Information from the Internet partly makes up for geographical isolation and poverty.

ECONOMIST: Life for most Russians is bleak, unhealthy and short

Development was spurred when, in the 1970s and 1980s, South Africa took on a pariah status that apartheid added to its geographical isolation: It was to manufacture fuels and chemicals from "indigenous raw materials, " i.e.

FORBES: Overcoming Isolation

For all its near-billion population, its should-be booming economy and its admirably efficient army, India always seems to be held back by something its fragile sense of national identity, the geographical isolation of the Indian subcontinent between mountains and sea, maybe the inward-looking nature of the Hindu religion from becoming the sort of country that strides confidently on to the world stage.

ECONOMIST: THE NEXT BALANCE OF POWER

As a result, Japanese companies are rethinking business continuity, eschewing traditional disaster recovery architectures and looking to the cloud to provide a new level of redundancy, failure isolation and geographical diversity for their IT resources in a more cost-effective manner.

FORBES: The Good News About Cloud Architecture: Everything Fails

"In north Wales, there has been relative isolation because people moved less because of geographical barriers, " Prof Donnelly said.

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