Publications

This special conference starts the new series, and therefore, it launches a tradition to follow, and an opportunity for a rapid spin up. This ICCQ conference was organized by the HSE and leading IT innovative companies such Huawei and Yandex. The ICCQ 2021 attracted a number of renowned experts including Jens Palsberg, Anders Møller, and David West. The papers were submitted from the world over. The conference attracted speakers and attendees from the USA, Europe, and Asia; therefore, this is truly an international event. Although ICCQ started as a relatively small single-day conference, it immediately gained the IEEE support. The plan for the next years is to embrace the world while keeping high quality standards.

We believe that Russian religious philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has great importance for Christian theology and philosophy. Russian thinkers, rooted in the tradition of the Church Fathers, strove for an integral knowledge of reality, based on the unity of faith and reason. Such philosophers and theologians as Peter Chaadaev, Alexei Khomiakov, Vladimir Soloviev, Evgenii Trubetskoi, Pavel Florensky, Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Semyon Frank, Georges Florovsky, and Aleksei Losev had penetrating insight into the nature of reality and thought deeply about religion and culture, science and philosophy, and history and society. Their legacy deserves a prominent place in contemporary philosophical and theological discussions. The series Ex Oriente Lux aims to meet this need. It serves as a way to bring Eastern Christian intuitions into the current post-secular philosophical and theological context. Each volume focuses on one Russian thinker and includes a selection of essays on the thinker’s main ideas in historical and contemporary contexts. The books are prepared by Western and Russian scholars, thus creating a space for intellectual dialogue. The series comes out of research connected with the annual conferences on Russian religious philosophy held in Krakow, Poland. The “Krakow Meetings” are organized jointly by the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow and the Edith Stein Institute of Philosophy in Granada, Spain.

This book describes various approaches in modelling financial risks and compiling ratings. Focusing on emerging markets, it illustrates how risk assessment is performed and analyses the use of machine learning methods for financial risk assessment and measurement. It not only offers readers insights into the differences between emerging and developed markets, but also helps them understand the development of risk management approaches for banks. Highlighting current problems connected with the evaluation and modelling of financial risks in the banking sector of emerging markets, the book presents the methodologies applied to credit and market financial risks and integrated and payment risks, and discusses the outcomes. In addition it explores the systemic risks and innovations in banking and risk management by analyzing the features of risk measurement in emerging countries. Lastly, it demonstrates the aggregation of approaches to financial risk for emerging financial markets, comparing the experiences of various countries, including Russia, Belarus, China and Brazil.

This book constitutes revised selected papers of the 9th International Conference on Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts, AIST 2020, held in Moscow, Russia, in october 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference was held online. 

The 14 full papers, 9 short papers and 4 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 108 qualified submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ​natural language processing; computer vision; social network analysis; data analysis and machine learning; theoretical machine learning and optimization; process mining; posters.

Challenges of the 21st Century: Democracy, Environment, Inequalities, Intersectionality  

This IV ISA Forum of Sociology will be our first virtual Forum, with over 800 sessions, more than 3,000 papers and the participation of sociologists from 125 countries.

This Forum will be a unique opportunity to gather our research results and analyses of the extraordinary time we live and study, of its impact on individuals and societies and on four global challenges it has intensified: democracy, environment, inequalities and intersectionality.

During six days, hundreds of panels will explore the world in the pandemic and the world that may come out of it based on research grounded in the field and topics of the ISA Research Committees, Working and Thematic groups. Young researchers and experienced scholars from different regions of the world will expose their analyses of societies and sociology in the pandemic. Leading scholars from different continents will share their perspectives in the Forum’s Opening and Closing Plenaries: Michael Burawoy, Isabel Casimiro, Manuel Castells, Ashish Kothari, Rita Segato, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maristella Svampa. This Forum will also be an opportunity for our global community to pay tribute to three of our most distinguished colleagues to which special panels are dedicated: Immanuel Wallerstein, Erik Olin Wright and Marielle Franco.

The pandemic has stressed how deeply interdependent we have become and accentuated the need of a more global sociology. Epistemologies of the South and intersectional perspectives on democracy, ecology and social justice are more than alternative options for sociology in the 21st century. There are at its core and have deeply transformed it. Opening more spaces for our colleagues from the Global South has been a central goal in this Forum. We are particularly pleased to host semi-plenary sessions set up by the Brazilian Sociological Society with the Porto Alegre Local Organizing Committee, by the Latin American Sociological Association and by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences, and that the president of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa will join us in the closing session.

Sari Hanafi, President of the ISA Geoffrey Pleyers, President of the IV ISA Forum of Sociology

We discuss the applicability of multiphase lattice Boltzmann method for the simulation of the drop oscillation. We demonstrate that the simulation of the single drop excited to the first eigenmode does follow Rayleigh formula. Simulations show no sensitivity to the number of the discrete velocities with D3Q19 and D3Q27 representations of the distribution function in three dimensions. The boundaries do influent the motion of the drop—division of the computational area by the even and the odd number of cells comes out important and leads to symmetry violence. The second part of the chapter describes the oscillations of the ensemble of three drops due to the excitation of the central drop in the first eigenmode. The motion of the backdrops does strongly depend on the viscosity of the fluid. We provide future details of simulations.

The relevance of studying the regulation of protein-ligand interactions is due to the emergence of new views on the role of metabolites and their key importance in vital processes. To study the protein-ligand interaction, the AB0 antigen-antibody blood system and the enzyme-substrate system of dehydrogenases were used as a test system, and ethanol was used as an influencing factor. In experiments performed with A and B blood erythrocyte antigens, natural AB0 system antibodies and monoclonal antibodies under the influence of ethanol performed change of the degree of agglutination and the time to onset of erythrocyte agglutination. It was found that ethanol can regulate the enzyme-substrate interactions of dehydrogenases: lactate dehydrogenase (EC 1.1.1.27), glyceraldehyde phosphate dehydrogenase (EC 1.1.1.12), and α-glycerol phosphate dehydrogenase (EC 1.1.1.8). The increase in the activity of studied enzymes under the influence of ethanol in the whole blood hemolysate was 2.5 - 3 times higher than in the isolated medium (with pure enzyme preparations).

This book offers new perspectives on the environmental history of the lands that have come under Russian and Soviet rule by paying attention to ‘place’ and ‘nature’ in the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them

This book highlights interdisciplinary insights, latest research results, and technological trends in Business Intelligence and Modelling in fields such as: Business Intelligence, Business Transformation, Knowledge Dissemination & Implementation, Modeling for Logistics, Business Informatics, Business Model Innovation, Simulation Modelling, E-Business, Enterprise & Conceptual Modelling, etc. The book is divided into eight sections, grouping emerging marketing technologies together in a close examination of practices, problems and trends. The chapters have been written by researchers and practitioners that demonstrate a special orientation in Strategic Marketing and Business Intelligence. This volume shares their recent contributions to the field and showcases their exchange of insights.

This volume presents the original text, accompanied by an English translation and commentary, of a hitherto unpublished Syriac composition, entitled the Marvels Found in the Great Cities and in the Seas and on the Islands. Produced by an unknown East Syrian Christian author during the late medieval or early modern period, this work offers a loosely organized catalogue of marvellous events, phenomena, and objects, natural as well as human-made, found throughout the world. The Marvels is a unique composition in that it bears witness to the creative adoption by Syriac Christians of the paradoxographical literary mode of ‘aǧā’ib that enjoyed great popularity among their Arabic- and Persian-speaking Muslim neighbours. In this composition, the East Syrian author blends together a number of different paradoxographical traditions: some inherited from the earlier Christian works in Syriac, such as the Alexander Romance, some borrowed directly or indirectly from Muslim geographical and other works, and some, apparently, circulating as a part of local oral lore. Combining entertainment and didacticism, he provides his audience with a fascinating panorama of imaginary geography, which at the same time has unmistakable Christian features.

This edition makes a fascinating Syriac work available to a wider audience, and provides detailed insights into the rich assortment of traditions creatively woven together by its author. Thanks to the combination of the original text, English translation and commentary, it will be of interest to scholars and readers alike.

Chapters gathered in Syriac Hagiography: Texts and Beyond explore a wide range of Syriac hagiographical works, while following two complementary methodological approaches, i.e. literary and cultic, or formal and functional. Grouped into three main sections, these contributions reflect three interrelated ways in which we can read Syriac hagiography and further grasp its characteristics: “Texts as Literature” seeks to unfold the mechanisms of their literary composition; “Saints Textualized” offers a different perspective on the role played by hagiographical texts in the invention and/or maintenance of the cult of a particular saint or group of saints; “Beyond the Texts” presents cases in which the historical reality behind the nexus of hagiographical texts and veneration of saints can be observed in greater details.

In Memory and Identity in the Syriac Cave of Treasures: Rewriting the Bible in Sasanian Iran Sergey Minov examines literary and socio-cultural aspects of the Syriac pseudepigraphic composition known as the Cave of Treasures, which offers a peculiar version of the Christian history of salvation. The book fills a lacuna in the history of Syriac Christian literary creativity by contextualising this unique work within the cultural and religious situation of Sasanian Mesopotamia towards the end of Late Antiquity. The author analyses the Cave’s content and message from the perspective of identity theory and memory studies, while discussing its author’s emphatically polemical stand vis-à-vis Judaism, the ambivalent way in which he deals with Iranian culture, and the promotion in this work of a distinctively Syriac-oriented vision of the biblical past.

Research background: Ethnic identity development, while universal, is also recognized as an especially important prerequisite for economic and social life among indigenous populations [1, 2]. Global transformations such as technology, industrialization, global warming and political and economic forces are impacting positive ethnic identity development in indigenous populations around the world. Purpose of the article: The purpose of this study is to examine gender differences in ethnic identity erosion in the adolescent indigenous Nenets population of the Russian Siberian Arctic Region. Methods: The study sample included 78 children in boarding schools from the northern area of Western Siberia. To define ethnic identity, the "Types of Ethnic Identity" questionnaire [3] was used. Findings & Value added: The study results show that across 8th-9th grade as well as 10-11 grade Nenets adolescent boys perceive their ethnic identity positively. However, the same indicators show girls do not view their ethnic identity as positively. There are also several other interesting gender differences that emerge between the students in each grade. This may be the result of specific gender differences in perceptions about the economic and social realities of tundra life, the position of women in traditional societies as well as the impact of global transformations on indigenous populations overall.

Coherently organised into seven parts, the book provides a structure through which EU-Russia relations can be studied in a comprehensive yet manageable fashion. It provides readers with the tools to deliver critical analysis of this sometimes volatile and polarising relationship, so new events and facts can be conceptualised in an objective and critical manner. Informed by high-quality academic research and key bilateral data/statistics, it further brings scope, balance and depth, with chapters contributed by a range of experts from the EU, Russia and beyond. Chapters deal with a wide range of policy areas and issues that are highly topical and fundamental to understanding the continuing development of EU-Russia relations, such as political and security relations, economic relations, social relations and regional and global governance.

The article presents a study of the reasons and motives for the emergence of educational requests from managers of a modern University. It was found that managers ' educational requests contradict real needs, and their motives are associated with weak and strong knowledge, which depends on their age and professional experience, and not on the University profile. Thus, the authors presented a variant of interaction between pro- ject teams based on strong knowledge.

The problem of the existence of an arc with at most countable (finite) number of bifurcations connecting structurally stable systems (Morse – Smale systems) on manifolds was included in the list of fifty Palis – Pugh problems at number 33. In 1976 S. Newhouse, J.Palis, F.Takens introduced the concept of a stable arc connecting two structurally stable systems on a manifold. Such an arc does not change its quality properties with small changes. In the same year, S.Newhouse and M.Peixoto proved the existence of a simple arc (containing only elementary bifurcations) between any two Morse – Smale flows. From the result of the work of J. Fliteas it follows that the simple arc constructed by Newhouse and Peixoto can always be replaced by a stable one. For Morse – Smale diffeomorphisms defined on manifolds of any dimension, there are examples of systems that cannot be connected by a stable arc. In this connection, the question naturally arises of finding an invariant that uniquely determines the equivalence class of a Morse – Smale diffeomorphism with respect to the relation of connection by a stable arc (a component of a stable isotopic connection). In the article, the components of the stable isotopic connection of polar gradient-like diffeomorphisms on a two-dimensional torus are found under the assumption that all non-wandering points are fixed and have a positive orientation type.

We consider massless Dirac operators on the half-line with compactly supported potentials. We solve the inverse problems in terms of Jost function and scattering matrix (including characterization). We study resonances as zeros of Jost function and prove that a potential is uniquely determined by its resonances. Moreover, we prove the following: (1) resonances are free parameters and a potential continuously depends on a resonance, (2) the forbidden domain for resonances is estimated, (3) asymptotics of resonance counting function is determined, (4) these results are applied to canonical systems.

Long-term (2009–2019) field studies of the CO2 fluxes over the Valday upland in north-western European Russia were performed in an old-growth spruce-dominated forest subject to the combined effects of climate change, bark beetle attacks and windfall events. The annual carbon uptake within the study area decreased from − 300 g C m− 2 yr−1 in 2010–2011 to − 95 g C m− 2 yr−1 in 2018 as a result of progressive tree mortality. However, mortality did not cause a significant reduction in specific ecosystem respiration. The respiration of the damaged forest was formed by efflux from soil (64.8%), living vegetation (15.5%), hotspots under dry standing trees (12.1%) and decomposition of woody debris (7.6%). High correlations between net ecosystem exchange and dry standing spruce stocks and average soil CO2 efflux were found. The decrease in the carbon sink was followed by a decline in evapotranspiration from 0.0142 ± 0.0003 g H2O m− 2 s−1 for May–October 2010 to 0.0116 ± 0.0002 g H2O m− 2 s−1 in 2018. We assumed that the decrease in carbon uptake was due to both the reduction in primary tree production and the decrease in the area of the unaffected stands. Our estimates show that an increase in tree mortality up to 27% of a stand area could turn an old-growth spruce forest into a net source of CO2. This should be taken into account when considering human-induced and climate-related effects on boreal forests.

This paper examines the transformations of contemporary cultural policy in the Russian Federation on three basic levels: organizational, politico-discursive, and legislative. It also establishes the continuity and differences in that policy vis-à-vis the Soviet period. The principal thesis of this article is that the organizational behavior of the state sector of cultural policy currently seeks to reproduce the model that emerged in the final period of the USSR’s existence. State cultural organizations competing for state resources publicly demonstrate ritualistic ceremonial behavior in relation to political discourse and the established legal system, but at the same time avoid direct ideological instrumentalization of their activities, while seeking to support, update, and expand their network.

The research presented here reports the process of adapting the Male Role Norms Inventory-Revised (MRNI-R) for use in Russian. The full (MRNI-R) and short form (Male Role Norms Inventory-Short Form; MRNI-SF) versions of the Inventory were tested in two studies. There were 1,016 participants in Study 1 and 1,038 participants in Study 2, which investigated second-order, seven-factor, and bifactor models. The analysis of construct validity indicated that the MRNI-R did not fit the data. Therefore, we developed a Russian-language MRNI-SF which fit the data well. The modified bifactor model of the MRNI-SF, which contained two covariances among the latent factors, demonstrated good construct validity and fit the data better than the unidimensional, seven-factor, second-order, oblique, and pure orthogonal bifactor models. Configural, metric, and scalar measurement invariance were supported for the modified bifactor model. The analysis of the MRNI-SF’s convergent validity demonstrated that traditional masculinity ideology (TMI) was related to stereotypes about men, ambivalent attitudes toward them, and negative attitudes toward homosexuals. Taken together, we concluded that the Russian-language MRNI-SF might be used for a reliable assessment of TMI among groups based on gender and sexual orientation.

Objectives

Clinical practice is developing under influence of the evidence-based clinical practice guidelines (EBCPG). In Russia development of the documents prescribing the content of care is connected with the idea that they may be used as well for estimation of the cost of care. The outcome is the national healthcare legislation of 2011. It dictates that care should be planned, funded, provided, and evaluated in agreement with standards of healthcare (SHC)—documents prescribing the content of care. The objective of this study was to evaluate how the correction of the SHC with the relevant EBCPG may change the cost of the prescribed care.

Methods

We selected the random sample of the SHC from the approved by the Ministry of Health for primary healthcare (SPHC) and specialized healthcare (SSHC). We analyzed interventions comparing SHC to the relevant EBCPG. Not recommended interventions were considered unnecessary. If the recommended by EBCPG intervention was missed in the SHC, then it increased the cost. We take the drug costs and the costs of interventions from the relevant ministerial registries. We calculated the total cost of the SHC by summing up the cost of each medical intervention/medications specified in the SHC.

Results

SPHC and SSHC both contain medical interventions and drugs that should not be provided. The total cost of all SHC included became lower: SPHC cost decreased by 66%, SSHC by 19%. The smaller change of the cost of SSHC is explained by the fact that the major part of the total cost of SSHC is the stay in a hospital.

Conclusion

Correction of the SHC using EBCPG may reduce the cost of care

In the paper, three algorithms for predicting protein side-chain conformations are suggested and discussed. All proposed approaches analyze the local neighborhood of the target residue to avoid'steric clashes'. Strong and weak points of the algorithms are described, and ways of improving their outcomes are suggested. The approach based on predicting conformations for all residues in a protein chain segment appears to be the most promising.

We derive a quadratic recursion relation for the linear Hodge integrals of the form $⟨τ_2^nλ_k⟩$. These numbers are used in a formula for Masur-Veech volumes of moduli spaces of quadratic differentials discovered by Chen, Möller and Sauvaget. Therefore, our recursion provides an efficient way of computing these volumes.

A novel method for finding roots of polynomials over finite fields has been proposed. This method is based on the cyclotomic discrete Fourier transform algorithm. The improvement is achieved by using the normalized cyclic convolutions, which have a small complexity and allow matrix decomposition, as well as methods of adapting the truncated normalized cyclic convolutions calculation. For small values of degree of the error-locator polynomial the novel method has not only the smallest multiplicative complexity, but the full computational complexity of this method is also less than with other methods. Thus, the multiplicative complexity of the novel method in comparison to the method of affine decomposition (the Fedorenko-Trifonov method) is up to ten times less, although the additive complexity is approximately 10-15\% more. The novel method has matrix representation convenient for implementation.

Diplomacy and Language (a Russian Embassy to Italy in 1659). Magic, Texts and Travel: Homage to a Scholar, Will Ryan. Janet M. Hartley and Denis J. B. Shaw (eds). London: SGECR, 2021.  P. 192–199.

Essays by and in Honor of William Gehrlein and Dominique Lepelley

Presents recent research on the analysis of voting rules using the probability approach

This book includes up-to-date contributions in the broadly defined area of probabilistic analysis of voting rules and decision mechanisms. Featuring papers from all fields of social choice and game theory, it presents probability arguments to allow readers to gain a better understanding of the properties of decision rules and of the functioning of modern democracies. In particular, it focuses on the legacy of William Gehrlein and Dominique Lepelley, two prominent scholars who have made important contributions to this field over the last fifty years. It covers a range of topics, including (but not limited to) computational and technical aspects of probability approaches, evaluation of the likelihood of voting paradoxes, power indices, empirical evaluations of voting rules, models of voters’ behavior, and strategic voting. The book gathers articles written in honor of Gehrlein and Lepelley along with original works written by the two scholars themselves.

Ecological politics in regard to natural resources, including water resources, can be implemented in many different ways: by administrative power, economic effect or social motivation. But the achievement of efficient water resources usage is hampered by the fact that these resources are collective access ones. In this article the experience of the basin districts creation in Russia is highlighted. Basin councils working in the districts are aimed at developing recommendations in the field of use and protection of water objects.

This talk deals with new, innovative, data exfiltration techniques using laser printers. The aim is to understand the possibilities offered by laser printing to insert data subliminally on paper during printing when using office printers. These techniques are similar to those used in auxiliary channel attacks or sidechannel/covert channel attacks), which mainly target confidential environments requiring a high level of security (military, state, industrial sectors). By using the print function, not only it is possible to hide a message (invisible to the public eye) but also to decipher it easily once printed on a paper sheet. The objective is to make people aware of the need of strong security management of printers against unauthorized access to avoid data breach. The main reason lies in the fact that a simple malware hooking the print queue may enable confidential information to be added to legitimate documents and organize the leakage of sensitive information. Demos of our techniques will be made during the talk and source codes will be released.

Most modern democracies and states have adopted a large number of standards and norms to promote and harmonize international trade. The precautionary principle has come to complete this regulatory arsenal especially in the field of security of states and citizens, their health, their private life ... The aim is also to protect government agencies against wrong decisions, especially when uncertain, immature technologies are concerned. Social, political, institutional security and stability and now cybersecurity has become heavily dependent on these new forms of regulation. In this article we will show how this regulation arsenal could be exploited by cybercriminals. It is indeed possible through a broader vision of the notion of cyber attack to turn these norms and standards and this precautionary principle precisely against those they are supposed to protect. Among many possible scenarios, we consider a specific one for illustration with respect to the attack of voting machines. The m ain conclusion is that any (cyber)security risk analysis should now extend the mostly favoured technical view to a more operational vision in which non technical aspects also be included.

Yemen continues to occupy a peripheral place in Russian foreign policy. There are three reasons for this: the lack of serious economic interest for Russia, the illusory possibilities of strengthening the military presence there, and also the recognition of the dominant role of Saudi Arabia in the Yemeni conflict, relations with which began to improve again after the accession to the throne of King Salman in 2015. On the other hand, the deepening of the split within the Arab Coalition in Yemen, primarily between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, forces the Russian authorities not only to balance between the Yemeni actors, but already makes it part of the “Yemeni triangle” along with the UAE and Saudi Arabia. In other words, Russian involvement in the Yemeni crisis has its own limits, which are due to both domestic factors and the specifics of relations with the Gulf countries.

We are very pleased to welcome you to the First International Conference on Code Quality at the HSE University in Moscow, Russia. This special conference kicks off the new series, and therefore, we hope it launches a tradition to follow, and an opportunity for a rapid spin up. This ICCQ conference was organized by the HSE and a few leading IT innovative companies such Huawei and Yandex. We are happy that the ICCQ 2021 attracted such renowned experts as Jens Palsberg, Anders Møller, and David West, to mention a few. The papers were submitted from the world over, and choosing the best of best was a challenge even for our lofty jury. The conference attracted speakers and attendees from the USA, Europe, and Asia; therefore, this is truly an international event.

Post-Soviet countries have experienced historical periods, political regimes, and socio-economic systems that differ fundamentally from each other and have adopted diverse values and norms, which have inevitably influenced the nations’ gendered labor market structures. This chapter considers the differences in labor market position between young men and women in 10 post-Soviet countries over time. The main research question is whether young women in these countries have attained labor market statuses as intensive (in terms of working hours) and high (in terms of job positions) as those of their male counterparts over the last three decades. The study uses World Values Survey cross-section data (1981–2014) as a database. The target group is employed youth aged 18–29 years. Contrary to the initial hypothesis, a time-trend analysis reveals a trend towards differences in job position between young men and women in post-Soviet countries. The results of two binary logistic regressions demonstrate that being a young woman in post-Soviet countries decreases the probability of being employed full-time but that Russia is following the opposite trend. In addition, being a young woman in Russia and Kazakhstan increases the probability of holding a supervisory position relative to the probability for a young man.

Populist studies are increasingly interested in the effects that populism has on political systems of contemporary democracies. This article analyzes the relationship between populist parties and politicians and the intensity of political protest. Arguing that populists generate feelings of anger and outrage at the establishment politicians, develop close relationships with social movements, and instigate further polarization and resistance from the opposition, the existence of populist actors in a political system is expected to generate more political protests. Empirical testing using cross-national figures considers the case of both the prevalence of populist parties in European countries and the existence of a populist politician as the head of government in European, Latin American, and North American countries. The results testify to strong positive correlations in both cases demonstrating the potential that populism has for socio-political destabilization. However, when tests are performed in order to observe whether this relationship holds within different geographical and temporal spaces, strong negative relationships are shown with populists prior to the year 2000 and positive ones afterwards. Finally, once the ideological disposition of the populist leaders is accounted for, the results testify to a diverging pattern; whereas the populist radical right and radical left are strongly associated with increasing protests after the year 2000, in the decade prior, centrist or neoliberal populism demonstrated a significantly negative correlation with protest intensity.

This paper deals with the extreme value analysis for the triangular arrays, which appear when some parameters of the mixture model vary as the number of observations grow. When the mixing parameter is small, it is natural to associate one of the components with ”an impurity” (in case of regularly varying distribution, ”heavy-tailed impurity”), which ”pollutes” another component. We show that the set of possible limit distributions is much more diverse than in the classical Fisher-Tippett-Gnedenko theorem, and provide the numerical examples showing the efficiency of the proposed model for studying the maximal values of the stock returns.

The guarantee of an anonymous mechanism is the worst case welfare an agent can secure against unanimously adversarial others. How high can such a guarantee be, and what type of mechanism achieves it? We address the worst case design question in the n-person probabilistic voting/bargaining model with p deterministic outcomes. If n is no less than p the uniform lottery is the only maximal (unimprovable) guarantee; there are many more if p>n, in particular the ones inspired by the random dictator mechanism and by voting by veto. If n=2 the maximal set M(n,p) is a simple polytope where each vertex combines a round of vetoes with one of random dictatorship. For p>n>2, we show that the dual veto and random dictator guarantees, together with the uniform one, are the building blocks of 2 to the power d simplices of dimension d in M(n,p), where d is the quotient of p-1 by n. Their vertices are guarantees easy to interpret and implement. The set M(n,p) may contain other guarantees as well; what we can say in full generality is that it is a finite union of polytopes, all sharing the uniform guarantee.

Globalisation has provoked a deep transformation in international law, political affairs and governance with contradictory consequences. It has stimulated the cosmopolitan project of global constitutionalism, transnational integration and the unification of democratic standards. However, it also resulted in the fragmentation of international affairs, the deterioration of constitutional democracy and a feeling of a growing shortage in democracy on national and international levels of governance. The international debate on global legal stability therefore cannot ignore the problem of constitutional transformation. The most simple solution to the dilemma consists in the polarised opposition of two trends in the development of the international legal order, namely, integration (in the form of the constitutionalisation of international law) and its fragmentation (in form of the separation of different global constitutional regions, supra-national actors or regimes). According this view, the two rival trends cannot be coordinated and a sharp collision cannot be avoided. The result could be described as a “zero-sum game”, as progress in integration means an equal regress in fragmentation and vice versa. This approach is therefore useful as a methodological presumption grounded on the very abstract, linear and teleological vision of globalisation considering its development from a black and white perspective and associating it strictly with positive results—progress in human rights protection, the supremacy of law and law-based states. The current global pandemic, however, reveals the other side of globalisation—economic recession, legal contradictions, the prevalence of egoistic motives, and the perceived interests of separate regions and national states over general international values or a different interpretation of its content and “common” character. That simple fact makes it important to reconsider the complex character of legal globalisation and the reciprocal relations between its opposite sides—constitutionalisation and the fragmentation of international constitutionalism. Trying to balance the impact of these two opposing trends, the author analyses the positive and negative effects of globalisation on constitutional development regarding such issues as transnational constitutionalisation, democracy and national sovereignty, the changing place of multilayer constitutionalism, the international separation of powers, and the system of global governance in the establishment of transnational constitutional democratic legitimacy. From this point of view, the populist backslide in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) looks dangerous and unforeseen, but it is a systemic and potentially predictable reaction of global regions on the uneven character of integration, the lack of democratic legitimacy and a new answer to the contortions and dysfunctions of global governance. An adequate response to these challenges could be found in a new concept of constitutional integration based on ongoing dialogue between the transnational and national actors of legal globalisation. This dialogue is possible by using a conflict-mediation strategy, elaborated by international experts, especially, for the deliberation of complex and protracted conflicts, which have no clear practical solutions in the short to medium term.

In this paper, we derive a stability result for L1 and L∞ perturbations of diffusions under weak regularity conditions on the coefficients. In particular, the drift terms we consider can be unbounded with at most linear growth, and we do not require uniform convergence of perturbed diffusions. Instead, we require a weaker convergence condition in a special metric introduced in this paper, related to the Holder norm of the diffusion matrix differences. Our approach is based on a special version of the McKean-Singer parametrix expansion.

The paper discusses interregional differentiation in the distribution of electronic purchases among the population in Russia. The aim of the work is to find out what factors are primarily responsible for interregional gaps in the level of online channel use in consumer retail purchases. The study focuses on regional drivers and barriers for the spread of e-commerce. The results show that shares of users of stationary computers (desktops), users of smartphones, and gross regional product per capita are the main positive factors, and lack of trust in e-commerce channels is the main obstacle, while Internet access, age structure, educational level, urbanization, aggregated regional preferences for personal purchases and physical availability of retail trade outlets were found to be irrelevant.

Convergence of order O(1/ √ n) is obtained for the distance in total variation between the Poisson distribution and the distribution of the number of fixed size cycles in generalized random graphs with random vertex weights. The weights are assumed to be independent identically distributed random variables which have a power-law distribution. The proof is based on the Chen–Stein approach and on the derived properties of the ratio of the sum of squares of random variables and the sum of these variables. These properties can be applied to other asymptotic problems related to generalized random graphs

Past evidence on fertility responses to external shocks, including economic recessions and the outbreaks of infectious diseases, show that people often put their childbearing plans on hold in uncertain times. We study the most recent data on monthly birth trends to analyse the initial fertility responses to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research, based on new Short-Term Fertility Fluctuations (STFF) data series (https://www.humanfertility.org/cgi-bin/stff.php), embedded in the Human Fertility Database (HFD), shows the initial signs of the expected “birth recession”. Monthly number of births in many countries fell sharply between October 2020 and the most recent month observed, often bringing about a clear reversal of the previous trend. Across 17 countries with lower fluctuations in births, the number of births fell on average by 5.1% in November 2020, 6.5% in December 2020 and 8.9% in January 2021 when compared with the same month of the previous year. Spain sustained the sharpest drop in the number of births among the analysed countries, with the number of births plummeting by 20% in December 2020 and January 2021. The combined effect of rising mortality and falling birth rates is disrupting the balance of births and deaths in many countries, pushing natural population increase to record low levels in 2020 and 2021.

A general scenario for an N-sequential conclusive state discrimination introduced recently in Loubenets and Namkung [arXiv:2102.04747] can provide a multipartite quantum communication realizable in the presence of a noise. In the present article, we propose a new experimental scheme for the implementation of a sequential conclusive discrimination between binary coherent states via indirect measurements within the Jaynes-Cummings interaction model. We find that if the mean photon number is less than 1.6, then, for our two-sequential state discrimination scheme, the optimal success probability is larger than the one presented in Fields, Varga, and Bergou [2020, IEEE Int. Conf. Quant. Eng. Comp.]. We also show that, if the mean photon number is almost equal to 1.2, then the optimal success probability nearly approaches the Helstrom bound.

Drawing on foundational arguments from the literature on emerging market institutional strategies, and employing a realist historical analysis, we present a retrospective on the Russian automotive industry. We begin by tracing the origins of the sector and synthesizing salient post World War II developments. We then recount the subsequent expansionary decade of the 1960s, followed by the stagnation of the late 1980s, culminating in the eventual collapse of socialism and the breakup of the USSR. Attracted by both the rapid growth in the local market, and the preferential tax rates that accompanied investments, we then document the swift expansion of production facilities in Russia by major global manufacturers in the 2000s. We show how eventually an ensuing sharp halt in local market growth, and an accompanying rise in spare production capacity, saw most manufacturers pursue institutional strategies aimed at obtaining new tax concessions and leveraging intra-industry cooperation, rather than divesting their recently established production facilities. Overall, our retrospective, in particular, calls attention to how global manufacturers were able not only to acquire and rejuvenate existing production facilities or install new greenfield ones, but also to exercise their agency in shaping the broader policy framework and in fashioning new sectoral institutions designed to buttress and sustain the industry.

The article analyses the short-term effects of aggregate economic sentiment on the expected GDP growth in Russia based on the results of regular large-scale surveys of business activity of the Federal State Statistics Service of the Russian Federation for the period 1998-2020. The main purpose of the study is to substantiate the predictive value of the opinions of economic agents in expanding macroeconomic information, including in crisis periods. The authors calculate a composite economic sentiment indicator (ESI), which combines quarterly information for the analysed period on 18 indicators of surveys with a sample of about 24,000 organizations of all size in basic kinds of economic activity, and 5,000 consumers in all Russian regions. The authors prove the possibility of using a vector autoregression model (VAR) with dummy variables to measure the relationship between GDP growth and ESI time series. Scenario estimates of GDP growth until the end of 2021 are based on the expected impulses in the ESI dynamics at the end of 2020, which differ in the amplitude and duration of their impact on economic growth, primarily due to the coronavirus effect. According to the results, under all possible scenarios for the development of business trends, national economic growth can exceed the level of the end of 2019, starting from the third quarter of 2021.

In the present article, we consistently develop the main issues of the Bloch vectors formalism for an arbitrary finite-dimensional quantum system. In the frame of this formalism, qudit states and their evolution in time, qudit observables and their expectations, entanglement and nonlocality, etc. are expressed in terms of the Bloch vectors -- the vectors in the Euclidean space R^{d²-1}, arising under decompositions of observables and states in different operator bases. Within this formalism, we specify for all d≥2 the set of Bloch vectors of traceless qudit observables and describe its properties; also, find for the sets of the Bloch vectors of qudit states, pure and mixed, the new compact expressions in terms of the operator norms that explicitly reveal the general properties of these sets and have the unified form for all d≥2. For the sets of the Bloch vectors of qudit states under the generalized Gell-Mann representation, these general properties cannot be analytically extracted from the known equivalent specifications of these sets via the system of algebraic equations. We derive the general equations describing the time evolution of the Bloch vector of a qudit state if a qudit system is isolated and if it is open and find for both cases the main properties of the Bloch vector evolution in time. For a pure bipartite state of a dimension d₁×d₂, we quantify its entanglement via the characteristics of the Bloch vectors for its reduced states. The introduced general formalism is important both for the theoretical analysis of quantum system properties and for quantum applications, in particular, for optimal quantum control, since, for systems where states are described by vectors in the Euclidean space, the methods of optimal control, analytical and numerical, are well developed.

Approximately twenty years ago, Laurent Itti and Christof Koch created a model of saliency in visual attention in an attempt to recreate the work of biological pyramidal neurons by mimicking neurons with centre-surround receptive fields. The Saliency Model has launched many studies that contributed to the understanding of layers of vision and the sphere of visual attention. The aim of the current study is to improve this model by using an artificial neural network as the spatial component of a model that generates saccades similar to how humans make saccadic eye movements. The proposed model uses a Leaky Integrate-and-Fire layer for temporal predictions, and replaces parallel feature maps with a deep learning neural network in order to create a generative model that is precise for both spatial and temporal shifts of attention. Our model was able to predict eye movements based on unsupervised learning from raw image input, combined with supervised learning from fixation maps retrieved during an eye-tracking experiment. The results imply that it is possible to match the spatial and temporal distributions of the model to spatial and temporal human distributions.

We estimate the n-gram entropies of English- language texts, using dictionaries and taking into account punctuation, and find a heuristic method for estimating the marginal entropy. We propose a method for evaluating the coverage of empirically generated dictionaries and an ap- proach to address the disadvantage of low coverage. In ad- dition, we compare the probability of obtaining a meaning- ful text by directly iterating through all possible n-grams of the alphabet and conclude that this is only possible for very short text segments.

The article examines the self-identification and professional values of the university community in post-Soviet Russia. On the basis of the corpus of the interviews, which were recorded by the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (Moscow) in the 2010s, the authors analyse how the contemporary Russian scholars consider the problems of university autonomy and university management, as well as the criteria to define an ideal University and an ideal Professor. Instead of the unique perceptions on the specifics of research and educational characteristics of university space and people, the present investigation represents the problematization of the basic definitions of university and its purposes by the contemporary Russian scholars.

Commuting is linked to fertility through demographic, social, and economic mechanisms. Average differences in first-birth rates of young, working women are estimated by a bivariate model with endogenous commuting. Empirical evidence based on administrative data (Sweden) reveals that commuting women have a lower probability of a first birth between 21-28 years of age and a higher probability between 29-32 years. Therefore, commuting women likely postpone their first child. Additional direct and spillover effects of commuting on fertility appear in income cross-municipal flows, diffusion of fertility norms across space, and changes in gender structure of the population of fertile age. A positive effect on relative income and social norms and a negative sex ratio effect are found significant both for commuting women and those who work in the municipality of their residence. Marginal effects for commuters are greater in magnitude.

Several results on presenting an affine algebraic group variety as a product of algebraic varieties are obtained.

We show existence of a natural rational structure on periodic cyclic homology, conjectured by L. Katzarkov, M. Kontsevich, T. Pantev, for several classes of dg-categories, including proper connective C-dg-algebras and dg-categories of local systems. The main ingredient is derived nilpotent invariance of A. Blanc's semi-topological K-theory, which we establish along the way.