Working paper
The Diffusion of Academic Achievements: Social Selection and Influence in Student Networks
By analyzing the logs of corporate e-mail networks we found a number of patterns, showing how the size of ego-networks of individual employees changes on a day by day basis. We proposed a simple model that adequately describes the observed time dependence of an employee's "social circle". Comparison of experimental data with the theoretical model showed that employees are divided into two groups - with fast and slow changes in their social circles, respectively. We believe that the presence of these groups reflects both project-type and process-type of employees' activities. Comparison of data obtained before and during the global economic crisis has shown that the crisis led to an actual reduction in project-type activities.
Bridging the gap between higher education research and policy making was always a challenge, but the recent calls for more evidence-based policies have opened a window of unprecedented opportunity for researchers to bring more contributions to shaping the future of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Encouraged by the success of the 2011 first edition, Romania and Armenia have organised a 2nd edition of the Future of Higher Education – Bologna Process Researchers’ Conference (FOHE-BPRC) in November 2014, with the support of the Italian Presidency of the European Union and as part of the official EHEA agenda. Reuniting over 170 researchers from more than 30 countries, the event was a forum to debate the trends and challenges faced by higher education today and look at the future of European cooperation in higher education. The research volumes offer unique insights regarding the state of affairs of European higher education and research, as well as forward-looking policy proposals. More than 50 articles focus on essential themes in higher education: Internationalization of higher education; Financing and governance; Excellence and the diversification of missions; Teaching, learning and student engagement; Equity and the social dimension of higher education; Education, research and innovation; Quality assurance, The impacts of the Bologna Process on the EHEA and beyond and Evidence-based policies in higher education.
Legal pluralism and the experience of the state in the Caucasus are at the centre of this edited volume. This is a region affected by a multitude of legal orders and the book describes social action and governance in the light of this, and considers how conceptions of order are enforced, used, followed and staged in social networks and legal practice. Principally, how is the state perceived and how does it perform in both the North and South Caucasus? From elections in Dagestan and Armenia to uses of traditional law in Ingushetia and Georgia, from repression of journalism in Azerbaijan to the narrations of anti-corruption campaigns in Georgia - the text reflects the multifarious uses and performances of law and order. The collection includes approaches from different scholarly traditions and their respective theoretical background and therefore forms a unique product of multinational encounters.
This book presents a course of English for Specific Purposes devoted specifically to the widely-discussed topic Web 2.0. It covers several aspects of online communication ranging from online friendship to business interacions. The activities presented in the coursebook are aimed at developing students’ communicative competence in both written and oral discourse. Web 2.0 includes a variety of authentic articles that arouse interest and provoke discussions. It also presents listening texts based on professional podcasts. Most grammar and vocabulary activities are developed from authentic texts as well.
Web 2.0 can be used at the B2-C1 levels of Common European Famework. The coursebook will help learn and practice the target vocabulary. It will be relevant to those interested in the development of Information and Communication Technologies in general and the Internet in particular.
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 article discusses the phenomenon of interconnected glocal hospitality communities which have recently spread over the world in the context of the internet development and cultural globalization processes. It focuses on a typical community of users of CouchSurfi ng.org, a major social hospitality network in St. Petersburg. The author argues that, in the framework of this web service, there occurs a transformation of virtual groups of users localized in various spots of the globe into actual interconnected glocal communities which shape shared identities, norms, values, and practices among its members.
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.
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.
This article is talking about state management and cultural policy, their nature and content in term of the new tendency - development of postindustrial society. It mentioned here, that at the moment cultural policy is the base of regional political activity and that regions can get strong competitive advantage if they are able to implement cultural policy successfully. All these trends can produce elements of new economic development.