Tag «IQ»

Global warming has caused the total area of more than 600 Greater Caucasus glaciers to drop by approximately 16%, according to an international research team that includes Stanislav Kutuzov, geographer from HSE University. Glaciers without rock debris coverage have decreased more than those with debris coverage.

Researchers at the HSE Institute of Education have used regional data to describe, for the first time in Russia, how inequality in access to education affects different parts of the Russian Federation. The research findings reveal that the key determining factors are the local economy and the proportion of people with a university degree: urbanised regions with well-developed economies and educated inhabitants are more likely to have good-quality schools, with a large proportion of students scoring highly in the Unified State Exam and going on to university. In contrast, poorer regions with low human capital see many of their school students drop out after the 9th grade, limiting their chances of further education.

HSE researchers, jointly with colleagues from the RAN Institute of Organoelement Compounds and the RAN Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, have studied the properties of a polyarylene ether ketone-based copolymer (co-PAEK) for potential space applications. Co-PAEK films are highly resistant to electrostatic discharges caused by ionizing radiation and can thus be used as protective coating for spacecraft electronics. The study findings have been published in Polymers.

Additional certification and training courses can not only affect an employee’s pay grade and career, but their sense of control over their life. Employees who have ‘upgraded’ their professional knowledge and skills find it easier to manage problems both in their personal lives and in the workplace. However, the trend does not hold equally for men and women. A study by Natalia Karmaeva and Andrey Zakharov of the HSE Institute of Education shows that men reap more benefits than women.

Getting an education and a job, leaving the parental home and starting a family are some of the the milestones of growing up. For Russians in their thirties today, these stages do not necessarily follow a pre-set sequence and often overlap. In contrast to their parents, linear and predictable biographies are increasingly rare among Russian millennials, whose lives tend to look more like a patchwork of diverse events than a straight line. Some of these events, especially childbirth, often get postponed until later in life. For young Russians today, having children tends to be the last stage in their own transition to maturity, according to demographer Ekaterina Mitrofanova.

In 2001, ten years after the launch of reforms in Russia, 54% of Russians  believed  the main achievement of the reforms was the availability of consumer goods, rather than freedom of speech or the possibility of travelling  abroad. A decade later, public attitudes had not changed, and the availability of goods on store shelves was still perceived as the number one priority. The massive trauma caused by scarcity was particularly strong. How it was addressed and in what way it influenced public attitudes after the USSR collapse is examined in a study  by HSE professor Oleg Khlevnyuk.

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.

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.