they argue or whether it poses possible alternatives to the status quo.

The focus on supply shocks may have obscured the importance of such other factors as institutions, ideas, culture, leaders, and human agency. Certainly these can lead to bad outcomes – bad leaders usually produce bad outcomes – but with rare exceptions they matter only at the margins. Elites will use established institutions to maintain their position against an adverse shock, but those institutions will yield to a big enough shock. Institutions, then, are endogenous, as are leaders (bad ones are overthrown or defeated) and human agency (although crowds, especially acting through markets, are usually wiser than individuals). The salient exceptions are culture and systemic ideas. We have convincing examples of how initially adaptive cultural traits – e.g., of male supremacy or interpersonal distrust – can persist over generations and affect how societies respond to shocks. And systemic ideas about how the world works can prescribe bad or good ways of responding to a crisis such as the Great Depression. Institutions, ideas, culture, leaders, or human agency clearly matter, but supply shocks almost always matter more.

The rising price of literature after the Black Death incentivized the invention of movable-type printing. An example of technological overshooting, the printing press turned an acute shortage of literature, and of human capital, into a sudden abundance. Cheaper literature encouraged wider literacy; new grammar schools and universities further multiplied human capital. That expansion sorely threatened the earlier Latinate elite, both clerical and secular, and led directly to the Reformation. Southern Catholic Europe invoked censorship; northern Protestant Europe censored only lightly. European publishing migrated northward. The divergent responses to printing are explained by: (a) the growth of Atlantic commerce and (b) the rise in Northern Europe of absolutist states. Both commerce and state-building required, and depended on, newly abundant human capital. In northern, Protestant Europe, rapidly multiplying human capital led to prosperity and technical progress; in southern, Catholic Europe, censorship constricted human capital and imposed persistent backwardness.