Article
Network Composition, Individual Social Capital and Culture: Comparing Traditional and Post-Modernized Cultures
The main focus of this paper is the relation between the realisation of the right of the child to express his/her views and democracy in Russia. With this in view, I will study the interconnection between the right to express the views and the right to participate. Further, I will give an overview of the specifics of democracy in Russia, how they influence political participation, and what could be done to prevent the further infantilisation of citizens in Russia. Finally, I will explore traditional perceptions with regard to children’s participation in Russia and the legal framework and practice of the implementation of the child’s right to social and political participation.
The article is devoted to analysis of discursive practices of public representation and discussion of the political course of “modernization” announced by president Dmitry Medvedev. It is focused at interpretations of the idea of modernization by the leading Russian politicians as well as at the role of the notions about collective past, present and future in its ideological justification and contestation.
There have been implemented engineering and development of multi-agent recommender system «EZSurf» that performs analysis of interests and provides recommendations for the social network «VKontakte» users based on the data from profile of particular user. During the work process different methods and technological solutions have been analyzed with examination of their advantages and disadvantages. Besides of that the comparative analysis of analogous products has been held where the most similar is Russian start-up service - Surfingbird. Based on this analysis the decision of recommender system implementation and integration has been accepted. The feature of this system is that it uses social network “VKontakte” profile for user’s data collection and API of third-party services (LastFM, TheMovieDB) for an extraction of information about similar objects. Such an approach contributes into optimization of recommender system, because it does not require creation of its own object classification system and objects database. The functionality of multi-agent system was separated between three agents. First agent (Collector) collects user data from “VKontakte” profile using VK API. Second agent (Analyzer) collects similar objects from databases of thitd-party services (LastFM, TheMovieDB) that will be the criteria for further search of recommendatory content. For search and selection of information an agent (Recommender) that works as web-crawler has been implemented. System «EZSurf» can be exploited by the users of social network “VKontakte” in everyday life for time economy on web-surfing process. At the same time they will get recommendations on content that are filtered depending on preferences of every particular user.
Nature abhors a "vacuum" - the new power elite arrives at the time of major social and political transformations and endeavours to shore up its position within the country and obtain support from outside. New power groups, which are active at times of revolution and who replace, push aside or even depose the old elites and impose their own control over the state machine and position themselves as new power elite.There are themselves not immune to social transformation, especially in the first decades of coming to their new commanding role. Unless its claims are given legitimacy it is unable to implement its positive programme, which it immediately claims as the national programme. Every country "acquires" a new functioning elite - political, financial and intellectual - from revolution or a change of regime. The old elite may lose control and depart or upon luck may merge into a new combination of social strata of particular country. We also believe that the composition and the structure of elites is the country-specific and reflect one’s country history.
This book seeks to “re-think democracy.” Over the past years, there has been a tendency in the global policy community and, even more widely, in the world’s media, to focus on democracy as the “gold standard” by which all things political are measured. This book re-examines democracy in Russia and in the world more generally, as idea, desired ideal, and practice. A major issue for Russia is whether the modernization of Russia might not prosper better by Russia focusing directly on modernization and not worrying too much about democracy. This book explores a wide range of aspects of this important question. It discusses how the debate is conducted in Russia; outlines how Russians contrast their own experiences, unfavourably, with the experience of China, where reform and modernization have been pursued with great success, with no concern for democracy; and concludes by assessing how the debate in Russia is likely to be resolved.