Article
Computer science skills across China, India, Russia, and the United States
We assess and compare computer science skills among final-year computer science undergraduates (seniors) in four major economic and political powers that produce approximately half of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates in the world. We find that seniors in the United States substantially outperform seniors in China, India, and Russia by 0.76–0.88 SDs and score comparably with seniors in elite institutions in these countries. Seniors in elite institutions in the United States further outperform seniors in elite institutions in China, India, and Russia by ∼0.85 SDs. The skills advantage of the United States is not because it has a large proportion of high-scoring international students. Finally, males score consistently but only moderately higher (0.16–0.41 SDs) than females within all four countries.
The general aim of this thesis is to explore the gendered and classed nature of social work and social welfare in Russia to show how social policy can be a part of and reinforce marginalisation. The overall research question is in what ways class and gender are constructed in Russian social work practice and welfare rhetoric through Soviet legacies and contemporary challenges? In addition, which actors contribute to the constitution of social work values and how this value system affects the agency of the clients? This study focuses on contradictory ideologies that are shaped in discursive formations of social policy, social work training and practice. It is a qualitative study, containing fi ve papers looking at this issue from three different perspectives: policy and institutions, culture and discourse, actors and identity. The data collection was arranged as a purposive–iterative process. The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with social work practitioners, administrators and clients, participant observations in social services and analysis of documents of various kinds.
The volume presents a new and unique view of welfare in Russia and Eastern European countries from an intersectional perspective of welfare, gender and agency. Since the collapse of socialism, the welfare structures of the post-socialist states have experienced large and rapid changes. The discussions on the reforming welfare models serve as the integrating theme for the volume. The authors discuss past and current developments and make comparisons in time and space between the early 1990s and late 2000s and between post-socialist and transitional countries. Welfare and political democratization are analyzed on the one hand as structures and processes and on the other hand as cultural meanings and through agency, which all are strongly gendered. Macro-level analyses and in-depth case studies by scholars from different countries and disciplines provide a wide and multilayered picture of welfare developments and gendered practices of social services, caregiving and civic activism, among others. Special attention is given to research methodologies, particularly on fieldwork and micro-level understanding of the related topics. The contributors come from social and political sciences and from both former socialist and 'Western' countries from Russia and Slovenia as well as the US, the UK, Germany and Finland.
Data management and analysis is one of the fastest growing and most challenging areas of research and development in both academia and industry. Numerous types of applications and services have been studied and re-examined in this field resulting in this edited volume which includes chapters on effective approaches for dealing with the inherent complexity within data management and analysis. This edited volume contains practical case studies, and will appeal to students, researchers and professionals working in data management and analysis in the business, education, healthcare, and bioinformatics areas.
Apart from the public sphere and the norms set by society, the private sphere plays an important role in the lives of the disabled, including the personal experience of disability at a micro level: in their families, everyday routines and romantic relationships. In this chapter, issues of family structure are considered using a narrative analysis of interviews with women who use wheelchairs. Various cultural, social, economic and political determinants effect the formation of certain types of family structure and attitudes towards family life. At the same time, they interrelate with biographical factors that reinforce or weaken the limits of freedom and private life. Using narrative analysis, I demonstrate what role family plays in constructing the identity of a person with a disability, and how family members act as coauthors of individual biographies. This can be seen in those dilemmas of family life associated with the feelings, sexuality and emotional stability at the micro-level of the life experience and identification of women with disabilities.
The main reason the so-called "crisis of education" covers not only the rap-id changes in the system of knowledge and technology, but also the changes in the labor market, the prevalence of atypical employment. As a result, the univer-sity, by definition, can not train a specialist, fully satisfying the requirements of the employer. For example, the direction of "Advertising and public relations" proposes measures to resolve the existing contradictions.
The paper deals with temporary employment in the Russian labour market. The main focus is the gender difference regarding determinants of temporary employment. Unlike most European countries, where women are more likely to have temporary work, in Russia men predominantly have this status, comparable to the situation in many developing countries. This paper seeks to understand why this is the case. The household survey of NOBUS (held in 2003 by State Statistical Centre with World Bank participation) is used to answer this question: the results suggest that gender differences in temporary employment do exist, and that the main factors that explain these differences are education, and marital status.
This chapter addresses the relationship between class, family and social welfare policies by analysing the construction of the identity category of ‘unfortunate families’ (neblagopoluchnye sem’i) in popular scientific discourses, governmental policy documents and discourses of social services, and by examining how those labelled as ‘unfortunate’ negotiate this identity conferred to them. The chapter shows that gender and class are closely intertwined in the production of this identity, as it is single mothers who are primarily categorised as ‘unfortunate’. In our analysis we draw on multiple sources of data. First, we analyse in-depth and focus group interviews with service providers and clients and participant observation data from a number of Russian cities. Second, we analyse various government documents and social advertisements, mass media materials, social policy and social work textbooks, and popular scientific texts published during the 1990–2010s. This chapter begins with a review of Western theoretical discussions of class in the context of family and welfare in order to see how Russia fits into these debates. Western class analysis was considered irrelevant in the Soviet Union due to the supposedly classless nature of advanced socialism, but the transition to a market economy in the 1990s and the new kind of class society it engendered have made these discussions topical in Russia. In the second section of this chapter we offer a brief description of the main principles of the Soviet and post-Soviet welfare ideologies and the policies towards families. The following sections examine how popular scientific discourses, governmental policy documents and social advertisements, and social service providers construct class with the concept of the unfortunate family. The last section preceding the conclusions analyses how mothers labelled as unfortunate negotiate this stigmatised identity.
In this paper, we discuss the methods of endowment management existing in the world and their applicability to the Russian university system. The endowment spending research focuses on the following issues: reinvesting endowment income; identifying the size of expendable endowment income; using the endowment body, not onlyincome; choosing endowment spending policy, rule and rate endowments, etc. We provide an overview of endowment fund financial indicators and endowment spending allocationin Russia. Based on the example of the HSE Endowment Fund, we analyze the use of endowment spending rulesand model of financial indicators for 2008–2014. The University’s Endowment Fund endowment spending policies implement the preservation principle, which may be reasonable in a stable economy. However, the viability of the principle is questionable in the crisis, the more so since the endowment is mostly in rubles. Using net asset valuation methods, the HSE Endowment Fund could provide equity betweengenerations with annual distribution of income in favor of the next and current generations.
This article analyzes the main female character in a work of Ildiko von Kürthy "Mondscheintarif". The author defines the behavior of the heroine, who ruins the stereotypes of "correct" gender identity - the female archetype as homemaker , faithful wife , virtuous mother, and highlights the features of the real , the average woman - imperfect , but therefore even more attractive. The article commented the important sign of the new type of identity of the modern woman - the openness of female consciousness, ie prevalence of the demonstrated characteristics over her intrinsic characteristics. Author gives arguments for the need of deconstruction of the existing and reconstruction of new, alternative ideas about gender
Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.