Publications

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts, AIST 2019, held in Kazan, Russia, in July 2019.

The 24 full papers and 10 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions (of which 21 papers were rejected without being reviewed). The papers are organized in topical sections on general topics of data analysis; natural language processing; social network analysis; analysis of images and video; optimization problems on graphs and network structures; analysis of dynamic behaviour through event data.

This groundbreaking volume reassess the philosophical trajectory of German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective. Over the course of the volume, German Idealism emerges as a crucial phase in the genealogy of political theology and an important point of reference for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and secularity.

The Festschrift containing 37 contributions celebrates the scholarly achievements of the two outstanding Assyriologists, Walter Sommerfeld (University of Marburg) and Manfred Krebernik (University of Jena). The primary focus of the volume corresponds to the main topics of interests of Professors Sommerfeld and Krebernik – Pre-Sargonic and Sargonic Mesopotamia and third millennium Syria. The volume also features a few contributions dealing with Sumerian language, Mesopotamian literature and the early history of Akkadian and its Semitic background.

Настоящее учебное пособие предназначено для  обучения академическим навыкам письма и подготовки к сдаче международного экзамена IELTS по аспектy «Академическое письмо».  

Целью пособия является формирование и закрепление академических навыков, необходимых для создания  англоязычных текстов учебной и научной направленности на микро и макроуровнях. Пособие направлено  на формирование компетенций, необходимых для использования английского языка в учебной, научной, и профессиональной деятельности. Пособие включает разделы, посвященные особенностям написания параграфа, изучения структуры академического эссе, а также эссе формата международного экзамена IELTS.

Материал пособия рекомендуется использовать для аудиторной и самостоятельной работы  студентов. Пособие может быть полезно студентам преподавателям  вузов,  а также для всех желающих приобрести академические навыки письма на английском языке.

Reflects on comedy's multilayered cultural, social and political character Takes an interdisciplinary approach with contributions from various fields including performance studies, philosophy, film studies and psychoanalysis

 ‘English for IT Studies in Higher Education’, is a collection of eight lessons based on a selection of TED talks about IT issues. The selected TED talks not only enhance the learners’ English language proficiency but also develop the learners’ professional competencies and expand their outlook by acquainting them with the latest applications of computers in various fields of our daily life. All the lessons have a regular structure and include exercises for developing vocabulary, listening, reading, speaking, note-taking and writing skills. A quick test has been developed for each lesson checking the student’s assimilation of the material. The book can be used both for classroom activities and for independent work. It will be of interest to an international readership, especially for ESP instructors and university teachers and students studying English as a foreign language.

This book introduces a 'Big History' perspective to understand the acceleration of social, technological and economic trends towards a near-term singularity, marking a radical turning point in the evolution of our planet. It traces the emergence of accelerating innovation rates through global history and highlights major historical transformations throughout the evolution of life, humans, and civilization. The authors pursue an interdisciplinary approach, also drawing on concepts from physics and evolutionary biology, to offer potential models of the underlying mechanisms driving this acceleration, along with potential clues on how it might progress.  The contributions gathered here are divided into five parts, the first of which studies historical mega-trends in relation to a variety of aspects including technology, population, energy, and information. The second part is dedicated to a variety of models that can help understand the potential mechanisms, and support extrapolation. In turn, the third part explores various potential future scenarios, along with the paths and decisions that are required. The fourth part presents philosophical perspectives on the potential deeper meaning and implications of the trend towards singularity, while the fifth and last part discusses the implications of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Given its scope, the book will appeal to scholars from various disciplines interested in historical trends, technological change and evolutionary processes. 

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This book presents the main findings of a study on school learning environments and student outcomes, which the World Bank conducted in 2019 in three regions of the Russian Federation. Using data collected through the OECD School User Survey and the pilot “Trends in Mathematics and Science Study” (TIMSS), the book analyzes how a school’s infrastructure and learning environment may affect the progress and success of students in math and science. It also delves into teaching practices, analyzing their impact on learning and highlighting the important nexus between learning environments and teaching methods. The book concludes by recommending areas in which focused attention by educational authorities could improve educational policy and help maintain high-quality learning environments. The book will be useful for educators, school principals, architects, and policy makers who are involved in school infrastructure projects and are interested in increasing their knowledge of school design planning.

The book focuses most of all on women's and partly on men's agency, to discuss variant ways in which women and men actively use their scopes of action - through political activism, protest, movements, in the military. The book is aiming to dicuss variant perspectives on these issues in different contexts witin Eastern Europe.  How do these in change affect conservative societies and the concepts of masculinity?

The volume is structured in four parts:

I) Floating concepts of Femininities and Masculinities

    (essentially this is a discussion on the role of feminism in the transformation period in Eastern Europe)

II) Political Activism

    (this part deals with political participation of women - also within conservative parties - and of variant forms of protest)

III) Nationalism and Militarization of societies

 (also papers on violence)

IV) Social Roles and Concepts of Women and Men

A Student's Guide

This proceedings presents the result of the 8th International Conference in Network Analysis, held at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, in May 2018. The conference brought together scientists, engineers, and researchers from academia, industry, and government.  Contributions in this book focus on the development of network algorithms for data mining and its applications. Researchers and students in mathematics, economics, statistics, computer science, and engineering find this collection a valuable resource filled with the latest research in network analysis. Computational aspects and applications of large-scale networks in market models, neural networks, social networks, power transmission grids, maximum clique problem, telecommunication networks, and complexity graphs are included with new tools for efficient network analysis of large-scale networks. Machine learning techniques in network settings including community detection, clustering, and biclustering algorithms are presented with applications to social network analysis.

This Special Issue raises the following points:

Government-to-Government Dispute Resolution

governance and decision-making in the EAEU, operation and case-law of the EAEU Court, governance and decisions making in the CIS, operation and case-law of the CIS Economic Court, dispute settlement under FTA collectively concluded by all EAEU members with third countries, WTO DSU disputes between Russia and the EU regarding mutually imposed sanctions, territorial disputes and border delimitation along the NSR, claims to natural resources in extended continental shelf (ECS) under the United Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), disputes leading to a conclusion of the 2018 Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea (Aktau Convention).

Investor/Business-to-Government Dispute Resolution

the network of BITs and investment-related FTAs chapters concluded by former Soviet republics between them and with third countries along with case studies of disputes resolved based on their provisions, investors' protection under FTAs collectively concluded by the EAEU, the case study of the investment chapter of the EAEU-Vietnam FTA, the case law under the implementation of the Energy Charter Treaty in the former Soviet Republic, the implications of Bucharest Energy Charter Declaration for post-Soviet space; non-discriminatory access to government contracts and participation in public-private partnerships along with domestic challenge procedures replicating requirement of the WTO GPA, conditions of foreign investments in SEZs with emphasis on mechanism of resolution of potential disputes with administrators of such zones, terms and conditions of production-sharing agreements along with their dispute resolution rules, interference of MDB and other financing institutions with the dispute resolution between borrowing/institutions and general contracts selected by such institutions to carry out finance projects, controversies between foreign shipping companies and Russian authorities regarding freedom of navigation (FON) and safety of navigation and marine pollution along the NSR, non-discriminatory access to navigation, ice-advisory and ice-breaking services and to post infrastructure along the NSR, along with domestic procedure allowing foreign vessels operators to challenge the conduct of Russian authorities and SCEs with monopolies over NSR-related services.

Business-to-Business Dispute Resolution

practical dimension of ADR preferred choice of law, forum, language etc) in commercial relations of entities based in post-Soviet jurisdictions in between them and with trade countries, of particular interest are practical issue arising out of trade with China, Iran and Turkey, commercial arbitration and mediation-related development in national law of former Soviet Republics, operation and case law of the RFCCI ICAC, bespoke solution of non-regional arbitration centers for post-Soviet space, including HKIAC, CIETAC, CIETAC HK etc., recognition of arbitral awards and foreign judgments in post-Soviet jurisdictions, adequacy of the Russian implementation of conventions related to covering liability and compensation at sea for the increased trade flows along the NSR, including 1) 1992 Protocol to the International Convention on the Establishment of an International Fund for Compensation for Oil Pollution Damage (FUND), 2) 1996 Protocol to the Convention on Limitation of Liability for Maritime Claims (LLMC) 1976, 3) International Convention on Liability and Compensation for Damage in Connection with the Carriage of Hazardous and Noxious Substances by Sea (HNS), and 4) International Convention on Civil Liability for Bunker Oil Pollution Damage (BUNKER).

Case Studies

discussion of specific ISDS cases, discussion of specific energy related-projects, including investment in exploitation/expansion of specific hydrocarbon deposits and development of power/cogeneration plants along with the financing arrangements, dispute resolution and social/environmental/sustainability aspect of such particular projects, specific transportation projects (rail, road, marine infrastructure) along with the financing arrangements, dispute resolution and social/environmental/sustainability aspects of such particular projects.

This book covers the challenges posed by digitalisation of labour markets in different countries of the world (a number of EU counties, Russia, Belarus, India, Arab countries and China). The authors address such aspects of digitalisation as: (1) the impact of new technologies in the labour market; (2) the impact of new technologies in the employees’ private life; and (3) the impact of new technologies on the labour process. 

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

The “policy mix” concept has gained popularity among science, technology and innovation policy communities over the past two decades in a context of growing policy complexity and need for policy evidence. Pressing societal challenges are also prompting governments to rethink policy making in order to better align public intervention across policy domains and leverage the transformative potential of system innovations. Governments faced multiple obstacles in implementing a policy mix approach in policy making and evaluation. Based on a comparative analysis of international STI policy repositories, a conceptual framework is proposed, as well as structuring principles and operational guidelines for mapping the composition of a policy mix, identifying interactions among components and translating the mapping into measurement. In that view, a range of new policy mix metrics is introduced. Finally, the discussion focuses on the need for moving towards a new data management paradigm and enlarging the measurement mix.

The mirroring hypothesis highlights the correspondence of design characteristics across different architectural levels and in this paper, we consider how mirroring may impact the distribution of national and international innovation activities of firms. We identify incremental and modular innovations (as product architecture reinforcing innovations) along with architectural and radical innovations (as innovations that overturn the existing product architecture) to consider how and when innovation activities may adopt an international dimension. Our study of the bicycle industry highlights that international collaboration is most likely to occur in respect of incremental and modular innovation on the basis of the embedded coordination that modular designs offer. However, even in these circumstances, international collaboration was limited, on the basis that cross-national collaboration created higher levels of complexity and uncertainty; thereby being an attractive option only when the capabilities of the international partner far exceeded what was available either internally, or within national boundaries.

Purpose

This paper aims to provide a detailed case study of a corporate foresight for innovation (CFI) project done by the Higher School of Economics’ (HSE) (Moscow, Russia) corporate foresight (CF) unit for a large state-owned Russian service company. It demonstrates how CFI methods lead to recommendations and how these recommendations result in decisions.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing from being part of the project team, review of the project documents and interviews, the case describes a multi-phased CFI project which incorporated several CF methods. Techniques used for the project itself included grand challenges and trend analysis, analysis of best practices through use of benchmarking and horizon scanning, interviews, expert panels, wild card and weak signals analysis, cross impact analysis, SWOT and backcasting. The project used a broad-base of secondary information, expert panels consisting of company experts and HSE CF team personnel, interviews with senior management and an extensive literature review using HSE’s propriety iFORA system.

Findings

In all 17 CFI recommendation and over 100 implementation recommendations were made; 94 per cent of the CFI recommendations were accepted with most implemented at the time this case was written. The case also identifies five enabling factors that collectively both helped the CFI project and led to a high rate of recommendation acceptance and one factor that hindered CFI project success.

Practical implications

The case study provides detailed information and insight that can help others in conducting CF for innovation projects and establishes a link between CF methods and innovation-based recommendations and subsequent decisions.

Originality/value

In-depth case studies that show academe and practitioners how CFI leads to recommendations and is linked to subsequent decisions have been identified as a gap in the literature. This paper therefore seeks to address this need by presenting a detailed CF case for a corporate innovation project.

Objectives This paper presents detailed analysis of the global and regional burden of chronic respiratory disease arising from occupational airborne exposures, as estimated in the Global Burden of Disease 2016 study.Methods The burden of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) due to occupational exposure to particulate matter, gases and fumes, and secondhand smoke, and the burden of asthma resulting from occupational exposure to asthmagens, was estimated using the population attributable fraction (PAF), calculated using exposure prevalence and relative risks from the literature. PAFs were applied to the number of deaths and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for COPD and asthma. Pneumoconioses were estimated directly from cause of death data. Age-standardised rates were based only on persons aged 15 years and above.Results The estimated PAFs (based on DALYs) were 17% (95% uncertainty interval (UI) 14%–20%) for COPD and 10% (95% UI 9%–11%) for asthma. There were estimated to be 519 000 (95% UI 441,000–609,000) deaths from chronic respiratory disease in 2016 due to occupational airborne risk factors (COPD: 460,100 [95% UI 382,000–551,000]; asthma: 37,600 [95% UI 28,400–47,900]; pneumoconioses: 21,500 [95% UI 17,900–25,400]. The equivalent overall burden estimate was 13.6 million (95% UI 11.9–15.5 million); DALYs (COPD: 10.7 [95% UI 9.0–12.5] million; asthma: 2.3 [95% UI 1.9–2.9] million; pneumoconioses: 0.58 [95% UI 0.46–0.67] million). Rates were highest in males; older persons and mainly in Oceania, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa; and decreased from 1990 to 2016.Conclusions Workplace exposures resulting in COPD, asthma and pneumoconiosis continue to be important contributors to the burden of disease in all regions of the world. This should be reducible through improved prevention and control of relevant exposures.

Objectives This study provides an overview of the influence of occupational risk factors on the global burden of disease as estimated by the occupational component of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2016 study.

 

Methods The GBD 2016 study estimated the burden in terms of deaths and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) arising from the effects of occupational risk factors (carcinogens; asthmagens; particulate matter, gases and fumes (PMGF); secondhand smoke (SHS); noise; ergonomic risk factors for low back pain; risk factors for injury). A population attributable fraction (PAF) approach was used for most risk factors.

 

Results In 2016, globally, an estimated 1.53 (95% uncertainty interval 1.39–1.68) million deaths and 76.1 (66.3–86.3) million DALYs were attributable to the included occupational risk factors, accounting for 2.8% of deaths and 3.2% of DALYs from all causes. Most deaths were attributable to PMGF, carcinogens (particularly asbestos), injury risk factors and SHS. Most DALYs were attributable to injury risk factors and ergonomic exposures. Men and persons 55 years or older were most affected. PAFs ranged from 26.8% for low back pain from ergonomic risk factors and 19.6% for hearing loss from noise to 3.4% for carcinogens. DALYs per capita were highest in Oceania, Southeast Asia and Central sub-Saharan Africa. On a per capita basis, between 1990 and 2016 there was an overall decrease of about 31% in deaths and 25% in DALYs.

 

Conclusions Occupational exposures continue to cause an important health burden worldwide, justifying the need for ongoing prevention and control initiatives.

Objectives This study provides a detailed analysis of the global and regional burden of cancer due to occupational carcinogens from the Global Burden of Disease 2016 study.Methods The burden of cancer due to 14 International Agency for Research on Cancer Group 1 occupational carcinogens was estimated using the population attributable fraction, based on past population exposure prevalence and relative risks from the literature. The results were used to calculate attributable deaths and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs).Results There were an estimated 349 000 (95% Uncertainty Interval 269 000 to 427 000) deaths and 7.2 (5.8 to 8.6) million DALYs in 2016 due to exposure to the included occupational carcinogens—3.9% (3.2% to 4.6%) of all cancer deaths and 3.4% (2.7% to 4.0%) of all cancer DALYs; 79% of deaths were of males and 88% were of people aged 55 –79 years. Lung cancer accounted for 86% of the deaths, mesothelioma for 7.9% and laryngeal cancer for 2.1%. Asbestos was responsible for the largest number of deaths due to occupational carcinogens (63%); other important risk factors were secondhand smoke (14%), silica (14%) and diesel engine exhaust (5%). The highest mortality rates were in high-income regions, largely due to asbestos-related cancers, whereas in other regions cancer deaths from secondhand smoke, silica and diesel engine exhaust were more prominent. From 1990 to 2016, there was a decrease in the rate for deaths (−10%) and DALYs (−15%) due to exposure to occupational carcinogens.Conclusions Work-related carcinogens are responsible for considerable disease burden worldwide. The results provide guidance for prevention and control initiatives.

We investigate numerically and analytically size-polydisperse granular mixtures immersed into a molecular gas. We show that the equipartition of granular temperatures of particles of different sizes is established; however, the granular temperatures significantly differ from the temperature of the molecular gas. This result is surprising since, generally, the energy equipartition is strongly violated in driven granular mixtures. Qualitatively, the obtained results do not depend on the collision model, being valid for a constant restitution coefficient ɛ, as well as for the ɛ for viscoelastic particles. Our findings may be important for astrophysical applications, such as protoplanetary disks, interstellar dust clouds, and comets .

In this work, we demonstrate the trapping of rubidium (Rb) atoms in a pulsed optical dipole trap formed by femtosecond laser radiation with a pulse duration as small as 70 fs. The atom localization in such trap strongly depends on the heating of the atoms caused by the momentum diffusion due to the dipole force fluctuations. The atom femto traps can be used for localization of atoms others than alkaline and alkaline earth atomic elements by conversation of pulsed laser radiation of visible or near infrared to UV spectral.

Background The epidemiological transition of non-communicable diseases replacing infectious diseases as the main contributors to disease burden has been well documented in global health literature. Less focus, however, has been given to the relationship between sociodemographic changes and injury. The aim of this study was to examine the association between disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) from injury for 195 countries and territories at different levels along the development spectrum between 1990 and 2017 based on the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2017 estimates.Methods Injury mortality was estimated using the GBD mortality database, corrections for garbage coding and CODEm—the cause of death ensemble modelling tool. Morbidity estimation was based on surveys and inpatient and outpatient data sets for 30 cause-of-injury with 47 nature-of-injury categories each. The Socio-demographic Index (SDI) is a composite indicator that includes lagged income per capita, average educational attainment over age 15 years and total fertility rate.Results For many causes of injury, age-standardised DALY rates declined with increasing SDI, although road injury, interpersonal violence and self-harm did not follow this pattern. Particularly for self-harm opposing patterns were observed in regions with similar SDI levels. For road injuries, this effect was less pronounced.Conclusions The overall global pattern is that of declining injury burden with increasing SDI. However, not all injuries follow this pattern, which suggests multiple underlying mechanisms influencing injury DALYs. There is a need for a detailed understanding of these patterns to help to inform national and global efforts to address injury-related health outcomes across the development spectrum.

We analyze comparative questions, i.e., questions asking to compare different items, that were submitted to Yandex in 2012. Responses to such questions might be quite different from the simple "ten blue links'' and could, for example, aggregate pros and cons of the different options as direct answers. However, changing the result presentation is an intricate decision such that the classification of comparative questions forms a highly precision-oriented task.

From a year-long Yandex log, we annotate a random sample of 50,000~questions; 2.8% of which are comparative. For these annotated questions, we develop a precision-oriented classifier by combining carefully hand-crafted lexico-syntactic rules with feature-based and neural approaches---achieving a recall of 0.6 at a perfect precision of 1.0. After running the classifier on the full year log (on average, there is at least one comparative question per second), we analyze 6,250 comparative questions using more fine-grained subclasses (e.g., should the answer be a "simple'' fact or rather a more verbose argument) for which individual classifiers are trained. An important insight is that more than 65% of the comparative questions demand argumentation and opinions, i.e., reliable direct answers to comparative questions require more than the facts from a search engine's knowledge graph.

In addition, we present a qualitative analysis of the underlying comparative information needs (separated into 14 categories likeconsumer electronics or health), their seasonal dynamics, and possible answers from community question answering platforms.

Over the past years, there is a deep interest in the analysis of different communities and complex networks. Identification of the most important elements in such networks is one of the main areas of research. However, the heterogeneity of real networks makes the problem both important and problematic. The application of SRIC and LRIC indices can be used to solve the problem since they take into account the individual properties of nodes, the possibility of their group influence, and topological structure of the whole network. However, the computational complexity of such indices needs further consideration. Our main focus is on the performance of SRIC and LRIC indices. We propose several modes on how to decrease the computational complexity of these indices. The runtime comparison of the sequential and parallel computation of the proposed models is also given.

We consider an application of long-range interaction centrality (LRIC) to the problem of the influence assessment in the global retail food network. Firstly, we reconstruct an initial graph into the graph of directed intensities based on individual node’s characteristics and possibility of the group influence. Secondly, we apply different models of the indirect influence estimation based on simple paths and random walks. This approach can help us to estimate node-to-node influence in networks. Finally, we aggregate node-to-node influence into the influence index. The model is applied to the food trade network based on the World International Trade Solution database. The results obtained for the global trade by different product commodities are compared with classical centrality measures.

We analyze export/import food trade network that contains several layers. Each layer accounts for a particular commodity that countries trade with. The network has directed weighted edges. We look at statistical and topological similarity of layers in order to detect dependencies between different products trade. The measures include the estimation of out-degree correlation as well as the analysis of communities. We apply a normalization technique to the initial graphs that takes into account individual attributes of nodes and the possibility of groups formation. The most important elements of the networks are considered in order to compare different layers. Additionally, we analyze the network in time and detect the most similar periods of trade. The analysis of trade in dynamics gives the opportunity to track changes in export/import patterns. The results may have a significant contribution to the further analysis of food security of countries and the development of trade processes.

Power of nodes has been studied in many works, in particular, using centrality concepts. However, in some applications, a large flow between two nodes implies that these nodes become too interdependent on each other. For instance, in trade networks, the possible shortage of flow between two countries may lead to the deficit of goods in the importing country but, on the other hand, it may also affect the financial stability of the exporting country. This feature is not captured by existing centrality measures. Thus, we propose an approach that takes into account interdependence of nodes. First, we evaluate how nodes influence and depend on each other via the same flow based on their individual attributes and a possibility of their group influence. Second, we present several models that transform information about direct influence to a single vector with respect to the network structure. Finally, we compare our models with centrality measures on artificial and real networks.

This paper is related to the problem of finding the maximal quasi-bicliques in a bipartite graph (bigraph). A quasi-biclique in the bigraph is its “almost” complete subgraph. The relaxation of completeness can be understood variously; here, we assume that the subgraph is a \(\gamma \)-quasi-biclique if it lacks a certain number of edges to form a biclique such that its density is at least \(\gamma \in (0,1]\). For a bigraph and fixed \(\gamma \), the problem of searching for the maximal quasi- biclique consists of finding a subset of vertices of the bigraph such that the induced subgraph is a quasi-biclique and its size is maximal for a given graph. Several models based on Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) to search for a quasi-biclique are proposed and tested for working efficiency. An alternative model inspired by biclustering is formulated and tested; this model simultaneously maximizes both the size of the quasi-biclique and its density, using the least-square criterion similar to the one exploited by triclustering TriBox

An incompatibility of object-oriented application code and relational database engine often causes performance problems, known as   mpedance Mismatch,   which negatively affect business-critical application functions. The incompatibility can also over-complicate application design and increase the costs of development.   We address these issues, applying a  concept of the API contracts to the interaction between the application and the database.   We introduce a new technique   providing for the transfer of complex objects  % (in JSON format)  rather than low-level records. We describe the implementation of the proposed solution in industrial settings  and   show how suggested techniques streamline the application development, at the same time providing significant performance gains.  

This chapter builds on the author’s previous work on the history of marginalized social groups, such as users of psychoactive drugs, female criminal offenders and GULAG prisoners. Taking the notion of ‘positionality’ as the point of departure, it traverses some of the methodological and ethical issues arising from the author’s experience in writing and publishing on such sensitive topics in the Russian context.

Given a graph H, a graph G is called H-critical if G does not admit a homomorphism to H, but any proper subgraph of G does. Observe that 𝐾𝑘−1-critical graphs are the classic k-(colour)-critical graphs. This work is a first step towards extending questions of extremal nature from k-critical graphs to H-critical graphs. Besides complete graphs, the next classic case is odd cycles. Thus, given integers 𝑙≥𝑘 we ask: what is the smallest order 𝜂(𝑘,𝑙) of a 𝐶2𝑙+1-critical graph of odd-girth at least 2𝑘+1? Denoting this value by 𝜂(𝑘,𝑙), we show that 𝜂(𝑘,𝑙)=4𝑘 for 𝑙≤𝑘≤3𝑙+𝑖−32 (2𝑘=𝑖mod3) and that 𝜂(3,2)=15. The latter is to say that a smallest graph of odd-girth 7 not admitting a homomorphism to the 5-cycle is of order 15 (there are at least 10 such graphs on 15 vertices).

We explore whether a root lattice may be similar to the lattice $\mathscr O$ of integers  of a number field $K$ endowed with the inner product $(x, y):={\rm Trace}_{K/\mathbb Q}(x\cdot\theta(y))$, where $\theta$ is an involution of $K$. We classify all  pairs $K$, $\theta$ such that $\mathscr O$ is similar to either an even root lattice or the root lattice $\mathbb Z^{[K:\mathbb Q]}$. We also classify all  pairs $K$, $\theta$ such that $\mathscr O$ is a root lattice. In addition to this, we show that $\mathscr O$ is never similar to a positive-definite even unimodular lattice of rank $\leqslant 48$, in particular, $\mathscr O$ is not similar to the Leech lattice. In appendix, we give a general cyclicity criterion for the primary components of the discriminant group of $\mathscr O$.

This research studies the role of culture in reproducing inequality through educational decision-making (VE) students in Russia. We show how the way they meaningfully map their options affects their decisions and outcomes. We built upon the conceptual approach of Hodkinson, specifically “horizons of action” in studying how young people are restricted by the “horizon of action” in their opportunities to see all the options available to them. We expand Hodkinson’s approach by suggesting that the “horizon of action” is a symbolic structure that renders reality as a meaningful frame of reference which is the result of meanings shaping young people’s outlook. Using this approach, we extract four complexes of meanings which we call “symbolic logics”. We investigate further how “serendipity” and “agency” are woven into young people's symbolic logics of choice. We show that students rely on a meaningful frame that allows them to be agents enacting a narrative of “bringing adulthood closer”, but they are also highly uncertain about their future and are open to serendipity which plays a large role in their trajectories.

It is well-known that quasi-one-dimensional superconductors suffer from the pairing uctuations that signicantly reduce the superconducting temperature or even completely suppress any coherent behavior. Here we demonstrate that a coupling to a robust pair condensate changes the situation dramatically. In this case the quasi-one-dimensional system can be a high temperature supercon- ductor governed by the proximity to the Lifshitz transition at which the Fermi level approaches the lower edge of the single-particle spectrum.

This research explores the relation between labor mobility in pre-retirement and retirement ages and further employment in old age in Russia. Older workers often face the challenge of keeping their job due to impaired health, age discrimination, and other factors. Job change can be a potential strategy to maintain employment in old age. Our study uses panel data of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of Higher School of Economics (RLMS-HSE) for 2010–2017. Logistic regression models show that labor mobility can be an effective strategy to maintain employment in old age but only for men. Older workers are more likely to change their job if they do not have stable employment relationships and are not satisfied with their current job.

Set aside procedures in public procurement are those reserved for a sub-class of bidders, such as small and medium enterprises (SMEs) only, as a tool of the preferential treatment of SMEs by many governments. Prior studies and our results indicate these setasides reduce costs of government contracting. If they are cheaper, why should regulations enforce them, and why do so on a limited scale? Using the public database of procurement procedures in the Russian Federation, we first show that SME-focused set-aside procedures indeed attract a larger number of participants and result in a larger rebate for contracting authorities (CA), however the vast majority of CAs strictly prefer non set-aside procedures: the share of set-asides is significantly below the threshold dictated by the Russian regulation. We then turn to factors that make CAs avoid set-asides – these are regional, CA-specific and contract-specific – and relate them to uncertainty and asymmetric information problems, which may be elevated in set-asides and thus counteract the cost-reduction argument. Our findings suggest results on economic benefits of set-aside procedures should be taken with a pinch of salt, and more attention should be paid to perceived risks of procurement from SMEs.    

There is a tacit assumption that multiband superconductors are essentially the same as multigap superconductors. More precisely, it is usually assumed that the number of excitation gaps in the single-particle energy spectrum of a uniform superconductor determines the number of contributing bands in the corresponding superconducting model. Here we demonstrate that contrary to this widely accepted viewpoint, the superconducting magnetic properties are sensitive to the number of contributing bands even when the corresponding excitation gaps are degenerate and cannot be distinguished. In particular, we find that the crossover between superconductivity types I and II - the intertype regime - is strongly affected by difference between characteristic lengths of multiple contributing condensates. The reason for this is that condensates with diverse characteristic lengths coexisting in one system interfere constructively or destructively, which results in multi-condensate magnetic phenomena regardless of the presence/absence of the multigap structure in the singleparticle excitation spectrum.

People differently rank factors they see as important when making decisions with potential environmental impact. Both in a survey and theoretically, we investigate the relative importance of monetary and non-monetary factors and how and whether attitudes to uncertainty affect this ranking. Risk and ambiguity aversion explains the ranking of decision factors that involve uncertainty about future outcomes but often uncertainty is neglected: e.g. possible changes to standards and regulations are seen as a factor of uncertainty, while data manipulation by car manufacturers, as manifested in the recent Dieselgate scandal, is not seen as such. Responses in our sample overwhelmingly reject consumers’ indifference with respect to environmental issues, however when it comes to individual consumption choices, these are strongly dominated by monetary factors. Our data highlight an important role of institutions as collective commitment devices to help promote proenvironmental behaviour.  

Artificial intelligence is having a transformative effect on business world. Among others, legal services industry is susceptible to these transformations, but being a part of the legal system, it adopts novelties more slowly than other service-based industries. The issue of AI acceptance for legal services is widely discussed in Russia. Opportunities and threats of AI implementation are the subjects of academic research, business enquires, experts' assessments, and professional community discussions. Still, all those pieces of evidence are biased by the objectives of specific research and methodology used, mostly have no or little empirical data to ground conclusions on. The absence of empirical evidence on the state-of-theart of AI in legal services and users’ expectations on AI implementation hinders further research in various topics – from legal firms’ management and legal innovations to the lawyering process and access to justice. This paper confirms expert opinions regarding AI technologies and their implementations for legal services, suggesting the cooperation of lawyer and AI in legal service rendering rather than competition. Russian lawyers appear to have the experience of using very advanced AI solutions, including those that are unavailable directly on the Russian market. The expectations of lawyers as users of AI technologies could be described as uncertain, which means that further extension of AI implementation is still a disputable issue.

This article describes major quantitative characteristics of digit ratios and the indicators of subjective well-being based using the RLMS-HSE data set. The index of average satisfaction is constructed and analyzed. Furthermore, the quantitative characteristics of subjective well-being indicators are also covered. These indicators include satisfaction with life, work, wage and economic conditions, and with opportunity for professional growth. The results of regression analysis, graphical presentations, and the specifics of fingers measurements are given in the text. This data article supports our main research article (Nye et al. 2019), published in Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 142, May 1.  

Education in early modern Russia has been traditionally described as imported from the West; secular; imposed by the state – or more specifically, by Peter I himself – from above on the unwilling population; driven by the  military needs, and therefore, technical. This chapter seeks to examine and to problematize some these theses. Some of them have already been re-assessed by scholars, especially insofar as the role of the church in providing education is concerned. In other cases, the discussion is limited to identifying the gaps in our current understanding and pointing to ways of addressing them. In particular, on the basis of he author's own research as well as that of other scholars, it seeks  to outline the responses of the tsar’s subjects to the educational change;  problematize the role of the “state” as an actor in this process, and that of Peter I himself; to understand what exactly is meant by the practical/military drivers of educational change and how exactly the role of these drivers could be ascertained; to emphasize the role of non-state, traditional, and informal genres and providers of education in that period. The last two sections seek to place the early modern education in Russia in the Western European context by identifying more precisely what exactly has been borrowed and how this “borrowing,” in fact, resulted in innovative reconfiguring of educational forms; and to discuss the role of early modern Russia as a pioneer, in some sense, of explicitly using education as a tool of social engineering.    

The level of alcohol consumption and the role of alcohol taxes as a source of state revenue in pre-Petrine Russia have been the subject of much scholarly interest and political speculation, yet reliable data on the magnitude of trade in “grain wine” is still lacking. This article draws on the records of central government agencies from the 1620s - early 1650s to partially fill this gap. In the decades immediately following the Times of Trouble tavern revenues nearly doubled in absolute numbers and accounted for about a quarter of the total state revenues of Muscovy. The growth rate of tavern revenues was on par with the rate of population growth (between the 1620s and 1640s, urban population increased by 60 percent). The article discusses different methods of running the state alcohol monopoly and estimates the profitability of alcohol trade and the overall levels of alcohol consumption during the period under study.

Vocational schools are involved in partnerships with employers to generate extra resources and in the implementation of high-stake accountability reforms in Russia. We examine school capacity in the top-down implementation of performance-related pay (PRP) in Russia. We consider two cases of collaboration between schools and local employers that are either highly or loosely integrated with different companies. We elaborate the understanding of the resource and productivity dimensions of school capacity embedded within the broader context of schools’ formal and informal ties. The findings indicate tensions that emerge in the implementation of a system of rewards with regard to the within schools’ trust and the trust developed with their partners and funders, educational goals, work arrangements, and the distribution of school finances generated in partnerships. These issues can be negotiated with local industrial partners at multiple levels.

Background and Purpose Despite the continuing efforts in multimodal assessment of the motor system after stroke, conclusive findings on the complementarity of functional and structural metrics of the corticospinal tract (CST) integrity and the role of the contralesional hemisphere are still missing. The aim of this work was to find the best combination of the motor system parameters, allowing classification of patients into three predefined groups of upper limb motor recovery. Methods 35 chronic ischemic stroke patients (47 [26–66] y.o., 29 [6–58] months post-stroke) with only supratentorial lesion and unilateral upper extremity weakness were enrolled. Patients were divided into three groups depending on the upper limb motor recovery. Non-parametric statistical tests and regression analysis were used to investigate the relationships among structural and functional motor system parameters, probed by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). In addition, stratification rules were tested, using a decision tree classifier to identify parameters explaining motor recovery. Results Fractional anisotropy (FA) ratio in the internal capsule (IC) and absence/presence of motor evoked potentials (MEPs), were equally discriminative of the worst motor outcome group (96% accuracy). MEP presence diverged for two investigated hand muscles. Concurrently, for the three recovery groups’ classification, the best parameter combination was: IC FA ratio and Fréchet distance between the contralesional and ipsilesional CST FA profiles (91% accuracy). No other metrics had any additional value for patients’ classification. Conclusions This study demonstrates that IC FA ratio and MEPs absence are equally important markers for poor recovery. Importantly, we found that MEPs should be controlled in more than one hand muscle. Finally, we show that better separation between different motor recovery groups may be achieved when considering the whole CST FA profile.

Unlike in the 1990s and early 2000s, nowadays scholars rarely address the issue of international activity of Russian regions (phenomenon known as paradiplomacy). Due to the successful centralization efforts, Russian governors almost lost their domestic as well as external agency. However, there is still a considerable variation in the levels of their international activity which remains unexplained. Employing an original dataset on the international activity of Russian governors from 2005 to 2015 I investigate the effect local political regime, ethnicity and other factors have on the level of gubernatorial participation in paradiplomacy. Contrary to other studies I find that ethnicity has a positive effect on the external activity. I argue that paradiplomacy of republics serves as a tool of their ethnic policy. I also find that more democratic local political regimes bolster the willingness of the governors to participate in paradiplomacy. Varyag governors with no prior connections to the region are also more active internationally.

This paper investigates the underlying nature of the demand for state support in Russia in the labor market and employment, social investments, and material support. Based on recent findings from social policy studies, the authors tested four different mechanisms: (a) the demographic features of the population, (b) household incomes and disposable assets including human and social capital, (c) interests, and (d) locus of control and cultural attitudes. Drawing on an all-Russian representative monitoring survey conducted by the Institute of Sociology of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2018, the authors argue that the popula- tion’s demand for state support has a very complex nature. The relative effect of income has a para- doxical nature. On the one hand, the Russian data confirm the hypothesis of ‘the altruistic rich’, de- veloped in recent studies, which predicts that, in societies with high inequalities, higher incomes boost the likelihood of demand for redistributive policies. On the other hand, higher incomes foster state escapism among those Russians who do not consider the state as a reliable agent capable of solving their problems.

This report aims at discovering the capacity of  WorldSkills approaches in objective and comparable skills assessment in vocational education. Authors study the best practices of the four countries (Russia, Australia, United Kingdom, Netherlands) in embedding WorldSkills standards and procedures to national TVET systems. Prospects of  WorldSkills approaches to objective skills assessment in building internationally comparable skills assessment in TVET are discussed. This report was produced at the initiative of the Union “WorldSkills Russia” in partnership with representatives of the WorldSkills movement in Australia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. This paper shall be of interest for researchers and experts in the field of technical and vocational skills assessment, managers and policy-makers in technical and vocational education (TVET).

Learning models with discrete latent variables using stochastic gradient descent remains a challenge due to the high variance of gradients. Modern variance reduction techniques mostly consider categorical distributions and have limited applicability when the number of possible outcomes becomes large. In this work, we consider models with latent permutations and propose control variates for the Plackett-Luce distribution. Our proof-of-concept experiment recasts optimization over permutations as a variational optimization w.r.t. the Plackett-Luce distribution and solves it using stochastic gradient descent.