Free Will or Fate? Why Russian Children Rarely Switch Schools
Unlike many other countries, Russian children’s educational path is decided from an early age. Starting with the first grade, parents try to send their children to schools where they can remain until they graduate after either the 9th or 11th grades. Moreover, many families do not use the opportunity available to them to transfer their children to a better school partway through their education. The result is that inter-school mobility remains low and a child’s educational path is often hard-wired early on, HSE University sociologists in St. Petersburg found.
Attention and Atención: How Language Proficiency Correlates with Cognitive Skills
An international team of researchers carried out an experiment at HSE University demonstrating that knowledge of several languages can improve the performance of the human brain. In their study, they registered a correlation between participants’ cognitive control and their proficiency in a second language.
Climate Control: How Countries Respond to Weather Change
Having studied the impact of warming on countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia, Georgy Safonov, Director of the HSE Centre for Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, warns that responding to climate change does not seem to be a top priority for the region's governments, while potential threats are assessed only in economic terms and almost never as a social challenge.
A Proud ‘No’: Why Egalitarian Values Don’t Catch on in Post-Soviet Countries
People’s values of personal choice, suсh as their attitudes towards abortion, divorce, and premarital sex, are usually determined their level of education, age, religiosity, and social status. At least this is the case in many countries such as the US and those in Europe. In a recent study, HSE sociologists found that in post-Soviet countries, personal values are most determined by people’s level of patriotism.
‘The More Consistent the Learning Process, the More We’ll See a Specifically Russian Type of Cluster-Based Economic Development’
On February 6, 2020, HSE University hosted an expert seminar, ‘Global and Russian Trends in Cluster Development and Regional Competitiveness’. The event was organized by the Russian Cluster Observatory based at HSE University’s Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge (ISSEK HSE). Keynote speaker Dr. Christian Ketels spoke about cluster policy and regional competitiveness in other parts of the world in order to further discussion about what form cluster policy should take in Russia.
Popularizing the Humanities vs. the Natural Sciences
Hearing about research advances in medicine, biology, or physics in public discourse is a common occurrence. However, the question of whether scholarly activity in the social sciences and the humanities should be popularized has always been left unanswered. What are the features of communication between humanities and society and the media? Are different fields of knowledge popularized differently? Physicists, linguists, sociologists, science communicators, and journalists discussed this question on the eve of the Day of Russian Science at the Total Dictation Conference in Moscow.
Build It and They Will Come
Migration, both domestic and abroad, is playing a major role in transforming the world’s largest cities, and Moscow is no exception. Researchers at HSE University, the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IGRAN) and Strelka KB identified which cities’ residents are buying newly built apartments in the capital and how economic inequality between Russia’s regions is changing the face of the city.
HSE Launches New International Laboratories
For ten years now, HSE has been holding an annual grant competition for researchers who wish to start new international laboratories at HSE in collaboration with leading foreign scholars and scientists. The most recent competition reached its conclusion this past November, and now some of the selected proposed labs have already begun operation. Who are the competition winners and what kind of research will they be doing?
Charmed, Doubly Strange
LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) collaboration, one of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) experiments, reported that their detector has identified particles that have not previously been detected in physics experimentally – excited omega baryons (Ω-b). Just several years ago, detecting such particles in LHC was believed to be next to impossible. Among proton particles, the excited ‘charmed omegas’ were preselected by an algorithm created by staff from the HSE Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis and Yandex LLC. IQ.HSE talked to Denis Derkach and Fedor Ratnikov about their collaboration’s ‘fresh catch’ and about the point of ‘fishing’ on LHCb in general.
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Weaving Languages Together: Why Megacities Need to Preserve Multilingualism
Moscow, like any modern big city, attracts migrants from different regions and countries. Some of them speak very little or no Russian. Their adaptation and successful integration depend in part on how fast they can learn Russian and in part on whether the city makes an effort to accommodate other languages. According to linguist Mira Bergelson, this latter factor is particularly important if the city is to benefit from immigration.
Deadline for abstract submission - November 15