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Russians do not show much interest in information about science and technology, despite being certain that they are knowledgeable about the topic. And they differ from Europeans in this. The average proportion of those who read popular science journals in Europe is 4 times higher than in Russia, but Europeans are more modest in evaluating their awareness about achievements in research than Russians.

Employees who are too focused on sales targets can ignore customer needs. Meanwhile, customer focus is emerging as a key trend in business management. Ksenia Klepneva, postgraduate student of the HSE School of Business Administration, examined factors contributing to customer focus in companies operating in developed and developing economies.

The Higher School of Economics is very serious about students getting involved in undergraduate research. For Russian Science Day, celebrated on February 8, the HSE News Service spoke with three young HSE researchers about their work and learned how the students set goals for themselves, achieve results, and move forward with what some might deem frighteningly ambitious research ideas.

In 2015 HSE laboratories and centres chose 24 scholars as post-doctoral fellows in the fields of philosophy, history, data analysis, finance, and cognitive studies. University bulletin HSE Look introduces these researchers as well as the teams with which they are now working.

On January 29, Thomas Espy, a student in the Population and Development Master’s programme at HSE, presented a report entitled ‘Mapping Xenophobia in Russia’. During his presentation, he highlighted his paper’s linear analysis of xenophobic attacks in the Russian Federation and a network analysis focusing on nationalist groups, as well as recommended areas of focus for Russian policymakers.

February 8th is Russian Science Day. How do people, directly involved in the process of generating and advancing new knowledge - scientists, entrepreneurs and public servants - assess the health and potential of Russian science today? Here are the results of a survey by HSE researchers in which experts, representatives of government bodies, scientific organisations, universities, hi-tech companies and social organisations express their views on the state of science in Russia and what should be done to improve it.

Shadow education for high school students, such as private tutors or preparatory courses, is often treated by families as a mega-project requiring substantial investments of money and effort. Such investments, however, rarely pay off for underachieving students who are often unaware of the quality of shadow education and thus may choose the wrong providers. A study by Andrey Zakharov, Deputy Head of the HSE Institute of Education’s International Laboratory for Education Policy Analysis, and Prashant Loyalka, leading research fellow of the same Institute, has debunked some of the more popular myths concerning the effect of shadow education.

This year, the HSE Faculty of Computer Science is opening an international theoretical computer science laboratory, which will be the new research division of the Big Data and Information Retrieval School. One of the lab’s main objectives is to help bring the Russian school of theoretical computer science to the world stage.