Publications

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The past decade has seen rapid advances in the field of talent management in emerging markets. Despite talent management being a new term in the vocabulary business in this region, the vast majority of leading local-owned firms and MNCs implement talent management programs. However, much uncertainty still exists about how talents are attracted and selected in various industries in emerging markets. This paper compares talent acquisition practices of different talent categories in two large groups of companies in Russia: industrial and knowledge-intensive ones. A qualitative approach was chosen to conduct this exploratory study. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews with 20 HR-experts from 13 industries from both MNCs and Russian-owned companies. Findings from the study show that knowledge-intensive companies use successfully both internal and external talent pools, while the vast majority of industrial firms put the highest priority on internal talent pools. We also introduce three types of selection systems: systems focusing on a single set of practices; systems with differentiated selection practices and systems with individual set of practices for each position. Interestingly, industrial companies tend to apply single set of selection practices to all talent categories, while knowledge-intensive firms select talents using differentiated practices or individual set of practices. Overall, this study sheds new light on talent acquisition practices applied in industrial and knowledge-intensive companies.

The book pursues the following three aims:

• First and foremost, we want to help conceptualize the Arctic as a multifaceted region within a changing global context, which is both affected by it and affecting it.

• Secondly, we aim to describe the major drivers of these GlobalArctic dynamics; namely, ecological changes, changes in resources extraction practices and corresponding infrastructure development, including urbanization, as well as changes in geopolitical configurations, and changes in Arctic economies, societies and cultures.

• Thirdly, we aim to define, analyze, and discuss concrete ways to address these changes in the GlobalArctic, including mitigation, adaptation, and resiliencebuilding. The purpose is to offer the relevant GlobalArctic stakeholders innovative approaches, methods, best practices, and solutions to address these unprecedented dynamics. Here the GlobalArctic is a (new) geopolitical context.

This book is based on the collection of articles centered around Russia and its policies. The articles are grouped under three parts. The first part contains articles on international relations, Russian foreign policy, and the situation in the world. The main themes they cover include Russian policy in Asia and the Eurasian integration — in which Moscow plays the most active role.

The second part looks at the theorization of Russia’s internal processes, issues concerning reforms to the communist system, its troubled transition from Communism, and analysis of the country’s current political regime. While elaborating on various reforms and transition from the communist system, the author has suggested certain alternatives concepts. Many of the articles analyze the shortcomings and inconsistencies of the modern Russian political system.

The third part is devoted to current issues in Russian politics, the democratization process, growing authoritarian tendencies, mass protests, and that evaluate the programs and policies of individual leaders. The book will be of interest to those specializing in Russian foreign and domestic policy as well as to all those interested in following the developments of this country, its role in the world, and the global situation in general.

The Handbook of Research on International Collaboration, Economic Development, and Sustainability in the Arctic discusses the perspectives and major challenges of the investment collaboration and development and commercial use of trade routes in the Arctic. Featuring research on topics such as agricultural production, environmental resources, and investment collaboration, this book is ideally designed for policymakers, business leaders, and environmental researchers seeking coverage on new practices and solutions in the sphere of achieving sustainability in economic exploration of the Artic region

The invitation to serve as Minister of Education and lead a bold and significant reform of an education system never comes with an instruction manual. Leading such an opportunity effectively, requires access to the best knowledge about how to make change happen. In this book, Ministers of Education and system level leaders in ten countries share what they learned in the process of advancing audacious reforms aimed at transforming public education so schools would better prepare students with the necessary skills to participate civically and economically in a rapidly changing world. A product of the Global Education Innovation Initiative, a practice-research consortium of leaders and institutions that advance knowledge to support the transformation of public education systems to augment their relevancy, the book is anchored in the proposition that successful educational change requires the appropriate combination of knowledge based on practice with knowledge based on research. The contributors to this volume embody the best qualities of reflective practitioners who can make visible what they have learned from their practice. In sharing with what they have learned with others, they demonstrate also the generosity and commitment of those who understand that we all share responsibility for the education of the entirety of the world’s children. In this book, the reader will find discerning and intimate accounts of what it is like to transform the largest organization in society, so it does a better job educating all children. The themes that resonate in their accounts across systems as diverse as Australia, Brazil, Colombia, India, Mexico, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Russia and Singapore are fascinating, surprising and valuable to those who hope to leave a legacy as Ministers of Education. Fernando M. Reimers is the Ford Foundation Professor of the Practice of International Education and Director of the Global Education Innovation Initiative and of the International Education Policy Masters Program at Harvard University. His research and teaching focus on understanding how to educate children and youth so they can thrive in the 21st century. Over more than three decades he has advised Ministers of Education and other leaders of education institutions in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East.

This book contains a selection of papers accepted for the presentation and discussion at the 2018 International Conference on Digital Science (DSIC’18). This Conference had the support of the Institute of Certified Specialists, Russia, AISTI (Iberian Association for Information Systems and Technologies), and Springer. It will take place Convention Centre, Budva, Montenegro, October 19-21, 2018.

DSIC’18 is an international forum for researches and practitioners to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, results, experiences, and concerns in the several perspectives of Digital Science. The main idea of this Conference is that the world of science is united allowing all scientists/practitioners to be able to think, analyze, and generalize their thoughts.

DSIC aims efficiently to disseminate original research results in natural, social, art, and humanities sciences. An important characteristic feature of the Conference should be the short publication time and worldwide distribution. This Conference enables fast dissemination, so conference participants can publish their papers in print and electronic format, which is then made available worldwide and accessible by numerous researchers.

The Scientific Committee of DSIC’18 was composed of multidisciplinary group of 26 experts. One hundred and seven invited reviewers who are intimately conceded with Digital Science have had the responsibility for evaluating, in a “double-blind review” process, the papers received for each of the main themes proposed for the Conference: Digital Art and Humanities; Digital Economics; Digital Education; Digital Engineering, Digital Environmental Sciences; Digital Finance; Business and Banking; Digital Media; Digital Medicine; Pharma and Public Health; Digital Public Administration; Digital Technology and Applied Sciences.

DSIC’18 received 88 contributions from 16 countries around the world. The papers accepted for the presentation and discussion at the Conference are published by Springer (this book) and will be submitted for indexing by ISI, SCOPUS, among others.

The book is aimed at developing students' listening and speaking skills via utilizingTED-talks on a variety of topics including education, time management, politics, discrimination, and modern inventions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Optimization and Applications, OPTIMA 2018, held in Petrovac, Montenegro, in October 2018.The 35 revised full papers and the one short paper presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on mathematical programming; combinatorial and discrete optimization; optimal control; optimization in economy, finance and social sciences; applications.

The series “Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing” contains publications on theory, applications, and design methods of Intelligent Systems and Intelligent Computing. Virtually all disciplines such as engineering, natural sciences, computer and information science, ICT, economics, business, e-commerce, environment, healthcare, life science are covered. The list of topics spans all the areas of modern intelligent systems and computing such as: computational intelligence, soft computing including neural networks, fuzzy systems, evolutionary computing and the fusion of these paradigms, social intelligence, ambient intelligence, computational neuroscience, artificial life, virtual worlds and society, cognitive science and systems, Perception and Vision, DNA and immune based systems, self-organizing and adaptive systems, e-Learning and teaching, human-centered and human-centric computing, recommender systems, intelligent control, robotics and mechatronics including human-machine teaming, knowledge-based paradigms, learning paradigms, machine ethics, intelligent data analysis, knowledge management, intelligent agents, intelligent decision making and support, intelligent network security, trust management, interactive entertainment, Web intelligence and multimedia. The publications within “Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing” are primarily proceedings of important conferences, symposia and congresses. They cover significant recent developments in the field, both of a foundational and applicable character. An important characteristic feature of the series is the short publication time and world-wide distribution. This permits a rapid and broad dissemination of research results.

This book contains a selection of papers accepted for the presentation and discussion at the 2018 International Conference on Digital Science (DSIC’18). This Conference had the support of the Institute of Certified Specialists, Russia, AISTI (Iberian Association for Information Systems and Technologies), and Springer. It will take place at Convention Centre, Budva, Montenegro, October 19–21, 2018. DSIC’18 is an international forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, results, experiences, and concerns in the several perspectives of Digital Science. The main idea of this Conference is that the world of science is unified and united allowing all scientists/practitioners to be able to think, analyze, and generalize their thoughts. DSIC aims efficiently to disseminate original research results in natural, social, art, and humanities sciences. An important characteristic feature of the Conference should be the short publication time and worldwide distribution. This Conference enables fast dissemination, so conference participants can publish their papers in print and electronic format, which is then made available worldwide and accessible by numerous researchers. The Scientific Committee of DSIC’18 was composed of a multidisciplinary group of 26 experts. One hundred and seven invited reviewers who are intimately concerned with Digital Science have had the responsibility for evaluating, in a “double-blind review” process, the papers received for each of the main themes proposed for the Conference: Digital Art and Humanities; Digital Economics; Digital Education; Digital Engineering; Digital Environmental Sciences; Digital Finance, Business and Banking; Digital Media; Digital Medicine, Pharma and Public Health; Digital Public Administration; Digital Technology and Applied Sciences. DSIC’18 received 88 contributions from 16 countries around the world. The papers accepted for the presentation and discussion at the Conference are published by Springer (this book) and will be submitted for indexing by ISI, SCOPUS, among others.

This book covers the classical theory of Markov chains on general state-spaces as well as many recent developments. The theoretical results are illustrated by simple examples, many of which are taken from Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. The book is self-contained, while all the results are carefully and concisely proven. Bibliographical notes are added at the end of each chapter to provide an overview of the literature.

A number of recent events in the last decade have renewed interest in Russian discourses on international law. This book evaluates and presents a contemporary analysis of Russian discourses on international law from various perspectives, including sociological, theoretical, political and philosophical. The aim is to identify how Russian interacts with international law, the reasons behind such interactions, and how such interactions compare with the general practice of international law. It also examines whether legal culture and other phenomena can justify Russia's interaction in international law. Russian Discourses on International Law explains Russia's interpretation of international law thrugh the lens of both leading western scholars and contemporary western-based Russian scholars. It will be of value to international law scholars looking for a better understanding of Russia's behaviour in international legal relations, law and society, foreign policy, and domestic application of international law. Further, those in fields such as sociology, politics, pholosophy, or general graduate students, lawyers, think tanks, government departments, and specialised Russian studies programmes will find this book helpful.

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

Liberalism in Russia is one of the most complex, multifaced and, indeed, controversial phenomena in the history of political thought. Values and practices traditionally associated with Western liberalism—such as individual freedom, property rights, or the rule of law—have often emerged ambiguously in the Russian historical experience through different dimensions and combinations. Economic and political liberalism have often appeared disjointed, and liberal projects have been shaped by local circumstances, evolved in response to secular challenges and developed within often rapidly-changing institutional and international settings. This third volume of the Reset DOC “Russia Workshop” collects a selection of the Dimensions and Challenges of Russian Liberalism conference proceedings, providing a broad set of insights into the Russian liberal experience through a dialogue between past and present, and intellectual and empirical contextualization, involving historians, jurists, political scientists and theorists. The first part focuses on the Imperial period, analyzing the political philosophy and peculiarities of pre-revolutionary Russian liberalism, its relations with the rule of law (Pravovoe Gosudarstvo), and its institutionalization within the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets). The second part focuses on Soviet times, when liberal undercurrents emerged under the surface of the official Marxist-Leninist ideology. After Stalin’s death, the “thaw intelligentsia” of Soviet dissidents and human rights defenders represented a new liberal dimension in late Soviet history, while the reforms of Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” became a substitute for liberalism in the final decade of the USSR.  The third part focuses on the “time of troubles” under the Yeltsin presidency, and assesses the impact of liberal values and ethics, the bureaucratic difficulties in adapting to change, and the paradoxes of liberal reforms during the transition to post-Soviet Russia. Despite Russian liberals having begun to draw lessons from previous failures, their project was severely challenged by the rise of Vladimir Putin. Hence, the fourth part focuses on the 2000s, when the liberal alternative in Russian politics confronted the ascendance of Putin, surviving in parts of Russian culture and in the mindset of technocrats and “system liberals”. Today, however, the Russian liberal project faces the limits of reform cycles of public administration, suffers from a lack of federalist attitude in politics and is externally challenged from an illiberal world order. All this asks us to consider: what is the likelihood of a “reboot” of Russian liberalism?

My book examines the function and development of the cult of saints in Coptic Egypt. For this purpose I focus primarily on the material provided by the texts forming the Coptic hagiographical tradition of the early Christian martyr Philotheus of Antioch, and more specifically – the Martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch (Pierpont Morgan M583). This Martyrdom is a reflection of a once flourishing cult which is attested in Egypt by rich textual and material evidence. This text enjoyed great popularity not only in Egypt, but also in other countries of the Christian East, since his dossier includes texts in Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Arabic. This work examines the literary and historical background of the Martyrdom of Philotheus and similar hagiographical texts. It also explores the goals and concerns of the authors and editors of Coptic martyr passions and their intended audience. I am arguing that these texts were produced in order to perform multiple functions: to justify and promote the cult of a particular saint, as an educational tool, and as an important structural element of liturgical celebrations in honour of the saint.

A discrete function of n variables is a mapping g:X1×…×Xn→A, where X1,…,Xn, and A are arbitrary finite sets. Function g is called separable if there exist n functions gi:Xi→A for i=1,…,n, such that for every input x1,…,xn the function g(x1,…,xn) takes one of the values g1(x1),…,gn(xn). Given a discrete function g, it is an interesting problem to ask whether g is separable or not. Although this seems to be a very basic problem concerning discrete functions, the complexity of recognition of separable discrete functions of n variables is known only for n=2. In this paper we will show that a slightly more general recognition problem, when g is not fully but only partially defined, is NP-complete for n≥3. We will then use this result to show that the recognition of fully defined separable discrete functions is NP-complete for n≥4.

The general recognition problem contains the above mentioned special case for n=2. This case is well-studied in the context of game theory, where (separable) discrete functions of n variables are referred to as (assignable) n-person game forms. There is a known sufficient condition for assignability (separability) of two-person game forms (discrete functions of two variables) called (weak) total tightness of a game form. This property can be tested in polynomial time, and can be easily generalized both to higher dimension and to partially defined functions. We will prove in this paper that weak total tightness implies separability for (partially defined) discrete functions of nvariables for any n, thus generalizing the above result known for n=2. Our proof is constructive. Using a graph-based discrete algorithm we show how for a given weakly totally tight (partially defined) discrete function g of nvariables one can construct separating functions g1,…,gn in polynomial time with respect to the size of the input function.

Evolution on changing fitness landscapes (seascapes) is an important problem in evolutionary biology. We consider the Moran model of finite population evolution with selection in a randomly changing, dynamic environment. In the model, each individual has one of the two alleles, wild type or mutant. We calculate the fixation probability by making a proper ansatz for the logarithm of fixation probabilities. This method has been used previously to solve the analogous problem for the Wright-Fisher model. The fixation probability is related to the solution of a third-order algebraic equation (for the logarithm of fixation probability).We consider the strong interference of landscape fluctuations, sampling, and selection when the fixation process cannot be described by the mean fitness. Such an effect appears if the mutant allele has a higher fitness in one landscape and a lower fitness in another, compared with the wild type, and the product of effective population size and fitness is large. We provide a generalization of the Kimura formula for the fixation probability that applies to these cases. When the mutant allele has a fitness (dis-)advantage in both landscapes, the fixation probability is described by the mean fitness.

A measurement of the charm-mixing parameter yCP using D0 → KþK−, D0 → πþπ−, and D0 → K−πþ decays is reported. The D0 mesons are required to originate from semimuonic decays of B− and B0 mesons. These decays are partially reconstructed in a data set of proton-proton collisions at center-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV collected with the LHCb experiment and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3 fb−1. The yCP parameter is measured to be ð0.57 0.13ðstatÞ 0.09ðsystÞÞ%, in agreement with, and as precise as, the current world-average value.

A search for CP violation in the Cabibbo-suppressed D0 → K+K−π+π− decay mode is performed using an amplitude analysis. The measurement uses a sample of pp collisions recorded by the LHCb experiment during 2011 and 2012, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3.0 fb−1. The D0 mesons are reconstructed from semileptonic b-hadron decays into D0μ−X final states. The selected sample contains more than 160 000 signal decays, allowing the most precise amplitude modelling of this D0 decay to date. The obtained amplitude model is used to perform the search for CP violation. The result is compatible with CP symmetry, with a sensitivity ranging from 1% to 15% depending on the amplitude considered.

The sensorimotor cortex is somatotopically organized to represent the vocal tract articulators, such as lips, tongue, larynx, and jaw. How speech and articulatory features are encoded at the subcortical level, however, remains largely unknown. We analyzed local field potential (LFP) recordings from the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and simultaneous electrocorticography recordings from the sensorimotor cortex of 11 human subjects (1 female) with Parkinson’s disease during implantation of deep brain stimulation (DBS) electrodes, while they read aloud three-phoneme words. The initial phonemes involved either articulation primarily with the tongue (coronal consonants) or the lips (labial consonants). We observed significant increases in high gamma (60–150 Hz) power in both the STN and the sensorimotor cortex that began before speech onset and persisted for the duration of speech articulation. As expected from previous reports, in the sensorimotor cortex, the primary articulators involved in the production of the initial consonants were topographically represented by high gamma activity. We found that STN high gamma activity also demonstrated specificity for the primary articulator, although no clear topography was observed. In general, subthalamic high gamma activity varied along the ventral-dorsal trajectory of the electrodes, with greater high gamma power recorded in the dorsal locations of the STN. Interestingly, the majority of significant articulator-discriminative activity in the STN occurred prior to that in sensorimotor cortex. These results demonstrate that articulator-specific speech information is contained within high gamma activity of the STN, but with different spatial and temporal organization compared to similar information encoded in the sensorimotor cortex.

This paper explores how Levinas redefines the traditional notion of prophecy, shifting the emphasis from the content of prophecy to the figure of the prophet, thus making prophetic inspiration a key feature of ethical subjectivity. The principal aim of the paper is to analyse the resulting triangular structure involving God and the Other. This structure is inherently unstable because God is incessantly stepping back in kenotic withdrawal. I show how this fundamental instability is reflected in the structure of the phenomenalisation of God’s glory, the structure of obedience to God’s order, and the structure of the authorship of prophecy. The prophetic experience is marked by heterogeneity; it can never be completely appropriated. Responsibility for the Other brings the subject to light as a witness of the glory of the Infinite, but not as the subject of self-identification.

We integrated models of discrimination of immigrants by combining established approaches to prejudice and discrimination towards immigrants (proximate explanations) using assumptions of Evolutionary-Coalitional Theory (ultimate explanations). Based on this perspective, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and multicultural ideology (MCI) were considered as sociofunctional motives for attitudes towards immigrants. We examined relationships between individual differences in beliefs about the social world (dangerous worldview and competitive worldview) as more distal antecedents, and RWA, SDO, and MCI as more proximal antecedents, and the endorsement of discrimination of immigrants in the socioeconomic domain by Russian majority group members as the outcome. Data were collected among 576 participants from 33 regions in Russia, using online social media. MCI predicted endorsement of discrimination of immigrants by Russian majority group members better than did RWA and SDO. SDO predicted only economic aspects of the endorsement of discrimination. The results are discussed within the Russian context, with its ethnically diverse composition of the population and high migration rates.

Review on: The Europeanized Elite in Russia, 1762–1825: Public Role and Subjective Self. Edited by Andreas Schönle, Andrei Zorin, and Alexei Evstratov. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. 

Abstract—We have investigated the radiation-induced conductivity (RIC) in Kapton-like polymers in which it increases with an accumulating dose at large dose rates and long irradiation times. Such a behavior is very useful for spacecraft applications as it allows mitigating the spacecraft charging problems.Also, we studied ordinary polymers whose RIC steadily falls after reaching an initial maximum. To interpret experimental results, we used the semi-empirical Rose–Fowler–Vaisberg model.Numerical and experimental results have been compared with published data.

This research project focuses on the resurgence of Kuki-Chin ethnic nationalism in the Indo-Myanmar borderlands. The tribe known as Kuki in Manipur is known as Chin in Myanmar—they live on both sides of the Indo-Myanmar border. Their land was annexed by the British in the 19th century and, during decolonization, divided between the new countries of India and Myanmar. The Kukis have a history of anticolonial resistance, and they have launched postcolonial ethnic nationalist movements to claim an autonomous state. In 2009, the Indian and Myanmar governments started investing in a hydropower project named Tamanthi in the borderland districts of Myanmar. There were protests against that project, because construction would have not only caused large-scale displacement but also led to the erasure of the sacred geography of the Kuki-Chin, and these protests led to the cancelation of the project. The specific research case of the movement against Tamanthi in Myanmar discussed here demonstrates a context in which the Kuki-Chin identity was politicized and forged, which not only stalled the project but led to the resurgence of ethno-nationalist demands on both sides of the border. Through this case study, we analyze the dilemmas, ambivalence, and processes of doing research in borderland communities, and demonstrate that these communities cannot be studied through the standard methodologically nationalist and realist paradigm, that is, a cross-country comparison of cases. To appreciate how and why ethno-nationalism and secessionism emerges whenever there is a state intervention for “development,” we need an “ethno-historical,” constructivist, and “emic” understanding of the making of these borderland communities and the liminal spaces they inhabit.

The chapter examines the role of language and cultural space in shaping and/or reshaping the identity of both first- and second-generation Georgian teenage students in the state secondary school in Moscow with a Georgian ethnocultural component. By analyzing the students’ linguistic behavior in the classroom, an attempt is made to examine how students negotiate their identity and sense of belonging while outside Georgia. More specifically, this study shows how Georgian students (re)shape their identity in light of linguistic, cultural, and spatial changes taking place in the institutional settings of the Moscow school. The language of instruction in the school is Russian. However, taking into consideration the fact that the majority of the school teachers are ethnic Georgians, it appears that this has implicit (and in some cases explicit) underpinnings in relation to the students’ ethnic identity orientation. The results demonstrate that high institutional support at school as well as the students’ high sense of group belonging which is encouraged by the school’s administration and teaching staff contributes to students’ identity construction process. The evidence indicates that the blurring of ethnic and cultural identity boundaries in the context of the Russian capital city has an effect on the students’ linguistic behavior at different levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon).

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In automated health services based on text and voice interfaces, there is a need to be able to understand what the user is talking about, and what is the attitude of the user towards a subject. Typical machine learning methods for text analysis require a lot of annotated data for the training. This is often a problem in addressing specific and possibly very personal health care needs. In this paper, we propose an active learning algorithm for the training of a text classifier for a conversational therapy application in the area of health behavior change. A new active learning algorithm, Query by Embedded Committee (QBEC), is proposed in the paper. The methods are particularly suitable for the text classification task in a dynamic environment and give a good performance with realistic test data. 

Russia may well rank highly in a relevant international rating of the formal attributes of performance-based budgeting (PBB). The Russian government has created the necessary preconditions for PBB – introducing a multi-year budget and accumulating data on performance indicators that are considered in the budget planning process. The new budget code draft currently under discussion proposes strengthening the link between the budget and programmes. However, the use of PBB tools is not a guarantee of success. The experience of many countries has demonstrated that the use of performance indicators in budget discussions, spending reviews, etc. is an essential but insufficient condition for an effective budget system. This fully applies to the Russian budgeting practices. On the one hand, Russia has introduced many PBB tools, ranging from presentational budgeting to direct budgeting. On the other hand, the effectiveness of the budget spending leaves much to be desired.

Modern Elbrus-4S and Elbrus-8S processors show floating point performance comparable to the popular Intel processors in the field of high-performance computing. Tasks oriented to take advantage of the VLIW architecture show even greater efficiency on Elbrus processors. In this paper the efficiency of the most popular materials science codes in the field of classical molecular dynamics and quantum-mechanical calculations is considered. A comparative analysis of the performance of these codes on Elbrus processor and other modern processors is carried out.

The development of demographic processes in the post-Soviet area demonstrates that a long existence within a single system determines the laws of the development to some extent even after 30 years. In particular, no matter how the geopolitical, economic and social conditions in the countries of the former USSR have changed, in the migratory sense they are largely ‘tied’ to each other. It may be argued that migration processes are still connecting the post-Soviet region. However, the modern form of migration processes would not be possible were it not for the profound differences in the demographic behaviour of the population of the former Soviet republics. When it comes to demography, diverging trends between countries of the Soviet Union started well before the dissolution of the latter; in fact, differences between the western and eastern republics (the latter meaning Central Asia and Azerbaijan) were visible as early as the 1960s in terms of reproduction rate, as well as average life expectancy. These trends resulted in significant changes in the ethnic composition of the Soviet Union even before 1989, with the share of titular nations increasing a lot faster in Central Asia than in Russia or Ukraine. These trends were further strengthened by the dissolution of the Soviet Union: demographic indicators significantly worsened in the western part of the post-Soviet region, as well as in Armenia and Georgia, while other countries experienced population growth. The ethnic composition of the post-Soviet countries was further changed by the mass emigration of ethnic Russians back to Russia, mainly in the 1990s. Regarding this particular aspect, the research revealed that the numbers of ethnic Russians living in countries of the former Soviet Union have sharply decreased in the past three decades. While in 1989 more than 25 million ethnic Russians lived in these countries, by the 2010s their numbers had dropped by nearly ten million, down to 15 million. The main reasons for this sharp decline included emigration back to Russia, assimilation, the lower fertility rate and, not least, higher natural mortality, due to the fact that remaining Russians belong to older age cohorts on average. As there is no reason to believe that these trends will change, the presence of ethnic Russians in countries of the former Soviet Union is likely to gradually lose its significance as a cohesive force in the region. The position of the Russian language as a lingua franca is different, however. Although in the 1990s the previously prioritized role of the language decreased significantly in line with the establishment of new states and identities, pragmatic considerations have still played a strong role in the preservation of the Russian language even throughout the 2010s. Although Russian is recognized as an official state language only in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan in addition to the respective titular languages, it still serves as a language of international and inter-ethnic communication in the other post-Soviet countries as well. Hence, all in all, one may conclude that while demographic differences in the post-Soviet region are increasing and the number of ethnic Russians living in the successor states is sharply decreasing, migration patterns, as well as the important role of the Russian language still serve as strong cementing factors in the region as a whole.

The report discusses the use of National Instruments tools for dependability prediction of electronic devices by simulation modeling. The description of the laboratory bench allowing to develop formal models based on reliability block diagrams, to carry out simulation experiment and to process statistical modeling results, is given as well as an example of this bench usage for reliability prediction of power supply of the lightweight spacecraft.

This article is devoted to the issue of developing adaptive learning systems for vocational education and training (VET). Firstly, it justifies the urgency of developing and using personalized adaptive learning in vocational educational organizations. Specific features of the Russian VET system and its students are described, demonstrating a number of arguments for the importance of a search for new digital educational solutions. Secondly, the paper elaborates on the theoretical framework of personalization of vocational education and training, which takes into account the necessity for both skills and knowledge. Finally, the authors present a prototype of an adaptive educational system, which is based on ontologically-controlled management of learning trajectories. The developed software is aimed at improving the effectiveness of the VET material science curriculum.

We construct a new infinite series of irreducible components of the Gieseker-Maruyama moduli scheme M(k), k≥3 of coherent semistable rank 2 sheaves with Chern classes c_1=0, c_2=k, c_3=0 on P^3 generic points of which correspond to sheaves with singularities of mixed dimension. These sheaves are constructed by elementary transformations of stable and properly μ-semistable reflexive sheaves along disjoint union of collections of points and smooth irreducible curves which are rational or complete intersection curves. As a special member of this series we obtain a new component of M(3).

The article reviews long-run sources of Russian economic growth and demonstrates that the stagnation of the Russian economy in the past decade can be considered in the context of the global productivity slowdown. Conventional industry growth accounting shows that in contrast to the transformational recession before 1998, the recent stagnation of 2008-2014 is primarily the outcome of a slowdown in total factor productivity (TFP) growth and a deterioration in the allocation of labour, rather than bottlenecks in capital inputs.

We study the question of realisability of iterated higher Whitehead products with a given form of nested brackets by simplicial complexes, using the notion of the moment-complex $\mathcal{Z_K}$. Namely, we say that a simplicial complex K realises an iterated higher Whitehead product w if w is a nontrivial element of the homotopy group $\pi_*(\mathcal{Z_K})$. The combinatorial approach to the question above uses the operation of substitution of simplicial complexes: for any iterated higher Whitehead product w we describe a simplicial complex $\partial\Delta_w$ that realises $w$. Furthermore, for a particular form of brackets inside w, we prove that $\partial\Delta_w$ is the smallest complex that realises $w$. We also give a combinatorial criterion for the nontriviality of the product w. In the proof of nontriviality we use the Hurewicz image of w in the cellular chains of $\mathcal{Z_K}$ and the description of the cohomology product of $\mathcal{Z_K}$. The second approach is algebraic: we use the coalgebraic versions of the Koszul complex and the Taylor resolution of the face coalgebra of $\mathcal{K}$ to describe the canonical cycles corresponding to iterated higher Whitehead products $w$. This gives another criterion for realisability of $w$.

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are of particular interest for telecommunication companies that can significantly affect the interaction of economic agents. As a result of the growth in the number of connected devices, the introduction of cloud services and business applications it became possible to combine equipment, information systems and management systems into a single communication network which in turn gave impetus to the development of the Internet of Things. The basis for the development of the Internet of Things is modern data transmission technologies including IoT Wireless Networks. There are, currently, a number of wireless IoT technologies which have different characteristics. In this regard, it is of interest to identify the most promising technologies that will form the basis of the infrastructure for the development of the IoT ecosystem. This paper develops an assessment model for the application potential of IoT wireless network technologies for the telecommunication sector. LPWAN, 4G and Wi-Fi were identified as the most promising technologies. The majority of the assessment criteria are applicable to other telecommunication technologies.

Psychological studies show the effect of mortality salience (MS) on attitudes and behavioral patterns in different spheres of social life, particularly, in intergroup relationships. This study examines the influence of MS on attitudes toward national outgroups. In line with terror management theory (TMT), previous studies indicate a contradictory impact of death-related thoughts. Reminders of death enhance unfavorable attitudes toward all national outgroups, however, MS reinforces the negative attitudes only toward unfriendly countries or toward those perceived as threatening. To shed light on the influence of MS, we conducted two experimental studies that were differentiated by MS manipulation and the specifics of the outgroups. In Study 1 we actualized the reminders of death through military news, whereas in Study 2 by the presentation of terrorism news (close and distant). In Study 1 (N = 180) we analyzed the impact of MS on attitudes toward Ukraine, Belarus, and Estonia. The results showed that MS mostly reinforced the unfavorable attitudes toward ‘unfriendly’ and ‘neutral’ countries. Study 2 (N = 242) focused on MS and attitudes toward Ukraine, Belarus, the USA, and China. The results indicated that MS enhanced negative attitudes toward Ukraine as an ‘unfriendly’ country. However, the close or distant terrorism-related content did not illustrate the specific influence on attitudes toward national outgroups.

This article studies the evolution of housing rents in St. Petersburg between 1880 and 1917, covering an eventful period of Russian and world history. We collect and digitize over 5,000 rental advertisements from a local newspaper, which we use together with geo-coded addresses and detailed structural characteristics to construct a quality-adjusted rent price index in continuous time. We provide the first pre-war and pre-Soviet index based on market data for any Russian housing market. In 1915, one of the world’s earliest rent control and tenant protection policies was introduced in response to soaring prices following the outbreak of World War I. We analyze the impact of this policy: before the regulation rents were increasing at a similarly rapid pace to other consumer prices; the policy reversed that trend. We find evidence for official compliance with the policy, document a rise in tenure duration and strongly increased rent affordability for workers after the introduction of the policy. We conclude that the immediate prelude to the October Revolution was indeed characterized by economic turmoil, but rent affordability and rising rents were no longer the dominating problems.This article studies the evolution of housing rents in St. Petersburg between 1880 and 1917, covering an eventful period of Russian and world history. We collect and digitize over 5,000 rental advertisements from a local newspaper, which we use together with geo-coded addresses and detailed structural characteristics to construct a quality-adjusted rent price index in continuous time. We provide the first pre-war and pre-Soviet index based on market data for any Russian housing market. In 1915, one of the world’s earliest rent control and tenant protection policies was introduced in response to soaring prices following the outbreak of World War I. We analyze the impact of this policy: before the regulation rents were increasing at a similarly rapid pace to other consumer prices; the policy reversed that trend. We find evidence for official compliance with the policy, document a rise in tenure duration and strongly increased rent affordability for workers after the introduction of the policy. We conclude that the immediate prelude to the October Revolution was indeed characterized by economic turmoil, but rent affordability and rising rents were no longer the dominating problems.

The issue of instrument choice is vital for climate policy. Carbon pricing is used next to a range of traditional energy taxes and renewable energy policies such as feed-in tariffs and minimal renewable generation targets. Several countries introduced carbon taxes alongside existing energy taxes such as excise duties on vehicle fuels. Since 2005, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) has attached a direct price to the GHG emissions of ETS companies. The combination of multiple instruments and explicit and indirect carbon price signals created a complex and frequently changing institutional landscape that blurs the contribution of each policy instrument. Can the decarbonization of the European economy be attributed to carbon price instruments or to renewable energy policies together with other fiscal instruments? This paper clarifies the relative impact of explicit carbon price instruments (carbon taxes and EU ETS) compared to other instruments, namely renewable energy policies and indirect carbon price signals (general energy taxes). The methodology is based on the calculation of the implicit carbon price in existing fiscal systems. On the basis of panel data for 30 European countries 1995–2016, several fixed-effect regression estimations were performed. The results indicate a greater but decreasing impact of price instruments on carbon intensity compared to renewable energy policies and a greater but decreasing relative impact of indirect price signals compared to explicit ones.

This study focuses on the ground transportation system and its impact on the rents in 30 of Russia's largest cities. It also compares the effect with subway transit networks. The data set includes rent information from an all-Russia online advertisement website Avito and various measures of proximity to the public transit network stops (including subways for cities with them). The analysis is conducted using linear hedonic models. The results show that the ground transportation proximity is important for housing rent formation in both cities with and without subways, although the effect for subway stations is greater in comparison. Nevertheless, the benefits of a denser ground transportation system are high and stable, whereas the distance to the closest bus stop and the number within the walking distance are important solely for cities with a subway system and without it, respectively.

The paper contributes new perspectives to the study of post-communist reforms by highlighting the limits of the transition paradigm in the analysis ofreform processes in the post-Soviet space. It examines Georgia’s police reform and argues that the more repressive aspects of the reform should not be viewed as “setbacks” on a transition path, but as integral to the goal of constructinganew Georgian statethroughthe creation of symbolic divides between two different “Georgias”. This symbolic work of emphasising contrasts between different domains by casting light on and obscuring social phenomena is analysed through the lens of the “spectacle of policing” (Comaroffs 2004; Wacquant 2009).

We investigate the effect of the proportional hazards assumption on prognostic and predictive models of the survival time of patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). We theoretically compare the underlying model formulations of several variants of survival forests and implementations thereof, including random forests for survival, conditional inference forests, Ranger, and survival forests with L1 splitting, with two novel variants, namely distributional and transformation survival forests. Theoretical considerations explain the low power of log-rank-based splitting in detecting patterns in non-proportional hazards situations in survival trees and corresponding forests. This limitation can potentially be overcome by the alternative split procedures suggested herein. We empirically investigated this effect using simulation experiments and a re-analysis of the PRO-ACT database of ALS survival, giving special emphasis to both prognostic and predictive models.

Tensor products of irreducible representations of a simple Lie algebra define two natural measures on the space of weights: one comes from the weight multiplicities and another is induced by the decomposition of the tensor product into irreducible components. Our first result is an explicit description of density of the limiting measure for weight multiplicities when the numbers of irreducible factors linearly tend to infinity. We use the derived density to obtain the limit of the measures coming from the decomposition into irreducibles. The density of the resulting measure in type A coincides with the density of the famous GUE joint eigenvalues density restricted to the the traceless matrices. We thus generalize Kerov's theorem and prove the Postnova-Reshetikhin formula.

We continue, generalize and expand our study of linear degenerations of flag varieties from [G. Cerulli Irelli, X. Fang, E. Feigin, G. Fourier, M. Reineke, Math. Z. 287 (2017), no. 1-2, 615-654]. We realize partial flag varieties as quiver Grassmannians for equi-oriented type A quivers and construct linear degenerations by varying the corresponding quiver representation. We prove that there exists the deepest flat degeneration and the deepest flat irreducible degeneration: the former is the partial analogue of the mf-degenerate flag variety and the latter coincides with the partial PBW-degenerate flag variety. We compute the generating function of the number of orbits in the flat irreducible locus and study the natural family of line bundles on the degenerations from the flat irreducible locus. We also describe explicitly the reduced scheme structure on these degenerations and conjecture that similar results hold for the whole flat locus. Finally, we prove an analogue of the Borel-Weil theorem for the flat irreducible locus.

        The paper explores the effect of migration of Russian settlers on the intra-regional development in Kazakhstan. We use the 1897 census dataset of the Russian Empire and modern economic data to provide links between Russian settlements in Kazakhstan in 1897 and the current level of economic development. Exploiting exogenous geographic and geopolitical sources of variation across twenty-six districts (uyezd) we provide the empirical evidence of positive impact of the migration of Russians in XVIII-XIX centuries on the current level of development. The paper discusses several channels of such influence: human capital formation channel and the Soviet Union industrialization policy. 

A description of rational Newton maps in terms of the partial fraction decomposition of rational functions is obtained. Dynamics on parabolic immediate basins for rational Newton maps of entire functions have been studied. It is proved that every parabolic immediate basin contains invariant accesses to the parabolic fixed point at infinity. Moreover, among these accesses there exists a unique dynamically defined access where dynamics are attracted towards the parabolic fixed point, whereas for other accesses, if there is any, the dynamics are repelled.

This article studies the evolution of housing rents in St. Petersburg between 1880 and 1917, covering an eventful period of Russian and world history. We collect and digitize over 5,000 rental advertisements from a local newspaper, which we use together with geo-coded addresses and detailed structural characteristics to construct a quality-adjusted rent price index in continuous time. We provide the first pre-war and pre-Soviet index based on market data for any Russian housing market. In 1915, one of the world’s earliest rent control and tenant protection policies was introduced in response to soaring prices following the outbreak of World War I. We analyze the impact of this policy: while before the regulation rents were increasing at a similar rapid pace as other consumer prices, the policy reversed this trend. We find evidence for official compliance with the policy, document a rise in tenure duration and strongly increased rent affordability among workers after the introduction of the policy. We conclude that the immediate prelude to the October Revolution was indeed characterized by economic turmoil, but rent affordability and rising rents were no longer the dominating problems.

It is shown that the main result of N. R. Wallach, Principal orbit type theorems for reductive algebraic group actions and the Kempf--Ness Theorem,  arXiv:1811.07195v1 (17 Nov 2018) is a special case of a more general statement, which can be deduced, using a short argument, from the classical Richardson and Luna theorems.

Economists tend to reduce all corruption to impersonal market-like transactions, ignoring the role of social ties in shaping corruption. In this paper, we show that this simplification substantially limits the understanding of corruption. We distinguish between market corruption (impersonal bribery), and network (or parochial) corruption which is conditional on the social connections between bureaucrats and private agents. We argue, both theoretically and empirically, that these types of corruption have different qualities. Using data from the Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) which covers all post-socialist countries we show, first, that the correlation between market and network corruption is weak, which implies that ignoring network corruption leads not only to an underestimation of the overall scale of corruption but also biases national corruption rankings. Secondly, in line with theoretical expectations, we find that network corruption is more persistent over time, less related to contemporary national socio-economic and institutional characteristics and has stronger historical roots than market corruption. Yet, network corruption, unlike bribery, is not able to ‘grease the wheels’ and is not associated with political instability. Lastly, we show that the decline in bribery which was observed in almost all post-socialist countries in the period from 2010 to 2016 was accompanied by rising network corruption in many of them, which has important policy implications.

Under certain initial conditions, we prove the existence of set-valued selectors of univariate compact-valued multifunctions of bounded (Jordan) variation when the notion of variation is defined taking into account only the Pompeiu asymmetric excess between compact sets from the target metric space. For this, we study subtle properties of the directional variations. We show by examples that all assumptions in the main existence result are essential. As an application, we establish the existence of set-valued solutions $X(t)$ of bounded variation to the functional inclusion of the form $X(t)\subset F(t,X(t))$ satisfying the initial condition $X(t_0)=X_0$.