News

Experts of the HSE Institute of Education examined access to higher education in Russia and found that it varies across regions. Besides, the possibility of getting a degree can be quite low in some parts of the country.

RusVectōrēs is a web service for distributional semantics created at the School of Linguistics. The service allows users to play with distributional semantic models (a.k.a. word embeddings) right in the browser. Last year, several new features were added. Find out more about the service and its functionality.

Researchers from HSE, Northumbria University, and Aarhus University have experimentally confirmed the hypothesis, whereby comprehension of a word’s meaning involves not only the ‘classic’ language brain centres but also the cortical regions responsible for the control of body muscles, such as hand movements. The resulting brain representations are, therefore, distributed across a network of locations involving both areas specialised for language processing and those responsible for the control of the associated action. The results have been published in the journal Neuropsychologia.

On February 8, Russian Science Day, the Higher School of Economics, along with the Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) and the Ministry of Education and Science, released its annual statistical data book on the state of science, technology, and innovation. Below, the Director of the HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge and HSE First Vice Rector Leonid Gokhberg discusses how research on science in Russia is advancing.

Igor Kolokolov and Vladimir Lebedev, scientific experts from HSE’s Faculty of Physics and the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics of Russian Academy of Sciences, have developed an analytical theory, which binds the structure of coherent vortices formed due to inverse cascades in 2-D turbulence with the statistical properties of hydrodynamic fluctuations. Uncovering this link can be useful in identifying the causes of the particular characteristics of such atmospheric phenomena as cyclones and anticyclones. Their research is presented in an article published in the ‘Journal of Fluid Mechanics’.

This week, the HSE Department of Theoretical Economics (Faculty of Economic Sciences) hosted Professor Johan Eyckmans of the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven (Belgium) for a series of lectures focusing on environmental economics. An expert in a number of areas concerning the economics of climate change, alternative energy and other related subjects, Professor Eyckmans spoke with the HSE news service while he was in Moscow about his research interests and his vision for the future.

On February 2-3, 2017 the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg hosted the International Student Research Conference. The campus became a meeting point for young researchers and professors from Belarus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Norway, Portugal, Russia, the UK, and Ukraine.  For two days, participants attended lectures delivered by keynote speakers, presented posters and discussed issues of social informatics, applied data analysis, regional planning and development, sustainable tourism and development, modern Asia, finance, economic growth, logistics, usable pasts and political science. Sessions covered a wide variety of research interests.

The belief that the non-profit sector is mainly supported by private donations is nothing but a myth. According to Natalia Ivanova's study Foreign Experience of Government's Impact on Philanthropy and Its Applicability in Russia, government support accounts for a substantial part of charity budgets.

The article ‘Regime Type and Political Destabilization in a Cross-National Perspective: A Re-Analysis’ by Andrey Korotayev, Professor at HSE School of Political Science, co-authored by Julia Zinkina (HSE), Elena Slinko (Rossiya Segodnya) and Stanislav Bilyuga (MSU) was published in the journal ‘Cross-Cultural Research’.

Researchers from the Higher School of Economics have shown how the level of perinatal testosterone, the sex hormone, impacts a person’s earnings in life. Prior research confirms that many skills and successes are linked to the widely known 2D:4D ratio, also knows as the digit ratio. This is the ratio of the index and ring fingers, and it is considered a reflection of the level of perinatal testosterone, the male hormone of the mother that acts on the development of the offspring during pregnancy.