Publications

This pocket data book contains the main indicators describing the development trends of general, secondary vocational, higher education, vocational training, and additional education in the Russian Federation. The publication also covers key education indicators for the OECD countries. The data book includes information of the Federal State Statistics Service, Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, Federal Treasury, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as results of methodological and analytical studies of the HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge.

Using data from a retail chain of 193 bakery shops that underwent downsizing, we study the effects of two types of downsizing announcements – closure or sale to another operator – on sales in the affected shops, and how these effects are moderated by job security perceptions. On average, sales in the affected shops go down by 26% after a closure announcement and by 7% after a sale announcement. Sales decline more sharply in shops where employees had higher job security perceptions before the announcement. Our findings are consistent with psychological contract theory: a breach of an implicit contract promising job security in exchange for work effort results in a reciprocal effort withdrawal. We rule out several alternative explanations to our findings.

This is the fi rst English translation of Andrei V. Fedorov’s classic 1953 text Vvedenie v teoriiu perevoda / Introduction to Translation Theory. Fedorov was the fi rst to argue that translation theorizing should be based on linguistics, due to the fact that language is the common denominator of all translation. In addition, this text offers a concise but thorough comparative overview of thinking on translation in Western Europe and Russia. The detailed annotations and substantial introduction by the leading scholar and award- winning translator Brian James Baer inscribe Fedorov’s work in the political and cultural context of the Soviet Union, highlighting the early infl uence of Russian Formalism on Fedorov’s thinking. This volume is a model of scholarly translation that fi lls a major gap in our understanding of Soviet translation theory, which will compel a rethinking of current histories of the field. Contributing to the important work of internationalizing and generating new histories of translation studies, this volume is key reading for scholars and researchers of the history, theory, and politics of translation studies; comparative literature; and Russian and Slavic studies.

Over the last number of years there has been a growing interest in the analysis of complex networks which describe a wide range of real-world systems in nature and society. Identification of the central elements in such networks is one of the key research areas. Solutions to this problem are important for making strategic decisions and studying the behavior of dynamic processes, e.g. epidemic spread. The importance of nodes has been studied using various centrality measures. Generally, it should be considered that most real systems are not homogeneous: nodes may have individual attributes and influence each other in groups while connections between nodes may describe different types of relations. Thus, critical nodes detection is not a straightforward process.

New Centrality Measures in Networks presents a class of new centrality measures which take into account individual attributes of nodes, the possibility of group influence and long-range interactions and discusses all their new features. The book provides a wide range of applications of network analysis in several fields – financial networks, international migration, global trade, global food network, arms transfers, networks of terrorist groups, and networks of international journals in economics. Real-world studies of networks indicate that the proposed centrality measures can identify important nodes in different applications. Starting from the basic ideas, the development of the indices and their advantages compared to existing centrality measures are presented.

Features:

Built around real-world case studies in a variety of different areas (finance, migration, trade, etc.) Suitable for students and professional researchers with an interest in complex network analysis Paired with a software package for readers who wish to apply the proposed models of centrality (in Python) available at https://github.com/SergSHV/slric

This timely and original volume fills the gaps in the existing theoretical and philosophical literature on international relations by problematizing civilization as a new unit of research in global politics. It interrogates to what extent and in what ways civilization is becoming a strategic frame of reference in the current world order.

The book complements and advances the existing field of study previously dominated by other approaches – economic, national, class-based, racial, and colonial – and tests its key philosophical suppositions against countries that exhibit civilizational ambitions. The authors are all leading international scholars in the fields of political theory, IR, cultural analysis, and area studies who deal with various aspects of the civilizational arena.

Offering key chapters on ideology, multipolarity, modernity, liberal democracy, and capitalism, this book extends the existing methodological, theoretical, and empirical debates for IR and area studies scholars globally. It will be of great interest to politicians, public opinion makers, and all those concerned with the evolution of world affairs.

XVII International Symposium "Problems of Redundancy in Information and Control Systems" is the conference that covers a wide area of aspects of information and communication systems. The main goal of the Symposium foundation is the reinforcement of cooperation between the representatives of various scientific schools, a possibility for the participants to get awareness of the latest scientific and technical achievements and sharing their experience with colleagues. The covered topics include but not limited to information and coding theory, mobile and wireless communications, telecommunication protocols, internet of things systems, data security, blockchain.

Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organization—LNISO—is a series of scientific books that explore the current scenario of information systems, in particular IS and organization. The focus on the relationship between IT, IS and organization is the common thread of this collection, which aspires to provide scholars across the world with a point of reference and comparison in the study and research of information systems and organization. LNISO is the publication forum for the community of scholars investigating behavioral and design aspects of IS and organization. The series offers an integrated publication platform for high-quality conferences, symposia and workshops in this field. Materials are published upon a strictly controlled double blind peer review evaluation made by selected reviewers. LNISO is abstracted/indexed in Scopus

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11237

Akkadian, a Semitic language attested in writing from 2600 BCE until the first century CE, was the language of Mesopotamia for nearly three millennia. This volume examines the language from a comparative and historical linguistic perspective.

Inspired by the work of renowned linguist John Huehnergard and featuring contributions from top scholars in the field, Bēl Lišāni showcases the latest research on Akkadian linguistics. Chapters focus on a wide range of topics, including lexicon, morphology, word order, syntax, verbal semantics, and subgrouping. Building upon Huehnergard’s pioneering studies focused on the identification of Proto-Akkadian features, the contributors explore linguistic innovations in the language from historical and comparative perspectives. In doing so, they open the way for further etymological, dialectical, and lexical research into Akkadian.

An important update on and synthesis of the research in Akkadian linguistics, this volume will be welcomed by Semitists, Akkadian language specialists, and scholars and students interested in historical linguistics.

In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Øyvind Bjøru, Maksim Kalinin, N. J. C. Kouwenberg, Sergey Loesov, Jacob J. de Ridder, Ambjörn Sjörs, Michael P. Streck, and Juan-Pablo Vita.

Our concern is the problem of determining the data complexity of answering an ontology-mediated query (OMQ) given in linear temporal logic LTL over (Z, <) and deciding whether it is rewritable to an FO(<)-query, possibly with extra predicates. First, we observe that, in line with the circuit complexity and FO-definability of regular languages, OMQ answering in AC0, ACC0 and NC1 coincides with FO(<, ≡)-rewritability using unary predicates x ≡ 0 (mod n), FO(<, MOD)-rewritability, and FO(RPR)-rewritability using relational primitive recursion, respectively. We then show that deciding FO(<)-, FO(<, ≡)- and FO(<, MOD)-rewritability of LTL OMQs is ExpSpace-complete, and that these problems become PSpace-complete for OMQs with a linear Horn ontology and an atomic query, and also a positive query in the cases of FO(<)- and FO(<, ≡)-rewritability. Further, we consider FO(<)-rewritability of OMQs with a binary-clause ontology and identify OMQ classes, for which deciding it is PSpace-, Πp2- and coNP-complete. 

We prove that, similarly to known PSPACEPSPACE-completeness of recognising 𝖥𝖮(<)FO(<)-definability of the language 𝐿(𝔄)L(A) of a DFA 𝔄A, deciding both 𝖥𝖮(<,≡)FO(<,≡)- and 𝖥𝖮(<,𝖬𝖮𝖣)FO(<,MOD)-definability (corresponding to circuit complexity in AC0AC0 and ACC0ACC0) are PSPACEPSPACE-complete. We obtain these results by first showing that known algebraic characterisations of FO-definability of 𝐿(𝔄)L(A)can be captured by ‘localisable’ properties of the transition monoid of 𝔄A. Using our criterion, we then generalise the known proof of PSPACEPSPACE-hardness of 𝖥𝖮(<)FO(<)-definability, and establish the upper bounds not only for arbitrary DFAs but also for 2NFAs.

This book is a translation from Russian of Part II of the book Mathematics Through Problems: From Olympiads and Math Circles to Profession. Part I, Algebra, was recently published in the same series. Part III, Combinatorics, will be published soon.

The main goal of this book is to develop important parts of mathematics through problems. The authors tried to put together sequences of problems that allow high school students (and some undergraduates) with strong interest in mathematics to discover and recreate much of elementary mathematics and start edging into more sophisticated topics such as projective and affine geometry, solid geometry, and so on, thus building a bridge between standard high school exercises and more intricate notions in geometry.

Definitions and/or references for material that is not standard in the school curriculum are included. To help students that might be unfamiliar with new material, problems are carefully arranged to provide gradual introduction into each subject. Problems are often accompanied by hints and/or complete solutions.

The book is based on classes taught by the authors at different times at the Independent University of Moscow, at a number of Moscow schools and math circles, and at various summer schools. It can be used by high school students and undergraduates, their teachers, and organizers of summer camps and math circles.

In the interest of fostering a greater awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and everyday life, MSRI and the AMS are publishing books in the Mathematical Circles Library series as a service to young people, their parents and teachers, and the mathematics profession.

With increasing interconnectedness of the world, intensifying migration flows and the rise of the right-wing populism in many countries, the topic of intercultural relations has become more and more relevant. Cultural and linguistic diversity brings both opportunities and challenges by, on the one hand, enriching human communication and enhancing societies’ creative potential, and on the other hand, bringing rapid change, threatening the status quo and demanding adaptation to the new circumstances from all members of multilingual and multicultural societies.

At the heart of these intercultural relations are stereotypes. Stereotyping is a cognitive mechanism that underlies all aspects of intercultural processes: the way we perceive members of other groups shapes our attitudes and behavior towards them. This position stereotypes at the beginning of a sequence of psychological processes: cognition (stereotypes); affect (attitudes); and actions (discrimination). The fundamental role that stereotypes play in attitude formation and discrimination makes them an important target for scientific inquiry.

Stereotypes are complex in nature. They are affected by psychological, sociocultural, sociolinguistic and geopolitical processes, which makes the study of stereotypes relevant to researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds. A vast body of literature accumulated so far illuminates the processes of stereotype formation and activation, their content and functions, their antecedents and consequences. However, the studies of stereotypes are scattered across various research areas: social, (cross-)cultural and cognitive psychology, ethnic studies, sociology, intercultural communication and management, social neuroscience, and others. Researchers working within these areas often use different terminology and diverging theoretical and methodological approaches. The lack of integration and interdisciplinary debate hinders the development of this field of research.

The current book aims to bring together researchers from different disciplinary, theoretical and methodological backgrounds to create a space for exchange and integration of ideas. We welcomed contributions on the role of stereotypes in intercultural relations, including on cultural-ecological variations in stereotyping, how ethnic stereotypes are formed and maintained, how they change and what role they play in intergroup relations, intercultural communication, and acculturation processes. We believe this collection will contribute to the convergence of these research streams and will set directions for the further development of these fields separately. 

Selected, peer reviewed papers from the IV International Scientific Conference "Competitiveness and the development of socio-economic systems" dedicated to the memory of Alexander Tatarkin (CDSES - 2020)

Commentaries on World Trade Law Online is a comprehensive, standard reference work on WTO Law. The Commentaries explain the provisions of the WTO Agreements article by article, setting out the interpretation of each article in the case law, in practice and in scholarly writing.

Building on the leading reference, Max Planck Commentaries on World Trade Law, this fully revised and updated second edition brings together the writings of  a team of more than 100 of the world’s leading scholars, practitioners and former members of the Appellate Body. The contents are extensively hyperlinked to source documents, cross-referenced and indexed.

This book explores the ways to 'rethink', 'repackage' and 'rescue' world trade law in the post-COVID-19 era. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as an important context, the book makes original and critical contributions to the growing debate over a range of emerging challenges and systemic issues that might change the landscape of world trade law in the years to come. The book asks: do these unprecedented times and challenges call for reengineering the world trading system and a further retreat from trade liberalisation? The authors offer a rigorous and insightful analysis of whether and how the existing trade institutions and/or rules, including their latest developments, may provide room to deal with pandemic-induced trade-related issues, sustainable development goals, future crises and other existential threats to the multilateral trading system. The book reinforces the importance of international cooperation and the pressing need to reinvigorate the world trading system. The pandemic has provided a unique opportunity for governments to rebuild the political will needed for such cooperation. One should never let a serious crisis go to waste.

Paper [I] focuses on the effects of time and space dynamics on the description of fertility in Sweden. These effects are expected to be generated by labour mobility across municipalities. The empirical evidence for the period 1985-2008 involved estimating space and time dynamics by using a spatial first-order and serial second-order panel data model. A hypothesis of a positive spatial autocorrelation of fertility is confirmed.

Paper [II] contributes to the study of stationarity conditions for a spatial first-order and serial second-order model in the presence of time-lagged spatial interaction are considered. The stationarity conditions on serial autocorrelation parameters are found on the basis of the structural vector auto-regression form for the model. The stationarity in time is expressed as a function of the spatial autoregressive parameters.

Paper [III] contributes to an analytical description of the spatial diffusion of fertility, in particular, influenced by labour movements of people between places of residence and work. The analytical model, in which effects on fertility are decomposed, is constructed in the paper on the base of a model of the demand for children, the spatial stock-flow model of a market, and a matching model with a sex imbalance or spatial mismatch as the probability of matching.

In Paper [IV] average differences in the first-birth rates of young working women are estimated by bivariate model with endogenous commuting. Empirical evidence based on administrative data (Sweden) reveals that commuting women have a lower probability of first birth at the age 21-28 years old and higher probability at the age 29-32 years old. Therefore, commuting women likely postpone first childbearing.

Paper [V] studies earnings and labour force participation (LFP) of native Swedes and recent immigrants in Sweden in response to the childcare reforms of 2001 and 2002 using a difference-in-differences approach and register-based data for the period of 1995-2009. The results show that the reforms had a positive effect on earnings and LFP among native mothers with preschool children. The group of immigrant mothers studied did not experience any gain in labour market outcomes as a response to the reform.

The analytical review is dedicated to the smart education

Crowd-sourcing of information has become popular in the years since James Surowiecki published The Wisdom of Crowds: why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations. In sports, crowd-sourced estimates of players’ values and abilities are common, particularly in football where salary information is generally unavailable. The analysis here first considers the characteristics of a good crowd-sourced value then turns to an empirical analysis which applies those characteristics and their implications to assess the quality of the commonly used crowd-sourced values from Transfermarkt. Our empirical results show systematic influences from some obvious factors indicating that the crowd-sourced transfer fees are biased as predictors of the true market determined fees. The findings are useful because they address the question of whether these values can reasonably be used as proxies for unknown salary in academic research. Additionally, because Transfermarkt values are often used in negotiations between clubs and players, it is useful to both parties to know the accuracy and the bias of the crowd-sourced values.

: This study aims to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Academic Expectations of Stress Inventory (AESI) in terms of validity and reliability measurements among Persian students. A total sample of 620 high-school students (nfemale = 328, nmale = 292) was recruited to complete scales on academic expectations of stress, self-efficacy, and depression. The AESI was translated from English to Persian and its translation was further checked by three experts. We used a cross-sectional research design to collect data. The results approved the internal consistency, test–retest reliability, convergent, and construct validity of the ASEI.

We studied the effect of social status on social learning and other personal characteristics in an experimental game where individuals in a dyad made repeated attempts to guess the underlying state of the world. Several sets of survey questions were deployed to control for socioeconomic status, the subjective perception of social status, and leadership traits, as well as quality and quantity of social interactions, and cognitive reflection. Risk aversion was measured using an incentivized task. We also induced social status in each pair of subjects using a dictator game. We found that people with high subjective social status relied less on observed choices of other subjects and put more weight on private information. Subjects who were less risk-averse and showed more leadership traits, were also less likely to learn from the actions of others. Some effects were gender-specific. Our finding that social learning is stronger in low-status individuals can imply higher likelihood of information cascades in hierarchical networks.

I argue in this article, grounding on a phenomenological analysis of the experience of qi in Chinese martial arts, that the experience of qi in this framework can share the features of a secular spiritual experience, in other words of a spiritual experience that is not religious, at least not necessarily. I put in evidence five features that can characterize the experience of qi in Chinese martial arts and that arguably pertain to spirituality: (1) the importance of individual experience; (2) self-transcendence and the quest for authenticity; (3) the connection with a transcendent dimension; (4) the importance of corporeity and at the same time the apprehension of a dimension which cannot be reduced to corporeity; (5) the use of imagination in order to grasp a transcendent dimension that presupposes the use of metaphors. Consequently, the experience of qi in Chinese martial arts suggests the possibility of a form of spirituality that is not necessarily bound to religion and that at the same time is not a mere rejection of traditional religions. At the same time, I argue that the experience of qi in Chinese martial and energetic arts reveals radical possibilities of human experience at the core of which are fundamental transcendental structures of human experience, i.e., the experience of our body and the experience of the world through our body. This suggests the idea that phenomenology has an important potential for the investigation of spirituality and opens towards a research field that can be deeper explored.

Background: The human white matter pathway network is complex and of critical importance for functionality. Thus, learning and understanding white matter tract anatomy is important for the training of neuroscientists and neurosurgeons. The study aims to test and evaluate a new method for fiber dissection using augmented reality (AR) in a group which is experienced in cadaver white matter dissection courses and in vivo tractography.

Methods: Fifteen neurosurgeons, neurolinguists, and neuroscientists participated in this questionnaire-based study. We presented five cases of patients with left-sided perisylvian gliomas who underwent awake craniotomy. Diffusion tensor imaging fiber tracking (DTI FT) was performed and the language-related networks were visualized separated in different tracts by color. Participants were able to virtually dissect the prepared DTI FTs using a spatial computer and AR goggles. The application was evaluated through a questionnaire with answers from 0 (minimum) to 10 (maximum).

Results: Participants rated the overall experience of AR fiber dissection with a median of 8 points (mean ± standard deviation 8.5 ± 1.4). Usefulness for fiber dissection courses and education in general was rated with 8 (8.3 ± 1.4) and 8 (8.1 ± 1.5) points, respectively. Educational value was expected to be high for several target audiences (student: median 9, 8.6 ± 1.4; resident: 9, 8.5 ± 1.8; surgeon: 9, 8.2 ± 2.4; scientist: 8.5, 8.0 ± 2.4). Even clinical application of AR fiber dissection was expected to be of value with a median of 7 points (7.0 ± 2.5).

Conclusion: The present evaluation of this first application of AR for fiber dissection shows a throughout positive evaluation for educational purposes.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems research has largely focused on the profile of a handful of successful locations. This has prevented a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that shape entrepreneurial activity across the geographical space. Our goals in this research are (1) to identify the critical dimensions of entrepreneurial ecosystems, and (2) to assess whether successful ecosystems rely on heterogeneous configurations. Through fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we address this issue with data from the State of São Paulo, Brazil. Findings generate a typological hierarchy of attributes, where the range of critical dimensions seems to be much more restricted than previously argued, and alternative configurations appear to lead to similar outcomes. A first pivotal path toward establishing a thriving ecosystem is fundamentally based on the conditions of the knowledge Infrastructure. A second approach combines elements of the socioeconomic system with the knowledge environment. Although some elements are ubiquitous, contributing attributes differ across distinct configurations, suggesting some level of heterogeneity in the dominant dimensions of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Such evidence contributes to the debate on entrepreneurial ecosystems’ dimensions and elements, offering exploratory insights on alternative ways to promote an environment conducive to knowledge-intensive ventures.

From Auckland to Zagreb, DiY laboratories are ‘popping up’ in cities across the world. Organised around open-source principles, these independent community-based research hubs are often set up by scientists and science enthusiasts in order to learn, experiment and get involved in the world of science, technology and innovation (STI) advancement.

We introduce a notion of a topologically flat locally convex module, which extends the notion of a flat Banach module and which is well adapted to the nonmetrizable setting (and especially to the setting of DF-modules). By using this notion, we introduce topologically amenable locally convex algebras and we show that a complete barrelled DF-algebra is topologically amenable if and only if it is Johnson amenable, extending thereby Helemskii-Sheinberg's criterion for Banach algebras. As an application, we completely characterize topologically amenable Köthe co-echelon algebras.

Ocean-generated seismic waves are omnipresent in passive seismic records around the world and present both a challenge for earthquake observations and an input signal for interferometric methods for characterization of the Earth's interior. Understanding of these waves requires the knowledge of the depth dependence of the oceanic noise at the transition into the continent. To this end, we examine 80 days of continuous acquisition with distributed acoustic sensor (DAS) system deployed in two deep boreholes near the south-eastern coast of Australia. The iDASv3™ system deployed in a deep borehole at the CO2CRC Otway Project site provides sufficiently high sensitivity and low instrumentation noise for frequencies from 100 mHz to 20 Hz. Analysis of the seismograms and correlation with wave climate allows decomposing the DAS response into microseisms generated by swell from remote s𝐴𝐴torms (∼ 0.15 Hz) and local winds (between 0.2 and 2 Hz), and strong body wave energy from large surf breaks at the coast (from 2 to 20 Hz). The depth dependence of the microseisms provides useful insights into the energy partition between the Rayleigh wave modes and may augment conventional kinematic analysis of the sparse surface seismological arrays. Overall, ocean-generated signals at each channel along the borehole are strongly related to the wave climate, so that— with sufficient amount of training data—the passive seismic records on several downhole DAS sensors has a potential for high-precision monitoring of formations surrounding the borehole as well as remote storms in the ocean.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of the current literature on economic growth and innovation, and the process of technology upgrading. It defines the key concepts that will be used throughout the book and sets the stage for the challenges and issues around economic growth that will be addressed in later chapters. It then outlines the contribution of each chapter and the Schumpeterian or neo-Schumpeterian perspective in which they’re framed, and the four major themes that run throughout the book: the relationship between technology capability and economic growth from new methodological angles, including the middle-income trap; technology capability upgrading from structural, sectoral, and micro-level perspectives; the emerging paradigm of technology capability upgrading which is about sustainability, green growth, inclusiveness, and socio-economic and political determinants of technology capability building; and the several dimensions of innovation policy which reflect a state of transition or changing policy philosophies.

During the late medieval period, several ethnic and confessional groups coexisted in the southern area of the Voivodate of Transylvania, each of them bringing into play their own cultural and religious traditions. Under Latin rule, Orthodox Romanians lived together with Catholic Hungarians, Szeklers, and Saxons, their long-lasting conviventia generating frequent encounters with the culture of the Other, which left deep traces in the religious art of both confessional groups. Fully connected to the main cultural trends of Latin Europe, the dominant Catholics commissioned and produced religious art throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth century that was deeply rooted in the spirituality of the West. This essay deals with the question of medieval painters trained in Byzantium, who decorated murals in Latin-rite churches and who received commissions from Catholic patrons. It focuses on two case studies: the mural decoration of the nave of the Calvinist (formerly Catholic) church in Sântămăria-Orlea (1311) and the paintings of the sanctuary of the Lutheran (formerly Catholic) church in Dârlos (late fourteenth to early fifteenth century). Both churches were located in the Voivodate of Transylvania, a region where Orthodox Romanians lived alongside Catholics but under the Latin rule of the latter. This context contributed to the emergence of frequent phenomena of eclecticism in the sphere of religious art, which defy the usual categories of medieval art and challenge traditional art-historical classifications.

Throughout his career as short prose writer, novelist, essayist, and professor of philosophy, William H. Gass (1924-2017) retained a consistent and well-integrated system of aesthetic values. His formalist commitments, which determined his reputation as a radical postmodern innovator in American letters in the 1960s and 1970s, were recognized as highbrow conservatism during the 1980s. This chapter seeks a connection between Gass’s concept of literary musicality and the overall unpopularity of his difficult writing with broad readerships, an unpopularity which reflects his articulated reservations about popular culture. The formalist tenets of Gass’s 1996 essay “The Music of Prose” and the musical indices of his fiction are considered alongside similar aspects of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetics, which Aldous Huxley once dismissed as too vulgar to be musical. Unlike Poe, Gass appears to avoid the danger of being remediated in popular songs and comics through his deliberate style, his undermining of subject matter, and the lack of a marketable mystery concerning his life.

The study of civil society in Russia has increased dramatically in the past thirty years as Russian and foreign scholars contribute a wide range of new data and case studies. Observers were full of optimism for the robust development both of foreign funded NGOs in the 2000s and local grassroots associations in Russia, which was expected to boost democratization. Recent scholars, however, have noted the persistent “statist” pattern of the Russian nonprofit sector and the “closing of the space” for civil society in Russia. Four fundamental questions demand to be answered: how large is the nonprofit sector across Russia? How does the sector vary across regions? Has the sector grown or contracted in the past two decades? And what factors affect the growth or contraction of the nonprofit sector in Russia? In the article the size of the nonprofit sector in Russia is examined and the effect of economic, socio-demographic and political factors on the variation across regions and the dynamics in these regions over time is explored. First, finding that wide variation in the nonprofit sector exists across regions of Russia is confirmed. Second, the “dynamic” growth and decline of the nonprofit sector over time by region across Russia is documented. The third major contribution is that authors approximate the effect of federal restrictions in 2006 and federal in 2012 on the size of the nonprofit sector in each region. It is argued that the effects of Russian federal policies outweigh the economic and demographic variables in explaining regional variation of nonprofits. In contemporary Russia, institutional factors are as important for explaining the size of the nonprofit sector as any economic or socio-demographic factors.

The chapter is devoted to the manuscript tradition of the Michael Scot's Physiognomy (ca. 1230) and to the problems of its critical edition.

Modern deep learning applications require increasingly more compute to train state-of-the-art models. To address this demand, large corporations and institutions use dedicated High-Performance Computing clusters, whose construction and maintenance are both environmentally costly and well beyond the budget of most organizations. As a result, some research directions become the exclusive domain of a few large industrial and even fewer academic actors. To alleviate this disparity, smaller groups may pool their computational resources and run collaborative experiments that benefit all participants. This paradigm, known as grid- or volunteer computing, has seen successful applications in numerous scientific areas. However, using this approach for machine learning is difficult due to high latency, asymmetric bandwidth, and several challenges unique to volunteer computing. In this work, we carefully analyze these constraints and propose a novel algorithmic framework designed specifically for collaborative training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for SwAV and ALBERT pretraining in realistic conditions and achieve performance comparable to traditional setups at a fraction of the cost. Finally, we provide a detailed report of successful collaborative language model pretraining with 40 participants.

Quality of search engine results returned to health-related questions is very critical, since a searcher may directly trust any suggestion in the top results. We analyze search questions that mention diseases / symptoms and remedies that are potential health-related misbeliefs. Using lists of medical and alternative medicine terms, we extract health-related search questions from 1.5~billion questions submitted to Yandex. As an initial study, we sample 30 frequent questions that contain a disease--remedy pair like "Can hepatitis be cured with milk thistle?". For each question, we carefully identify a ground truth answer in the medical literature and annotate the top-10 Yandex search result snippets as confirming the belief, rejecting it, or giving no answer. Our analysis shows that about 44%~of the snippets (that users may simply interpret as definitive answers!) confirm some untrue beliefs and are wrong, and only few include health risk warnings about using toxic plants.

The crucial position divination held in Mesopotamian religion and society, as well as beyond the Babylonian and Assyrian heartlands, has long been acknowledged and has justly received scholarly attention since the early days of Assyriology. Much progress has been made in the contextual study of divinatory theory and practice, although mainly focusing on extispicy and celestial divination, leaving aside the smaller, but considerable corpora relating to other types of divination. Oil divination is one such example. This paper attempts to elucidate its potential to contribute to current discussions concerning divination with insights from both the field itself but also other relevant Assyriological themes.

We consider Takahashi's categorical interpretation of the Berglund-Hubsch mirror symmetry conjecture for invertible polynomials in the case of chain polynomials. Our strategy is based on a stronger claim that the relevant categories satisfy a recursion of directed A∞-categories, which may be of independent interest. We give a full proof of this claim on the B-side. On the A-side we give a detailed sketch of an argument, which falls short of a full proof because of certain missing foundational results in Fukaya-Seidel categories, most notably a generation statement.

For an appropriate choice of a ℤ-grading structure, we prove that the wrapped Fukaya category of the symmetric square of a (k+3)-punctured sphere, i.e. the Weinstein manifold given as the complement of (k+3) generic lines in ℂP2 is quasi-equivalent to the derived category of coherent sheaves on a singular surface Z2,k constructed as the boundary of a toric Landau-Ginzburg model (X2,k,w2,k). We do this by first constructing a quasi-equivalence between certain categorical resolutions of both sides and then localising. We also provide a general homological mirror symmetry conjecture concerning all the higher symmetric powers of punctured spheres. The corresponding toric LG-models (Xn,k,wn,k) are constructed from the combinatorics of curves on the punctured surface and are related to small toric resolutions of the singularity x1…xn+1=v1…vk.

We revisit Schmidt's theorem connecting the Schmidt rank of a tensor with the codimension of a certain variety and adapt the proof to the case of arbitrary characteristic. We also find a sharper result of this kind for homogeneous polynomials of degree d (assuming that the characteristic does not divide d(d-1)). We then use this to relate the Schmidt rank of a homogeneous polynomial (resp., a collection of homogeneous polynomials of the same degree) with the codimension of the singular locus of the corresponding hypersurface (resp., intersection of hypersurfaces).

Let k be a perfect field and let X⊂ℙ^N be a hypersurface of degree d defined over k and containing a linear subspace L defined over an algebraic closure k⎯⎯⎯ with codim_ℙ^N L=r. We show that X contains a linear subspace L_0 defined over k with codim_ℙ^N L ≤ dr. We conjecture that the intersection of all linear subspaces (over k^⎯) of minimal codimension rcontained in X, has codimension bounded above only in terms of r and d. We prove this when either d≤3 or r≤2.

We give an elementary proof of an efficient version of the Wagner's theorem on almost invariant subspaces and deduce some consequences in the context of Galois extensions.

We study embeddability of superschemes into Π-projective spaces and into supergrassmannians G(1|1,n|n). We give some criteria based on the relation with 𝔸0|1-torsors and 𝔸0|1-fibrations. We also prove the existence of nice quotients for free actions of 𝔸0|1 on superschemes.

We give a description of the formal neighborhoods of the components of the boundary divisor in the Deligne-Mumford moduli stack M^⎯_g of stable curves in terms of the extended clutching construction that we define. This construction can be viewed as a formal version of the analytic plumbing construction. The advantage of our formal construction is that we can control the effect of changing formal parameters at the marked points that are being glued. As an application, we prove that the 1st infinitesimal neighborhood of the boundary component Δ_1,g−1 is canonically isomorphic to the 1st infinitesimal neighborhood in the normal bundle, near the locus M_1,1×M_g−1,1⊂Δ_1,g−1corresponding to pairs of smooth curves with marked points. As another application, we show how to study the period map near the boundary components Δ_g1,g2 in terms of the coordinates coming from our extended clutching construction.

Let k be a perfect field of characteristic ≠2. We prove that the Schmidt rank (also known as strength) of a quartic polynomial f over k is bounded above in terms of only the Schmidt rank of f over k⎯⎯⎯, an algebraic closure of k.

We show any slightly degenerate weakly group-theoretical fusion category admits a minimal extension. Let d be a positive square-free integer, given a weakly group-theoretical non-degenerate fusion category C, assume that FPdim(C)=nd and (n,d)=1. If (FPdim(X)^2,d)=1 for all simple objects Xof , then we show that C contains a non-degenerate fusion subcategory C(ℤ_d,q). In particular, we obtain that integral fusion categories of FP-dimensions pmd such that C′⊆sVec are nilpotent and group-theoretical, where p is a prime and (p,d)=1.

We study linear and hermitian representations of finite C2-graded groups. We prove that the category of linear representations is equivalent to a category of antilinear representations as an ∞-category. We also prove that the category hermitian representations, as an ∞-category, is equivalent to a category of usual representations.

We investigate a method of construction of central deformations of associative algebras, which we call centrification. We prove some general results in the case of Hopf algebras and provide several examples.

We obtain a sufficient condition for a Fano threefold with terminal singularities to have a conic bundle structure.

The sex gap in life expectancy (LE) at birth is currently narrowing in all high-income countries. Previous research on Western European and English-speaking (WE&ES) countries suggested that smoking-related mortality at ages 50+ was largely responsible for both widening and subsequent narrowing of the gap. However, countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have had particularly high excess male mortality at young and middle ages that couldn`t be fully attributed to the smoking-related causes. We use the Human Mortality Database to examine the patterns and time trends in male/female differences in LE across 41 high-income countries and 7 country groups from 1959 until the latest available year. Contour decomposition is applied to estimate the contribution of different ages to the maximum sex gap and its change ever since. While the UK was the first country to reach the peak in the sex gap in 1969, Greece did it half a century later, in 2009. The largest male disadvantage in LE was observed in Russia in 2005 (13.7 years), Israel had a peak in 1999 with just 4.4 years. There is a persistent difference between countries and particularly country groups in the age-specific contribution to the maximum sex gap. In WE&ES countries ages older than 50 play the major role in determining the sex gap while CEE countries have high excess male mortality in young and middle ages (20- 50). The narrowing of the sex gap in CEE countries hasn`t substantially changed the age contribution. Mortality at ages younger than 50 still plays an important role in determining the sex gap in LE in these countries. Differences in the sex gap between countries add a new dimension to a previously established East-West mortality divide. Country specifics must be taken into account to develop public health policies aimed at reducing sex mortality inequalities.

An LCK manifold with potential is a complex manifold with a Kahler potential on its cover, such that any deck transformation multiplies the Kahler potential by a constant multiplier. We prove that any homogeneous LCK manifold admits a metric with LCK potential. This is used to give a new proof that any compact homogeneous LCK manifold is Vaisman.

Let M be a hyperkahler manifold of maximal holonomy (that is, an IHS manifold), and let K be its Kahler cone, which is an open, convex subset in the space H1,1(M,R) of real (1,1)-forms. This space is equipped with a canonical bilinear symmetric form of signature (1,n) obtained as a restriction of the Bogomolov-Beauville-Fujiki form. The set of vectors of positive square in the space of signature (1,n) is a disconnected union of two convex cones. The "positive cone" is the component which contains the Kahler cone. We say that the Kahler cone is "round" if it is equal to the positive cone. The manifolds with round Kahler cones have unique bimeromorphic model and correspond to Hausdorff points in the corresponding Teichmuller space. We prove thay any maximal holonomy hyperkahler manifold with b2>4 has a deformation with round Kahler cone and the Picard lattice of signature (1,1), admitting two non-collinear integer isotropic classes. This is used to show that all known examples of hyperkahler manifolds admit a deformation with two transversal Lagrangian fibrations, and the Kobayashi metric vanishes unless the Picard rank is maximal.

A Kahler-type form is a symplectic form compatible with an integrable complex structure. Let M be a either a torus or a K3-surface equipped with a Kahler-type form. We show that the homology class of any Maslov-zero Lagrangian torus in M has to be non-zero and primitive. This extends previous results of Abouzaid-Smith (for tori) and Sheridan-Smith (for K3-surfaces) who proved it for particular Kahler-type forms on M. In the K3 case our proof uses dynamical properties of the action of the diffeomorphism group of M on the space of the Kahler-type forms. These properties are obtained using Shah's arithmetic version of Ratner's orbit closure theorem.

A C-symplectic structure is a complex-valued 2-form which is holomorphically symplectic for an appropriate complex structure. We prove an analogue of Moser's isotopy theorem for families of C-symplectic structures and list several applications of this result. We prove that the degenerate twistorial deformation associated to a holomorphic Lagrangian fibration is locally trivial over the base of this fibration. This is used to extend several theorems about Lagrangian fibrations, known for projective hyperkähler manifolds, to the non-projective case. We also exhibit new examples of non-compact complex manifolds with infinitely many pairwise non-birational algebraic compactifications.