Publications

This two volume set (CCIS 858 and CCIS 859) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Digital Transformation and Global Society, DTGS 2018, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May/June 2018.

The 75 revised full papers and the one short paper presented in the two volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 222 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on e-polity: smart governance and e-participation, politics and activism in the cyberspace, law and regulation; e-city: smart cities and urban planning; e-economy: IT and new markets; e-society: social informatics, digital divides; e-communication: discussions and perceptions on the social media; e-humanities: arts and culture; International Workshop on Internet Psychology; International Workshop on Computational Linguistics. 

I show that Hurwitz numbers may be generated by certain correlation functions which appear in quantum chaos.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th Russian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, RCAI 2018, Moscow, Russia, in September 2018. 

The 22 full papers presented along with 4 short papers in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. The conference deals with a wide range of topics, including data mining and knowledge discovery, text mining, reasoning, decision making, natural language processing, vision, intelligent robotics, multi-agent systems, machine learning, ontology engineering.

The 9th iteration of this go-to textbook on contemporary Russian politics offers comprehensive and critical discussion of the country’s most recent developments, providing substantive coverage of the key areas in domestic and foreign Russian politics. Ranging from established topics such as executive leadership, parties and elections, to newer issues of national identity, protest, and Russia and Greater Eurasia, it reflects the changing nature of Russian politics in a globalising world defined by ever-shifting balances of power.

Building on the success of previous versions, Developments in Russian Politics 9 is an established text for modules on Russian politics. Its chapters can also be used as standalone or supplementary reading at various points throughout courses on comparative government and politics. Accessibly written, and compiled by an international team of specialists, it will appeal to both undergraduate and postgraduate students from across the world.

The use of data in society has seen an exponential growth in recent years. Data science, the field of research concerned with understanding and analyzing data, aims to find ways to operationalize data so that it can be beneficially used in society, for example in health applications, urban governance or smart household devices. The legal questions that accompany the rise of new, data-driven technologies however are underexplored. This book is the first volume that seeks to map the legal implications of the emergence of data science. It discusses the possibilities and limitations imposed by the current legal framework, considers whether regulation is needed to respond to problems raised by data science, and which ethical problems occur in relation to the use of data. It also considers the emergence of Data Science and Law as a new legal discipline.

    

The concept of sacred insanity is widespread among many religions of the world and through many ages and cultures. The present volume collects the contributions of the symposium Holy Fools and Divine Madmen, held in Munich in 2015. Employing interdisciplinary approaches, these studies cover a wide geographical and cultural range, from Byzantium westward to Italy and Ireland, and eastward to Islamic Iran, and to India and Tibet

The full text of the UN Satellite Account on Nonprofit and Related Institutions and Volunteer Work, developed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies in cooperation with the United Nations Statistical Division and an international team of statistical experts. This handbook updates and expands the 2002 UN Handbook on Nonprofit Institutions in the System of National Accounts to embrace the larger “Third Sector,” including nonprofit, social economy, and civil society institutions, as well as volunteer work. It calls on national statistical offices to prepare regular “satellite accounts” on this set of institutions and activities and provides a standard set of guidelines for doing so as part of existing official economic data-gathering and reporting. Published in August 2018 by the United Nations Statistics Division.

One of the primary energy sources, natural gas is widely used for power generation, industrial production, transportation, commercial buildings, and households. The industry is a capital intensive one for all stages from exploration to delivery. Two types of supplies: pipeline and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), recently have faced a direct intra-industrial competition. Physical nature of methane and associated transportation costs lead to domination of so-called "natural monopolies" or "national champions" and strict government regulation, which postponed the development of free trade and competition. After decades of technical innovations and cost curve improvement in LNG sector, shale boom in the USA, increasing global consumption, and demand for supply diversification reformulated the role of gas in the global energy balance. While the pipeline sector remains to be in the hands of large corporations and a subject of strategic interstate and international agreements, or LNG provides more diversity and flexibility of trade. However, even after a long history of LNG shipment since the late 1950s, LNG market is still regional with high spreads between countries and terms of delivery.

The paper presents the evolution of business models in the natural gas industry, focusing on the primary drivers as government regulation, production technologies, and regional markets trends on the way to liberalization and cointegration. Thus, our primary objective is to show relative influence power of these drivers. This analysis also defines the competitiveness of corporate business model under conditions of asymmetric information, regional gas markets, deregulation trends, fast-growing production technologies and downstream infrastructure (specifically in LNG sector). We also enclose the analysis of the most globally competitive gas projects. We analyze changes in value chain change and trading contracts. Our methodological approach poses model-based principles, including option and contract models, jointly with game theory elements.

We generalize well-known results on the Onsager–Machlup functional for diffusions. The case of L´evy processes with finite number of jumps and diffusions with jumps were considered in our work. The Onsager–Machlup functional of a c´adl´ag process X is defined by the following expression OM( f ,ψ) = lim_{ε→0}P{ω : ||X(ω)− f|| <ε }/P{ω : ||X(ω)−ψ|| <ε }, where || · || is a norm in the Skorokhod space D[0,∞]. This expression gives a tool to compare weights of trajectories of the corresponding process, also it is naturally connected with the most probable sample path of the process. This interpretation leads to the number of applications, for example, to the popular Customer Journey Maps problem.

We generalize well-known results on the Onsager–Machlup functional for diffusions. The case of L´evy processes with finite number of jumps and diffusions with jumps were considered in our work. The Onsager–Machlup functional of a c´adl´ag process X is defined by the following expression OM( f ,ψ) = lim_{ε→0}P{ω : ||X(ω)− f|| <ε }/P{ω : ||X(ω)−ψ|| <ε }, where || · || is a norm in the Skorokhod space D[0,∞]. This expression gives a tool to compare weights of trajectories of the corresponding process, also it is naturally connected with the most probable sample path of the process. This interpretation leads to the number of applications, for example, to the popular Customer Journey Maps problem.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian policy towards the Middle East has been marked by inconsistency and unexpected U-turns. This has made it hard for Western policymakers to understand whether Russia’s presence in the Middle East represents a source of cooperation or of future conflict between Moscow and the West.   On the one hand, Russia’s stance on Syria, its refusal to recognize the threat posed in the past by Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes, and its frequent attempts to penetrate and, in some cases, to dominate the energy and arms markets of Middle Eastern countries have raised concerns among Western powers. On the other hand, over the same period, Russia’s initial de facto support of Western involvement in the Libyan conflict in 2010–11, its cooperation to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue in 2012–15, its initiatives on conflict resolution in Yemen in 2011–12, and its refusal to export S-300 missile systems to Syria in 2013–14 offered hope that Moscow could play a positive role in the region.  The nature of Russia’s interaction with the Middle East has shifted since 2012. After the re-election of Vladimir Putin for a third term in 2012, Moscow substantially increased its presence in the region. It became more deeply involved when, on 30 September 2015, Russia launched airstrikes against groups opposing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. This set a new precedent. Before September 2015, Russia had tried to avoid any fully fledged involvement in military conflicts in the region. This was also the first time Russia focused on air power instead of ground forces – an approach often used by the US

This book offers insight into ideational motives behind Tehran’s behaviour on the international arena, considering its twin desires to protect Iran’s national interests, and to project raw power. This can then be used to understand the current foreign policy of Iran in the region and generate informed prognosis about Tehran’s diplomatic moves in the future. Given the ongoing instability in the Middle East and Iran’s growing importance as a regional power, it is vital to determine the areas where it actions may threaten the economic, security, and political interests of the international community. At the same time it is also important to identify cases where Tehran could be a team player. This may offer chances to build more constructive relations with Iran in the longer term.

This book provides a critical account of the third sector and its future in Europe. It offers an original conceptualization of the third sector in its European manifestations alongside an overview of its major contours, including its structure, sources of support, and recent trends. It also assesses the impact of this sector in Europe which considers its contributions to European economic development, citizen well-being and human development.

The Third Sector As A Renewable Resource for Europe presents the findings of the Third Sector Impact (TSI) project funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7). It recognises that in a time of social and economic distress, as well as enormous pressures on governmental budgets, the third sector and volunteering represent a unique ‘renewable resource’ for social and economic problem-solving and civic engagement in Europe.

Neuroimaging studies are accumulating fast. A significant number of these studies use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and report stereotactic brain coordinates. In the last 15 years meta-analytic software tools have been developed to identify over-arching data agreement across studies (e.g., http://www.brainmap.org/). Meta-analytic studies help establish statistical concordance and quantitatively summarize large amounts of evidence. To date there are 944 papers on fMRI meta-analyses, as indexed by Web of Science (WOS; 28/04/18). Before analyzing coordinates researchers have to compile, systematically review relevant literature and extract stereotaxic coordinates. One process of pooling information from the articles requires manual search of the articles and manual extraction the relevant data, such as coordinates (i.e., foci), contrasts (i.e., experiments) and types of analyses (whole-brain or region of interest). Another available approach is offered by software with pre-extracted information, such as Sleuth (http://brainmap.org/sleuth/), Neurosynth (http://neurosynth.org/) and other open-source programs. Critically, these methods do not have up to date datasets covering only a limited number of studies (e.g., 11406 papers in the Neurosynth and 3294 papers in the Sleuth 2.4 at the 28/04/2018), whereas, a WOS search for the keyword (“fMRI”) yields 61976 papers. To improve the quality of the manual search for area-based meta-analyses and increase the speed of the identification of the foci of interest, we developed CoordsFinder - standalone graphical interface software for addressing the challenge of processing multiple fMRI articles reporting data in coordinate space. The software is written using WPF (C# and XAML), based on .NET Framework 4.5.2, and it supports Microsoft Windows 7 operating system or higher. The CoordsFinder estimates the foci uploaded in the software manually and searches for it inside the specified folder, which contains the pdf files of the papers, as this is the most common file format for articles. Foci coordinates can be found both in tables and in a plain text of the articles. The foci file uploaded could contain MNI or TAL space coordinates, and the software can indicate each type. In the current version, CoordsFinder can explore only files stored at the user’s computer, and process 274 papers per minute for a typical computer. Practically this software provides a solution for automatically extracting coordinates from multiple articles for effectively organizing and further analyzing data already available in the literature.

This collection offers the first comprehensive and definitive account of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. It does so through a detailed analysis of canonical texts and recently published primary sources on two crucial concepts in Heidegger’s later thought: Gelassenheit and Gestell. Gelassenheit, translated as ‘releasement’, and Gestell, often translated as ‘enframing’, stand as opposing ideas in Heidegger’s work whereby the meditative thinking of Gelassenheit counters the dangers of our technological framing of the world in Gestell. After opening with a scholarly overview of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology as a whole, this volume focuses on important Heideggerian critiques of science, technology, and modern industrialized society as well as Heidegger’s belief that transformations in our thought processes enable us to resist the restrictive domain of modern techno-scientific practice. Key themes discussed in this collection include: the history, development, and defining features of modern technology; the relationship between scientific theories and their technological instantiations; the nature of human agency and the essence of education in the age of technology; and the ethical, political, and environmental impact of our current techno-scientific customs. This volume also addresses the connection between Heidegger’s critique of technology and his involvement with the Nazis. Finally, and with contributions from a number of renowned Heidegger scholars, the original essays in this collection will be of great interest to students of Philosophy, Technology Studies, the History of Science, Critical Theory, Environmental Studies, Education, Sociology, and Political Theory.

Over the past two years, the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation (from now on referred to as FAS) raised the issue of the internal gas market's efficiency, as well as possible scenarios for its partial or complete deregulation. Previously several times settled task has been discussed in the context of the transition to market pricing of wholesale gas volumes and the preservation of state regulation regarding tariffs for the transportation of gas through the Unified Gas Supply System (from now referred to as UGSS). However, to date, the regulation of the domestic gas market, pricing rules and tariffs for transportation have not changed significantly, except for somehow development of the gas exchange trading (SPIMEX), which nevertheless also has some problems and constraints to the development of open market trade.

The main criticism in this issue is the currently applied pricing regime, which consists in the presence on the over-the-counter (OTC) market of monopolistically regulated prices and the so-called open pricing mechanism, and exchange prices on the Saint Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange (SPIMEX) gas exchange, respectively. Experts agree that such a system leads to an asymmetry of the market, and, as a consequence, its inefficiency, unequal position of players in the market, as well as risks of a serious shift of the balance towards one player in case of a significant change in gas market regulation. In this regard, each separate proposal of the FAS on reforming the domestic gas market, whether it relates to the division of the dominant seller into production and transportation or the abolition of price regulation, faces severe contradictions on the each player's side. Thus, the pilot project in three subjects of the Russian Federation (Tyumen Region, Yamal-Nenets, and Khanty-Mansiysk Regions) was discussed to be settled in 2016 on the abolition of the lower boundary of the monopolistic regulated gas price for industrial consumers. The project, however, has not been implemented due to the reason mentioned above for the disagreements of all interested parties.

Such aspects further exacerbate this problem as the share of the gas industry in exports, and, in particular, the export of liquefied natural gas (from now on LNG). The role of LNG in the transformation of global, regional gas markets has been noted over the past decade by the IEA and Russia, as one of the players in this industry, is also setting strengthening rules the positions of Russian gas companies in LNG markets as one of the country's developments priorities.

The paper briefly examines the proposed reforms on the abolition of the gas price lower limit for industrial consumers in the context of the impact on independent gas producers, their market position, market value, and credit rating. Also, the work considers the development of exchange trade in natural gas, as an indicator of open pricing and related problems.

This article discusses the trend in the development of testing from maximum regimentation of the test-takers’ activity (where they solve problems clearly formulated by the creator with a single correct answer) to diagnostic problematic situations that are very new and indefinite with an open beginning and an open end. With increasing frequency, the open beginning used in testing presupposes a freedom of independent formulation of one’s own research questions of the reality being studied and a search for answers while interacting with that reality. The emergence of mass testing of exploratory behavior is a reflection of the conviction that one of the key abilities that will be required in the very near future is the ability to cope with uncertainty and novelty, including by actively investigating them.

The discussion deals with the problems of testing intelligence and creativity in conditions of novelty and uncertainty, including the “judging problem.” It is pointed out that any thinking test, especially a test of creative thinking, is also an implicit (albeit perhaps not conscious) claim by its developers that their wisdom is virtually unsurpassed. After all, it is assumed that any person’s intelligence and creativity that unfold in a new situation may be described in the context of the model produced by the creative intellect of the test’s developer and, hence, by a more powerful “superintellect.” The errors that are practically inevitable with such an approach can be corrected in a dialog among various groups of researchers or, to the contrary, may be deepened if criticism is shut off.

The article analyzes a fundamental methodological error of creativity testing—the “standard list of creative answers” drawn up by the test-maker in advance, against which the participants’ solutions are checked. This error is explored in the case of an invention-oriented task in the international scholastic test PISA 2012, based on which the education ratings of countries are constructed.

An optimistic thesis is offered: no matter how successful testing is, humankind will never be fully prepared to determine its creative potential, due to its forward development. Without diagnostic tools, however, it will be far less prepared; they are a new and important part of that potential.

We prove that any distribution on the positive half-line with infinite expectation can be a distribution of the terminal value of an increasing process such that the difference between the terminal values of its compensator and the increasing process itself is 1.

Background

Assessments of age-specific mortality and life expectancy have been done by the UN Population Division, Department of Economics and Social Affairs (UNPOP), the United States Census Bureau, WHO, and as part of previous iterations of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD). Previous iterations of the GBD used population estimates from UNPOP, which were not derived in a way that was internally consistent with the estimates of the numbers of deaths in the GBD. The present iteration of the GBD, GBD 2017, improves on previous assessments and provides timely estimates of the mortality experience of populations globally.

Methods

The GBD uses all available data to produce estimates of mortality rates between 1950 and 2017 for 23 age groups, both sexes, and 918 locations, including 195 countries and territories and subnational locations for 16 countries. Data used include vital registration systems, sample registration systems, household surveys (complete birth histories, summary birth histories, sibling histories), censuses (summary birth histories, household deaths), and Demographic Surveillance Sites. In total, this analysis used 8259 data sources. Estimates of the probability of death between birth and the age of 5 years and between ages 15 and 60 years are generated and then input into a model life table system to produce complete life tables for all locations and years. Fatal discontinuities and mortality due to HIV/AIDS are analysed separately and then incorporated into the estimation. We analyse the relationship between age-specific mortality and development status using the Socio-demographic Index, a composite measure based on fertility under the age of 25 years, education, and income. There are four main methodological improvements in GBD 2017 compared with GBD 2016: 622 additional data sources have been incorporated; new estimates of population, generated by the GBD study, are used; statistical methods used in different components of the analysis have been further standardised and improved; and the analysis has been extended backwards in time by two decades to start in 1950.

Findings

Globally, 18·7% (95% uncertainty interval 18·4–19·0) of deaths were registered in 1950 and that proportion has been steadily increasing since, with 58·8% (58·2–59·3) of all deaths being registered in 2015. At the global level, between 1950 and 2017, life expectancy increased from 48·1 years (46·5–49·6) to 70·5 years (70·1–70·8) for men and from 52·9 years (51·7–54·0) to 75·6 years (75·3–75·9) for women. Despite this overall progress, there remains substantial variation in life expectancy at birth in 2017, which ranges from 49·1 years (46·5–51·7) for men in the Central African Republic to 87·6 years (86·9–88·1) among women in Singapore. The greatest progress across age groups was for children younger than 5 years; under-5 mortality dropped from 216·0 deaths (196·3–238·1) per 1000 livebirths in 1950 to 38·9 deaths (35·6–42·83) per 1000 livebirths in 2017, with huge reductions across countries. Nevertheless, there were still 5·4 million (5·2–5·6) deaths among children younger than 5 years in the world in 2017. Progress has been less pronounced and more variable for adults, especially for adult males, who had stagnant or increasing mortality rates in several countries. The gap between male and female life expectancy between 1950 and 2017, while relatively stable at the global level, shows distinctive patterns across super-regions and has consistently been the largest in central Europe, eastern Europe, and central Asia, and smallest in south Asia. Performance was also variable across countries and time in observed mortality rates compared with those expected on the basis of development.

Interpretation

This analysis of age-sex-specific mortality shows that there are remarkably complex patterns in population mortality across countries. The findings of this study highlight global successes, such as the large decline in under-5 mortality, which reflects significant local, national, and global commitment and investment over several decades. However, they also bring attention to mortality patterns that are a cause for concern, particularly among adult men and, to a lesser extent, women, whose mortality rates have stagnated in many countries over the time period of this study, and in some cases are increasing.

Background

Global development goals increasingly rely on country-specific estimates for benchmarking a nation's progress. To meet this need, the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2016 estimated global, regional, national, and, for selected locations, subnational cause-specific mortality beginning in the year 1980. Here we report an update to that study, making use of newly available data and improved methods. GBD 2017 provides a comprehensive assessment of cause-specific mortality for 282 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1980 to 2017.

Methods

The causes of death database is composed of vital registration (VR), verbal autopsy (VA), registry, survey, police, and surveillance data. GBD 2017 added ten VA studies, 127 country-years of VR data, 502 cancer-registry country-years, and an additional surveillance country-year. Expansions of the GBD cause of death hierarchy resulted in 18 additional causes estimated for GBD 2017. Newly available data led to subnational estimates for five additional countries—Ethiopia, Iran, New Zealand, Norway, and Russia. Deaths assigned International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes for non-specific, implausible, or intermediate causes of death were reassigned to underlying causes by redistribution algorithms that were incorporated into uncertainty estimation. We used statistical modelling tools developed for GBD, including the Cause of Death Ensemble model (CODEm), to generate cause fractions and cause-specific death rates for each location, year, age, and sex. Instead of using UN estimates as in previous versions, GBD 2017 independently estimated population size and fertility rate for all locations. Years of life lost (YLLs) were then calculated as the sum of each death multiplied by the standard life expectancy at each age. All rates reported here are age-standardised.

Findings

At the broadest grouping of causes of death (Level 1), non-communicable diseases (NCDs) comprised the greatest fraction of deaths, contributing to 73·4% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 72·5–74·1) of total deaths in 2017, while communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional (CMNN) causes accounted for 18·6% (17·9–19·6), and injuries 8·0% (7·7–8·2). Total numbers of deaths from NCD causes increased from 2007 to 2017 by 22·7% (21·5–23·9), representing an additional 7·61 million (7·20–8·01) deaths estimated in 2017 versus 2007. The death rate from NCDs decreased globally by 7·9% (7·0–8·8). The number of deaths for CMNN causes decreased by 22·2% (20·0–24·0) and the death rate by 31·8% (30·1–33·3). Total deaths from injuries increased by 2·3% (0·5–4·0) between 2007 and 2017, and the death rate from injuries decreased by 13·7% (12·2–15·1) to 57·9 deaths (55·9–59·2) per 100 000 in 2017. Deaths from substance use disorders also increased, rising from 284 000 deaths (268 000–289 000) globally in 2007 to 352 000 (334 000–363 000) in 2017. Between 2007 and 2017, total deaths from conflict and terrorism increased by 118·0% (88·8–148·6). A greater reduction in total deaths and death rates was observed for some CMNN causes among children younger than 5 years than for older adults, such as a 36·4% (32·2–40·6) reduction in deaths from lower respiratory infections for children younger than 5 years compared with a 33·6% (31·2–36·1) increase in adults older than 70 years. Globally, the number of deaths was greater for men than for women at most ages in 2017, except at ages older than 85 years. Trends in global YLLs reflect an epidemiological transition, with decreases in total YLLs from enteric infections, respiratory infections and tuberculosis, and maternal and neonatal disorders between 1990 and 2017; these were generally greater in magnitude at the lowest levels of the Socio-demographic Index (SDI). At the same time, there were large increases in YLLs from neoplasms and cardiovascular diseases. YLL rates decreased across the five leading Level 2 causes in all SDI quintiles. The leading causes of YLLs in 1990—neonatal disorders, lower respiratory infections, and diarrhoeal diseases—were ranked second, fourth, and fifth, in 2017. Meanwhile, estimated YLLs increased for ischaemic heart disease (ranked first in 2017) and stroke (ranked third), even though YLL rates decreased. Population growth contributed to increased total deaths across the 20 leading Level 2 causes of mortality between 2007 and 2017. Decreases in the cause-specific mortality rate reduced the effect of population growth for all but three causes: substance use disorders, neurological disorders, and skin and subcutaneous diseases.

Interpretation

Improvements in global health have been unevenly distributed among populations. Deaths due to injuries, substance use disorders, armed conflict and terrorism, neoplasms, and cardiovascular disease are expanding threats to global health. For causes of death such as lower respiratory and enteric infections, more rapid progress occurred for children than for the oldest adults, and there is continuing disparity in mortality rates by sex across age groups. Reductions in the death rate of some common diseases are themselves slowing or have ceased, primarily for NCDs, and the death rate for selected causes has increased in the past decade.

Background

The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2017 (GBD 2017) includes a comprehensive assessment of incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability (YLDs) for 354 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2017. Previous GBD studies have shown how the decline of mortality rates from 1990 to 2016 has led to an increase in life expectancy, an ageing global population, and an expansion of the non-fatal burden of disease and injury. These studies have also shown how a substantial portion of the world's population experiences non-fatal health loss with considerable heterogeneity among different causes, locations, ages, and sexes. Ongoing objectives of the GBD study include increasing the level of estimation detail, improving analytical strategies, and increasing the amount of high-quality data.

Methods

We estimated incidence and prevalence for 354 diseases and injuries and 3484 sequelae. We used an updated and extensive body of literature studies, survey data, surveillance data, inpatient admission records, outpatient visit records, and health insurance claims, and additionally used results from cause of death models to inform estimates using a total of 68 781 data sources. Newly available clinical data from India, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Nepal, China, Brazil, Norway, and Italy were incorporated, as well as updated claims data from the USA and new claims data from Taiwan (province of China) and Singapore. We used DisMod-MR 2.1, a Bayesian meta-regression tool, as the main method of estimation, ensuring consistency between rates of incidence, prevalence, remission, and cause of death for each condition. YLDs were estimated as the product of a prevalence estimate and a disability weight for health states of each mutually exclusive sequela, adjusted for comorbidity. We updated the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a summary development indicator of income per capita, years of schooling, and total fertility rate. Additionally, we calculated differences between male and female YLDs to identify divergent trends across sexes. GBD 2017 complies with the Guidelines for Accurate and Transparent Health Estimates Reporting.

Findings

Globally, for females, the causes with the greatest age-standardised prevalence were oral disorders, headache disorders, and haemoglobinopathies and haemolytic anaemias in both 1990 and 2017. For males, the causes with the greatest age-standardised prevalence were oral disorders, headache disorders, and tuberculosis including latent tuberculosis infection in both 1990 and 2017. In terms of YLDs, low back pain, headache disorders, and dietary iron deficiency were the leading Level 3 causes of YLD counts in 1990, whereas low back pain, headache disorders, and depressive disorders were the leading causes in 2017 for both sexes combined. All-cause age-standardised YLD rates decreased by 3·9% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 3·1–4·6) from 1990 to 2017; however, the all-age YLD rate increased by 7·2% (6·0–8·4) while the total sum of global YLDs increased from 562 million (421–723) to 853 million (642–1100). The increases for males and females were similar, with increases in all-age YLD rates of 7·9% (6·6–9·2) for males and 6·5% (5·4–7·7) for females. We found significant differences between males and females in terms of age-standardised prevalence estimates for multiple causes. The causes with the greatest relative differences between sexes in 2017 included substance use disorders (3018 cases [95% UI 2782–3252] per 100 000 in males vs s1400 [1279–1524] per 100 000 in females), transport injuries (3322 [3082–3583] vs 2336 [2154–2535]), and self-harm and interpersonal violence (3265 [2943–3630] vs 5643 [5057–6302]).

Interpretation

Global all-cause age-standardised YLD rates have improved only slightly over a period spanning nearly three decades. However, the magnitude of the non-fatal disease burden has expanded globally, with increasing numbers of people who have a wide spectrum of conditions. A subset of conditions has remained globally pervasive since 1990, whereas other conditions have displayed more dynamic trends, with different ages, sexes, and geographies across the globe experiencing varying burdens and trends of health loss. This study emphasises how global improvements in premature mortality for select conditions have led to older populations with complex and potentially expensive diseases, yet also highlights global achievements in certain domains of disease and injury.

Background

How long one lives, how many years of life are spent in good and poor health, and how the population's state of health and leading causes of disability change over time all have implications for policy, planning, and provision of services. We comparatively assessed the patterns and trends of healthy life expectancy (HALE), which quantifies the number of years of life expected to be lived in good health, and the complementary measure of disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), a composite measure of disease burden capturing both premature mortality and prevalence and severity of ill health, for 359 diseases and injuries for 195 countries and territories over the past 28 years.

Methods

We used data for age-specific mortality rates, years of life lost (YLLs) due to premature mortality, and years lived with disability (YLDs) from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2017 to calculate HALE and DALYs from 1990 to 2017. We calculated HALE using age-specific mortality rates and YLDs per capita for each location, age, sex, and year. We calculated DALYs for 359 causes as the sum of YLLs and YLDs. We assessed how observed HALE and DALYs differed by country and sex from expected trends based on Socio-demographic Index (SDI). We also analysed HALE by decomposing years of life gained into years spent in good health and in poor health, between 1990 and 2017, and extra years lived by females compared with males.

Findings

Globally, from 1990 to 2017, life expectancy at birth increased by 7·4 years (95% uncertainty interval 7·1–7·8), from 65·6 years (65·3–65·8) in 1990 to 73·0 years (72·7–73·3) in 2017. The increase in years of life varied from 5·1 years (5·0–5·3) in high SDI countries to 12·0 years (11·3–12·8) in low SDI countries. Of the additional years of life expected at birth, 26·3% (20·1–33·1) were expected to be spent in poor health in high SDI countries compared with 11·7% (8·8–15·1) in low-middle SDI countries. HALE at birth increased by 6·3 years (5·9–6·7), from 57·0 years (54·6–59·1) in 1990 to 63·3 years (60·5–65·7) in 2017. The increase varied from 3·8 years (3·4–4·1) in high SDI countries to 10·5 years (9·8–11·2) in low SDI countries. Even larger variations in HALE than these were observed between countries, ranging from 1·0 year (0·4–1·7) in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (62·4 years [59·9–64·7] in 1990 to 63·5 years [60·9–65·8] in 2017) to 23·7 years (21·9–25·6) in Eritrea (30·7 years [28·9–32·2] in 1990 to 54·4 years [51·5–57·1] in 2017). In most countries, the increase in HALE was smaller than the increase in overall life expectancy, indicating more years lived in poor health. In 180 of 195 countries and territories, females were expected to live longer than males in 2017, with extra years lived varying from 1·4 years (0·6–2·3) in Algeria to 11·9 years (10·9–12·9) in Ukraine. Of the extra years gained, the proportion spent in poor health varied largely across countries, with less than 20% of additional years spent in poor health in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burundi, and Slovakia, whereas in Bahrain all the extra years were spent in poor health. In 2017, the highest estimate of HALE at birth was in Singapore for both females (75·8 years [72·4–78·7]) and males (72·6 years [69·8–75·0]) and the lowest estimates were in Central African Republic (47·0 years [43·7–50·2] for females and 42·8 years [40·1–45·6] for males). Globally, in 2017, the five leading causes of DALYs were neonatal disorders, ischaemic heart disease, stroke, lower respiratory infections, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Between 1990 and 2017, age-standardised DALY rates decreased by 41·3% (38·8–43·5) for communicable diseases and by 49·8% (47·9–51·6) for neonatal disorders. For non-communicable diseases, global DALYs increased by 40·1% (36·8–43·0), although age-standardised DALY rates decreased by 18·1% (16·0–20·2).

Interpretation

With increasing life expectancy in most countries, the question of whether the additional years of life gained are spent in good health or poor health has been increasingly relevant because of the potential policy implications, such as health-care provisions and extending retirement ages. In some locations, a large proportion of those additional years are spent in poor health. Large inequalities in HALE and disease burden exist across countries in different SDI quintiles and between sexes. The burden of disabling conditions has serious implications for health system planning and health-related expenditures. Despite the progress made in reducing the burden of communicable diseases and neonatal disorders in low SDI countries, the speed of this progress could be increased by scaling up proven interventions. The global trends among non-communicable diseases indicate that more effort is needed to maximise HALE, such as risk prevention and attention to upstream determinants of health.

Background

The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2017 comparative risk assessment (CRA) is a comprehensive approach to risk factor quantification that offers a useful tool for synthesising evidence on risks and risk–outcome associations. With each annual GBD study, we update the GBD CRA to incorporate improved methods, new risks and risk–outcome pairs, and new data on risk exposure levels and risk–outcome associations.

Methods

We used the CRA framework developed for previous iterations of GBD to estimate levels and trends in exposure, attributable deaths, and attributable disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), by age group, sex, year, and location for 84 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or groups of risks from 1990 to 2017. This study included 476 risk–outcome pairs that met the GBD study criteria for convincing or probable evidence of causation. We extracted relative risk and exposure estimates from 46 749 randomised controlled trials, cohort studies, household surveys, census data, satellite data, and other sources. We used statistical models to pool data, adjust for bias, and incorporate covariates. Using the counterfactual scenario of theoretical minimum risk exposure level (TMREL), we estimated the portion of deaths and DALYs that could be attributed to a given risk. We explored the relationship between development and risk exposure by modelling the relationship between the Socio-demographic Index (SDI) and risk-weighted exposure prevalence and estimated expected levels of exposure and risk-attributable burden by SDI. Finally, we explored temporal changes in risk-attributable DALYs by decomposing those changes into six main component drivers of change as follows: (1) population growth; (2) changes in population age structures; (3) changes in exposure to environmental and occupational risks; (4) changes in exposure to behavioural risks; (5) changes in exposure to metabolic risks; and (6) changes due to all other factors, approximated as the risk-deleted death and DALY rates, where the risk-deleted rate is the rate that would be observed had we reduced the exposure levels to the TMREL for all risk factors included in GBD 2017.

Findings

In 2017, 34·1 million (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 33·3–35·0) deaths and 1·21 billion (1·14–1·28) DALYs were attributable to GBD risk factors. Globally, 61·0% (59·6–62·4) of deaths and 48·3% (46·3–50·2) of DALYs were attributed to the GBD 2017 risk factors. When ranked by risk-attributable DALYs, high systolic blood pressure (SBP) was the leading risk factor, accounting for 10·4 million (9·39–11·5) deaths and 218 million (198–237) DALYs, followed by smoking (7·10 million [6·83–7·37] deaths and 182 million [173–193] DALYs), high fasting plasma glucose (6·53 million [5·23–8·23] deaths and 171 million [144–201] DALYs), high body-mass index (BMI; 4·72 million [2·99–6·70] deaths and 148 million [98·6–202] DALYs), and short gestation for birthweight (1·43 million [1·36–1·51] deaths and 139 million [131–147] DALYs). In total, risk-attributable DALYs declined by 4·9% (3·3–6·5) between 2007 and 2017. In the absence of demographic changes (ie, population growth and ageing), changes in risk exposure and risk-deleted DALYs would have led to a 23·5% decline in DALYs during that period. Conversely, in the absence of changes in risk exposure and risk-deleted DALYs, demographic changes would have led to an 18·6% increase in DALYs during that period. The ratios of observed risk exposure levels to exposure levels expected based on SDI (O/E ratios) increased globally for unsafe drinking water and household air pollution between 1990 and 2017. This result suggests that development is occurring more rapidly than are changes in the underlying risk structure in a population. Conversely, nearly universal declines in O/E ratios for smoking and alcohol use indicate that, for a given SDI, exposure to these risks is declining. In 2017, the leading Level 4 risk factor for age-standardised DALY rates was high SBP in four super-regions: central Europe, eastern Europe, and central Asia; north Africa and Middle East; south Asia; and southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania. The leading risk factor in the high-income super-region was smoking, in Latin America and Caribbean was high BMI, and in sub-Saharan Africa was unsafe sex. O/E ratios for unsafe sex in sub-Saharan Africa were notably high, and those for alcohol use in north Africa and the Middle East were notably low.

Interpretation

By quantifying levels and trends in exposures to risk factors and the resulting disease burden, this assessment offers insight into where past policy and programme efforts might have been successful and highlights current priorities for public health action. Decreases in behavioural, environmental, and occupational risks have largely offset the effects of population growth and ageing, in relation to trends in absolute burden. Conversely, the combination of increasing metabolic risks and population ageing will probably continue to drive the increasing trends in non-communicable diseases at the global level, which presents both a public health challenge and opportunity. We see considerable spatiotemporal heterogeneity in levels of risk exposure and risk-attributable burden. Although levels of development underlie some of this heterogeneity, O/E ratios show risks for which countries are overperforming or underperforming relative to their level of development. As such, these ratios provide a benchmarking tool to help to focus local decision making. Our findings reinforce the importance of both risk exposure monitoring and epidemiological research to assess causal connections between risks and health outcomes, and they highlight the usefulness of the GBD study in synthesising data to draw comprehensive and robust conclusions that help to inform good policy and strategic health planning.

Background

Population estimates underpin demographic and epidemiological research and are used to track progress on numerous international indicators of health and development. To date, internationally available estimates of population and fertility, although useful, have not been produced with transparent and replicable methods and do not use standardised estimates of mortality. We present single-calendar year and single-year of age estimates of fertility and population by sex with standardised and replicable methods.

Methods

We estimated population in 195 locations by single year of age and single calendar year from 1950 to 2017 with standardised and replicable methods. We based the estimates on the demographic balancing equation, with inputs of fertility, mortality, population, and migration data. Fertility data came from 7817 location-years of vital registration data, 429 surveys reporting complete birth histories, and 977 surveys and censuses reporting summary birth histories. We estimated age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs; the annual number of livebirths to women of a specified age group per 1000 women in that age group) by use of spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression and used the ASFRs to estimate total fertility rates (TFRs; the average number of children a woman would bear if she survived through the end of the reproductive age span [age 10–54 years] and experienced at each age a particular set of ASFRs observed in the year of interest). Because of sparse data, fertility at ages 10–14 years and 50–54 years was estimated from data on fertility in women aged 15–19 years and 45–49 years, through use of linear regression. Age-specific mortality data came from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2017 estimates. Data on population came from 1257 censuses and 761 population registry location-years and were adjusted for underenumeration and age misreporting with standard demographic methods. Migration was estimated with the GBD Bayesian demographic balancing model, after incorporating information about refugee migration into the model prior. Final population estimates used the cohort-component method of population projection, with inputs of fertility, mortality, and migration data. Population uncertainty was estimated by use of out-of-sample predictive validity testing. With these data, we estimated the trends in population by age and sex and in fertility by age between 1950 and 2017 in 195 countries and territories.

Findings

From 1950 to 2017, TFRs decreased by 49·4% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 46·4–52·0). The TFR decreased from 4·7 livebirths (4·5–4·9) to 2·4 livebirths (2·2–2·5), and the ASFR of mothers aged 10–19 years decreased from 37 livebirths (34–40) to 22 livebirths (19–24) per 1000 women. Despite reductions in the TFR, the global population has been increasing by an average of 83·8 million people per year since 1985. The global population increased by 197·2% (193·3–200·8) since 1950, from 2·6 billion (2·5–2·6) to 7·6 billion (7·4–7·9) people in 2017; much of this increase was in the proportion of the global population in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The global annual rate of population growth increased between 1950 and 1964, when it peaked at 2·0%; this rate then remained nearly constant until 1970 and then decreased to 1·1% in 2017. Population growth rates in the southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania GBD super-region decreased from 2·5% in 1963 to 0·7% in 2017, whereas in sub-Saharan Africa, population growth rates were almost at the highest reported levels ever in 2017, when they were at 2·7%. The global average age increased from 26·6 years in 1950 to 32·1 years in 2017, and the proportion of the population that is of working age (age 15–64 years) increased from 59·9% to 65·3%. At the national level, the TFR decreased in all countries and territories between 1950 and 2017; in 2017, TFRs ranged from a low of 1·0 livebirths (95% UI 0·9–1·2) in Cyprus to a high of 7·1 livebirths (6·8–7·4) in Niger. The TFR under age 25 years (TFU25; number of livebirths expected by age 25 years for a hypothetical woman who survived the age group and was exposed to current ASFRs) in 2017 ranged from 0·08 livebirths (0·07–0·09) in South Korea to 2·4 livebirths (2·2–2·6) in Niger, and the TFR over age 30 years (TFO30; number of livebirths expected for a hypothetical woman ageing from 30 to 54 years who survived the age group and was exposed to current ASFRs) ranged from a low of 0·3 livebirths (0·3–0·4) in Puerto Rico to a high of 3·1 livebirths (3·0–3·2) in Niger. TFO30 was higher than TFU25 in 145 countries and territories in 2017. 33 countries had a negative population growth rate from 2010 to 2017, most of which were located in central, eastern, and western Europe, whereas population growth rates of more than 2·0% were seen in 33 of 46 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2017, less than 65% of the national population was of working age in 12 of 34 high-income countries, and less than 50% of the national population was of working age in Mali, Chad, and Niger.

Interpretation

Population trends create demographic dividends and headwinds (ie, economic benefits and detriments) that affect national economies and determine national planning needs. Although TFRs are decreasing, the global population continues to grow as mortality declines, with diverse patterns at the national level and across age groups. To our knowledge, this is the first study to provide transparent and replicable estimates of population and fertility, which can be used to inform decision making and to monitor progress.

This chapter presents an overview of the Northwest Caucasian (West Caucasian, Abkhaz-Adyghe) family.

Proceedings of the 1st Internatinal Conference on Urban Linguistics

The paper studies the tendencies in police and judicial response to crime in the context of the new Russian capitalism. The results show that the police evade the objective analysis of crime, evaluating only its current situation (within a year) and resorting to misrepresentation of statistical data to insinuate that they are more effective in solving cases than they are. Judicial practice, in turn, vividly demonstrates the selective (class) approach to prosecuting “blue-collar” criminals, on the one hand, and “white-collar” criminals, on the other. Based on the findings this research provides a scientific toolkit to research the mechanism of judicial response to crime.

This paper examines theoretical aspects of games’ designing in the context of training managers and leaders. Successful leaders are required to be flexible and adaptable. Effective performance as a leader must be learned actively. Around the world various theoretical frameworks are in use for supporting the use of games and simulations as part of this process of connecting theory to action. The work reported in this paper begins with an examination of current understanding about the importance of learning to enact transformational leadership. It begins with a rationale indicting requirements for simulations and games as learning contexts for leadership development. Then it introduces Bakhtin’s theories on ‘polyphonic’ and ‘ventriloquistic’ learning designs and describes how this work can assist those educating others for leadership roles to choose wisely when planning and implementing leadership development programs. The concept of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ designs for active engagement in learning has been explored in simulation and games literature in other cultural contexts and Bakhtin’s contribution extends and enhances the relevant conceptual frameworks. It emphasizes the value of using learning processes that do not include pre-determined outcomes, thus allowing participants to co-create processes and results demonstrating their capacity for flexibility, initiative and responsiveness to what is actually present within the context of the moment.

The review discusses the political-economic aspects of the concept of distributed capitalism allowed for by blockchain technology. As opposed to the first era of the Internet, where the industry of financial and information services was dominated by intermediaries, the blockchain era is characterized by development of a new institution of trust; disruption of financial intermediation; economic inclusion of hundreds of millions of citizens in developing countries; an increase in competition and a decrease in inequality. The paper focuses on the content of key political-economic categories being redefined in the blockchain era. First, labor value gives way to creative value which is manifesting itself in cryptocurrencies. Second, exploitation of workers is replaced by digital discrimination. The blockchain revolution is a solution to the problem of discrimination against intellectual property creators, who have to hand over a large part of the value created to intermediaries. Third, capitalism characterized by information monopoly gives place to free competition based on rivalry between cryptocurrencies. Fourth, class struggle is substituted by confrontation between agents of information monopoly system and those of distributed economy. The author considers the main opposition to distributed capitalism to stem from the feudal financial system which loses ground under new conditions, where economic agents may use alternative currencies and interact directly with one other without risk and high transaction costs.

A corpus study of polysemy and collocability of Goidelic words for 'heavy' and 'light'

The entry provides an overview of the development of the multidiscilinary field of higher education research in Russia. In Soviet period, research on higher education has been developing along with the division of research in the country – between the Academy of Sciences, higher education institutions, and sectoral research under the corresponding ministries. However, current lack of an institutional basis for higher education research reflects the marginal role that the field plays in Russia.

Software analysis is becoming increasingly important as a way of software quality assurance. Most works in this area focus their attention on a single machine scenario, when the analysis is run and implemented on a single processing node, as it seems to be a good fit for the current software development methodologies. We argue that in some cases it is reasonable to employ high performance computing (HPC) to do software analysis, if the performance impact is worth the increase in computational requirements. In this paper we present our experience with the implementation of a HPC version of the bounded model checker Borealis, major problems we encountered together with their solutions, and the evaluation results on a number of different real-world projects. © Springer International Publishing AG 2018.

The question whether visual working memory (VWM) stores individual features or bound objects as basic units is actively debated. Evidence exists for both feature-based and object-based storages, as well as hierarchically organized representations maintaining both types of information at different levels. One argument for feature-based storage is that features belonging to different dimensions (e.g., color and orientations) can be stored without interference suggesting independent capacities for every dimension. Here, whether the lack of crossdimensional interference reflects genuinely independent feature storages or mediated by common objects. In three experiments, participants remembered and recalled the colors and orientations of sets of objects. We independently manipulated set sizes within each feature dimension (making colors and orientations either identical or differing across objects). Critically, we assigned to-be-remembered colors and orientations either to same spatially integrated or to different spatially separated objects. We found that the precision and recall probability within each dimension was not affected be set size manipulations in a different dimension when the features belonged to integrated objects. However, manipulations with color set sizes did affect orientation memory when the features were separated. We conclude therefore that different feature dimensions can be encoded and stored independently but the advantage of the independent storages are mediated at the object-based level. This conclusion is consistent with the idea of hierarchically organized VWM.

We develop a stock-flow-consistent agent-based model that comprises a realistic mechanism of money creation and parametrize it to fit actually observed data. The model is used to make out-of-sample projections of broad money and credit developments under the commencement/termination of foreign reserve accumulation by the Bank of Russia. We use direct forecasts from the agent-based model as well as the two-step approach, which implies the use of artificial data to pre-train the Bayesian vector autoregression model. We conclude that the suggested approach is competitive in forecasting and yields promising results.

We introduce a useful and rather simple class of BKP tau functions which which we shall call "easy tau functions". We consider two versions of BKP hierarchy, one we will call "small BKP hierarchy" (sBKP) related to O(∞) introduced in Date et al and "large BKP hierarchy" (lBKP) related to O(2∞+1) introduced in Kac and van de Leur (which is closely related to the large O(2∞) DKP hierarchy (lDKP) introduced in Jimbo and Miwa). Actually "easy tau functions" of the sBKP hierarchy were already considered in Harnad et al, here we are more interested in the lBKP case and also the mixed small-large BKP tau functions (Kac and van de Leur). Tau functions under consideration are equal to certain sums over partitions and to certain multi-integrals over cone domains. In this way they may be applicable in models of random partitions and models of random matrices. Here is the first part of the paper where sums of Schur and projective Schur functions over partitions are considered.

Abstract: We shall consider the product of complex random matrices from the independent complex Ginibre ensembles. The product includes complex matrices Zi,Z†i,i=1,…,n and 2n sources (complex matrices Ci and C∗i). Any such product can be represented by a chord diagram that encodes the order of the matrices in the product. We introduce the Euler characteristic E∗ of the chord diagram and show that the spectral correlation functions of the product generate Hurwitz numbers that enumerate nonequivalent branched coverings of Riemann surfaces of genus g∗. The role of sources is the generation of branching profiles in critical points which are assigned to the vertices of the graph drawn on the base surface obtained as a result of gluing of the 2n-gon related to the chord diagram in a standard way. Hurwitz numbers for Klein surfaces may also be obtained by a slight modification of the model. Namely, we consider 2n+1 -gon and consider pairing of the extra matrix Z2n+1 with a "Mobius" tau function. Thus, the presented matrix models labelled by chord diagrams generate Hurwitz numbers for any given Euler characteristic of the base surface and for any given set of ramification profiles.  

We present a comparative study of several algorithms for an in-plane random walk with a variable step. The goal is to check the efficiency of the algorithm in the case where the random walk terminates at some boundary. We recently found that a finite step of the random walk produces a bias in the hitting probability and this bias vanishes in the limit of an infinitesimal step. Therefore, it is important to know how a change in the step size of the random walk influences the performance of simulations. We propose an algorithm with the most effective procedure for the step-length-change protocol.

We provide a bare-bones framework that uncovers the circumstances which lead either to the emergence of equally-spaced and equally-sized central places or to a hierarchy of central places. We show how these patterns reflect the preferences of agents and the efficiency of transportation and communication technologies. Under one class of agents, the economy is characterized by a uniform distribution or by a periodic distribution of central places having the same size. Under two asymmetric classes of agents, the interaction between agents may give rise to a hierarchy of settlements with one or several primate cities.

The correspondence study has now become a standard method of measuring discrimination in the labour market. For the first time in the literature, we present a correspondence study of ethnic discrimination in Russia. A sample of over 9,000 job applications makes it one of the largest such studies ever conducted. We include 10 ethnic groups and run the experiment in four Russian cities, whose populations have varying ethnic compositions. Ethnic preferences of Russian employers are different across locations. In Moscow and St Petersburg, employers treat applications from ethnic Russians and ethnic groups of European origin (Germans, Jews, and Ukrainians) in about the same way. Visible minorities of Southern origin are discriminated against. Men from ethnic groups of Southern origin experience stronger discrimination than women. In Kazan and Ufa, two cities with ethnically mixed populations, and in which indigenous ethnic groups have a privileged status, all applicants are treated about equally. We discuss the effects, on discrimination, of ethnic autonomy and of the ethnic composition of a population; these effects may apply to other ethnic federations beyond the Russian case.  

The Internet provides students with a unique opportunity to connect and maintain social ties with peers from other schools, irrespective of how far they are from each other. However, little is known about the real structure of such online relationships. In this paper, we investigate the structure of interschool friendship on a popular social networking site. We use data from 36,951 students from 590 schools of a large European city. We find that the probability of a friendship tie between students from neighboring schools is high and that it decreases with the distance between schools following the power law. We also find that students are more likely to be connected if the educational outcomes of their schools are similar. We show that this fact is not a consequence of residential segregation. While high- and low-performing schools are evenly distributed across the city, this is not the case for the digital space, where schools turn out to be segregated by educational outcomes. There is no significant correlation between the educational outcomes of a school and its geographical neighbors; however, there is a strong correlation between the educational outcomes of a school and its digital neighbors. These results challenge the common assumption that the Internet is a borderless space, and may have important implications for the understanding of educational inequality in the digital age.

In this article, we attempt to trace the semantic changes two key concepts of the Modern period - fundamental law and constitution underwent at the 18th century and investigates how these European concepts were adapted and used in the Russian political language. The concept of the constitution and fundamental laws in eighteenth-century political discourse had differing connotations: while the constitution was used mainly to describe the form of government, the concept of fundamental laws referred to historically developing legal traditions which have been adopted as norms of political law. The most radical vision of constitution in the 18th century went further than identify it with the fundamental law, demanding that the latter should enshrine the principles of civil rights and liberties of the Nation, and the legal guarantees thereof. However, this radical view, arising at the end of the century, was far from universal, and the discussion around various understandings of this concept was still to continue for many years.  

This paper studies the publication productivity of inbreds and non-inbreds among Russian academics. The literature provides ambiguous results on the relationship between inbred status and productivity. This may be explained by the focus on different segments of academia as well as by using different indicators for measuring publication productivity. We exploit data from 3 datasets covering different segments of the academic population and included different indicators of the publication productivity to see whether inbreds and non-inbreds differ in their productivity. We did not find any difference in current publication productivity between s and non-inbreds. We found, however, a difference between inbreds and non-inbreds in whole career publication productivity; non-inbreds are more productive on an individual level. While focusing on Russian data, an analysis of the 3 datasets suggests an explanation for the contradictory existing results on the relationship between academic inbreeding and productivity in general.

This paper investigates the characteristics of the affective component in the structural mere exposure effect (SMEE). Two approaches are considered – fluency attribution approach (FA) and affect as predictive efficiency approach (APE) – within a predictive coding framework. Using the artificial grammar learning and affective priming paradigms, we demonstrate that a violation of implicitly learned regularities elicits an automatic negative affective response. This result suggests that SMEE can be observed without any overtly evaluative judgment. Participants’ decisions on the grammaticality of stimuli did not change this pattern. We conclude that SMEE is based on the affective response to prediction errors made by the cognitive system and may include the fluency attribution process in the later stages of processing.

We generalize well-known results on the Onsager–Machlup functional for diffusions. The case of L´evy processes with finite number of jumps and diffusions with jumps were considered in our work. The Onsager–Machlup functional of a c´adl´ag process X is defined by the following expression OM( f ,ψ) = lim_{ε→0}P{ω :||X(ω)− f || <ε }/P{ω : ||(ω)−ψ|| <ε }, where || ·|| is a norm in the Skorokhod space D[0,∞]. This expression gives a tool to compare weights of trajectories of the corresponding process, also it is naturally connected with the most probable sample path of the process. This interpretation leads to the number of applications, for example, to the popular Customer Journey Maps problem.

The article deals with the process of emergence of tourism in Russia and focused on a visual pattern in the making of tourist places. Being an essential part of mass printed culture, travel guidebooks, along with travel literature and postcards, were in demand during the late imperial period. They were produced and replicated intensively and circulated widely. At the turn of the 19 – 20th centuries the Black Sea coast of Russia was evolving into a popular place for travel and a recreational destination. A set of images of attractive spots of this region, which were reproduced in Nikolai Lender’s guidebooks, as well as on postcards in 1880s - 1910s formed the empirical basis of this research.

Expectations of people with high and low intelligence differ considerably. High intelligence is associated with several desirable social outcomes, while low intelligence is associated with low social status and poverty. We assumed that attributing high intelligence to a person could lead to a more positive evaluation of them and, as a result, less negative attitudes toward them. In the experimental study (N = 781) we investigated how levels of perceived intelligence impact the long-term stigmatization of dirty workers. The results show that perceived high intelligence of dirty workers decreases long-term stigmatization towards them, but these findings relate only to people performing moral dirty work. Implicit theories about intelligence were controlled as a covariate and had no significant effect. Results are discussed in terms of the positive effect of perceived high intelligence on everyday perception. Limitations and future directions are also discussed.

This paper analyzes the patterns of CO2 emissions for a sample of 144 countries in the period from 1992 to 2013. Environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis was tested with the help of econometric analysis for both production- and consumption-based emissions. The relationship between incomes and emissions was also examined at the level of leading national economies. The results show important distinction: while there is some evidence of decoupling between economic growth and the growth of production-based emissions at the higher level of income, consumption-based emissions continue to grow with rising incomes even in the richest countries. The further investigation is devoted to discrepancies between production and consumption EKCs which are determined by emissions embodied in international trade. Structural decomposition analysis was applied to define the contribution of different factors to the change in emissions embodied in trade with the rise of GDP per capita. While structural and technological factors are dominant in explaining this change at the low and middle level of income, the effect of volume of trade plays the key role in evolution of emissions embodied in trade in high-income countries.

The Russian Federation offers the unique example of a leading centrally planned economy swiftly transforming itself into a market-oriented economy. This paper offers a comprehensive study of inequality and mobility patterns for Russia, using multiple rounds of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Surveys over the past two decades spanning this transition. The findings show rising income levels and decreasing inequality, with the latter being mostly caused by pro-poor growth rather than redistribution. The poorest tercile experienced a growth rate that was more than 10 times that of the richest tercile, leading to less long-term inequality than short-term inequality. The analysis also finds that switching from a part-time job to a full-time job, from a lower-skill job to a higher-skill job, or staying in the formal sector is statistically significantly associated with reduced downward mobility and increased income growth. However, a similar transition from the private sector to the public sector is negatively associated with income growth

We report the observation of a current-phase relation dominated by the second Josephson harmonic in superconductor-ferromagnet-superconductor junctions. The exotic current-phase relation is realized in the vicinity of a temperature-controlled 0-to-π junction transition, at which the first Josephson harmonic vanishes. Direct current-phase relation measurements, as well as Josephson interferometry, non-vanishing supercurrent and half-integer Shapiro steps at the 0-π transition selfconsistently point to an intrinsic second harmonic term, making it possible to rule out common alternative origins of half-periodic behavior. While surprising for diffusive multimode junctions, the large second harmonic is in agreement with theory predictions for thin ferromagnetic interlayers.