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This chapter examines the Modi government’s foreign economic policy, focusing especially on its reform agenda – including signature projects like ‘Make in India’ – and its relations with other South Asian states. It argues that despite Modi’s rhetoric about globalisation, inclusion and connectivity, his government’s economic agenda was conditioned more by inherited Hindu nationalist ideas than by liberal principles. These ideas, the chapter contends, tethered the Modi government to a form of economic nationalism. It explores the limited reforms pursued, and the consequences for India’s economy and its trade and investment relations with other states. Finally, it discusses the Modi government’s evolving attitude to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which threatened to draw India and other South Asian states further into Beijing’s economic orbit.

Michail Bletsas, Director of Computing at the MIT Media Lab and Director of the Network Computing Systems Group at MIT, is convinced that the 21st century will see the emergence of biological intelligence. He starts the dialogue with an explanation of why the Internet and its huge computational system, - the most complex human-built system -, is forcing us to learn to engage with systems that are becoming even more complicated, with varying levels of complexity. He describes later the arrival of the finely granular Internet, which in consequence led to the concept of connectivity everywhere. Later he outlines the Internet of Things’ capabilities that he and his team have deployed inside the new MIT Media Lab building. Michael then goes on to argue why we have to separate issues of business from scientific arguments and prediction—the important thing in business is not only what’s going to happen, but when it will happen. Michael also relates why the best type of innovation is bottom up, before going on to explain how not only innovation, but also evolution, is gradually improving things.

It is common to hold that our conscious experiences at a single moment are often unified. But when consciousness is unified, what are the fundamental facts in virtue of which it is unified? It is common to hold the Newtonian view that the most fundamental fact that grounds unity is a form of singularity or oneness. In this chapter, FaridMasrour sketches and defends an alternative Leibnizian view according to which experiences are unified when they are connected in the right way. This view has significant implications for our understanding of the metaphysics of conscious experience, the cognitive architecture of the mind and our assessment of the conditions under which unity of consciousness breaks down.

This chapter reviews the definitions of resilience with respect to psychological disorder and to schizophrenia, in particular. Alternative meanings of resilience emphasize innate characteristics and the steeling effect of experiences; these are not mutually exclusive and both could be harnessed in terms of treatments for the disorder. The implications of resilience are already well known in the sphere of psychosocial interventions and recent developments in cognitive therapies. The notion of building structural or physical resilience of the brain to prevent the onset of schizophrenia is not new: Kraepelin discussed such an approach in the conclusion of his most definitive description of dementia praecox a century ago. To do this successfully, however, remains a challenge, but much could be done if studies on risk modifiers and causes were reformulated toward public health intervention. Finally, new domains for inquiry into developmental resilience are explored, with a focus on neural connectivity and healthy brain growth. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.

Beginning with a discussion of the overall impact of the cost and logistics of stone transport, this chapter examines in turn the evidence for the transport of stone overland, by river, and by sea. Our best evidence for the organization of stone transport over long distances is provided by shipwrecks. These sites, eighty-two of which are examined in this chapter, reveal the different levels of this activity, ranging from large-scale cargoes of raw materials down to the shipping of individual statues or sarcophagi. These shipwrecks provide a unique insight into the connectivity between quarries and centres of stone consumption.

This concluding chapter sums up many of the conclusions drawn from the preceding chapters, concentrating on what the stone trade can add to our understanding of the wider Roman economy. To this end, it focuses on the role of the state, the evidence for local, regional, and inter-regional connectivity provided by the distribution of particular stone types, and what the carving of architectural elements, statuary, and sarcophagi reveal about production, in particular mass production, in the Roman world.

In “Care of the Soil, Care of the Self,” T. Wilson Dickinson interrogates our familiar places and habitual practices in order to see anew the ways of being of obscure places, ecological connectivity, and the relationship between creativity and creation. He suggests that the care for creation may be connected to the formation of character, and vice versa, in surprising ways.

This introduction outlines the critical aims of the study, identifying the authors covered and placing them within the context of post-millennial writing in Britain. It also centrally addresses the problems involved in practising literary criticism on very contemporary material, and contextualises debates around the end of the postmodern and its aftermath. It seeks to establish (and justify) a critical methodology that eschews broad synopticism in favour of close attentiveness to the reflections and refractions of one author beside another. It also introduces the themes of Materiality, Connectivity, and Authenticity that emerge repeatedly in the analyses that follow.

This chapter traces the development of Jon McGregor’s writing up to the publication of his collection of short stories This Isn’t the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone Like You (2012). It establishes McGregor’s deep interest in the resonance of the everyday and the overlooked, and examines the ethical importance of mutual recognition and the import of the other in his writing. McGregor’s fiction always demands the gaze of an often disinterested world both as an act of charity, and as a statement of human connectedness.

This chapter discusses the Grey and Pleasant Land project on rural ageing which focused on older people’s connections to and participation in community life in diverse rural settings in southwest England and Wales. The interdisiplinary approach used to investigate the types, extent and experiences of older people’s ‘connectivity’ in these rural places is described, including the combination of empirical and arts-based methods. Seven principal types of connectivities identified are elaborated using examples from the research findings: civic engagement; social participation; intergenerational relations; connections to the landscape; connectivity and group identity; virtual connectivity; and imaginative connectivity. The implications of these connectivities of older people as sources of rural community capital with the potential to sustain ageing populations in these areas are discussed.

Most species now have fragmented distributions, often with adverse genetic consequences. The genetic impacts of population fragmentation depend critically upon gene flow among fragments and their effective sizes. Fragmentation with cessation of gene flow is highly harmful in the long term, leading to greater inbreeding, increased loss of genetic diversity, decreased likelihood of evolutionary adaptation and elevated extinction risk, when compared to a single population of the same total size. The consequences of fragmentation with limited gene flow typically lie between those for a large population with random mating and isolated population fragments with no gene flow.

This chapter focuses on infrastructure connectivity issues that are required for providing efficient service links between production blocs. It argues that after enjoying a rich history of about 1,600 years, the Silk Roads (land connectivity) went into disrepair. Now, for various reasons, land connectivity is once again making a comeback in Asia. First, is the growing importance of supply chain trade or parts and component trade which require efficient service links. The second is the ‘Go West’ policy and the ‘One Belt, One Road’ policy in China. The third is the opening of Myanmar, the node between SA and EA. This chapter also reviews bilateral, regional, and Asia-wide efforts to revive land connectivity including the ASEAN–India Connectivity projects and the recently initiated Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar Economic Corridor. The chapter then proposes several new Trans-Himalayan Economic Corridors for seamless Pan-Asian connectivity between South Asia, Central Asia, and East Asia.

The search for greater connectivity with Southeast Asia is driving the evolution of the relationship between India and Myanmar. A partnership with Naypyidaw could help India’s integration with the more dynamic economies of Southeast Asia as well as with the dynamic Yunnan province in China. In doing so, India also expects to contain China’s influence in Myanmar. Transport infrastructure projects, including the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project, are being developed in Myanmar that may help India achieve its objectives. But numerous obstacles including ethnic conflicts in the country as well as relative mistrust between New Delhi and Naypyidaw may inhibit regional integration through Myanmar. India moreover faces competition from countries with much larger capacities such as Japan and the United States, which on one hand may help diminish China’s influence but also diminish the political space available for India.

This chapter introduces the main question of the book — what happens to war when you wire up the world as densely as we have done in recent decades? It locates the book in relation to extant literature, in particular on globalisation and the future of war. The key themes of carnage and connectivity are elaborated and defined. The main argument is that war itself has remained remarkably constant, and is still more than adequately conceptualised through the trinity of chance, probability and purpose postulated by Carl von Clausewitz two hundred years ago. The way warfare is fought, however, has changed enormously in ways in which statesmen and generals have found difficult to comprehend.

This chapter establishes a genealogy of the concept of ‘connectivity’ from the foundation of the US Army Signal Corps in 1860 (motto: ‘Getting the message through’) via cybernetics and information theory to the first stirrings of the World Wide Web in the 1990s (motto: ‘What matters is in the connections’). Three key terms are defined and briefly illustrated: signal, medium, interface. The book’s primary concern is with literature’s ability to illuminate from within the complex, vivid, unpredictable romance the principle of connectivity has woven through the enduring human desire and need for remote intimacy. It offers, in its first part, an alternative view of canonical ‘British’ writing from the Victorian era to modernism; and, in its second, case studies of European and African-American fiction, and of interwar British cinema, designed to open the topic up for further enquiry.

Bangladesh and the India’s North East are much more than next door neighbours. Being geographically contiguous, they are ‘natural markets’ for each other. India and Bangladesh are now working together to widen and strengthen their cooperation. In the field of security, they have made significant progress in recent years. Now they could build on that foundation of cooperation and remove the bottlenecks affecting improved trade and connectivity. While India can help develop Bangladesh’s export and investment climate, Bangladesh can let India use its infrastructure for surface and maritime connectivity to move men and material to the Northeast . Equally important is the need to remove tariff and non-tariff barriers, develop and modernize the infrastructure along the border, and facilitate connectivity bilaterally and within the sub-region and beyond.

The development of connectivity infrastructure between India and ASEAN through Northeast India has been presented as a way forward for Northeast India to address its current state of underdevelopment. New Delhi increasingly presents the development of the region as integral to its efforts towards greater integration with its eastern neighbours under the aegis of its Look East Policy. Some of the internal and external strategic compulsions that prevented the region from being opened up[ continue to persist. There are greater development challenges within the region if it were to benefit from opening up and integration with Southeast Asia. Further, if the region is to meaningfully become part of a new economic dynamism, there is a need to reconsider the current limited context within which New Delhi seeks to open it out. This requires addressing difficult issues with neighbors with whom India has not always had cordial relations.