Tag "IQ"

In 1992 in post-Soviet Russia, retail trade was allowed to flow out of stores to the streets where people were now able to sell things hand-to-hand, from stands and kiosks. Immediately, street vendors flooded the country and open-air markets expanded and multiplied. After a few years, according to some estimates, more than 30 million people, or nearly half of Russia's economically active population, were engaged in trading. This phenomenon was examined in detail for the first time by HSE professor Oleg Khlevniuk.

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.

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.

At the end of January, Rosstat presented preliminary data on Russia's economic performance during 2019. In anticipation of the official publication, IQ.HSE interviewed a prominent  Russian expert, Director of the HSE Centre for Business Tendency Studies (CBTS) Georgy Ostapkovich, about the 2019 results and the outlook for 2020.

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.

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.

According to forecasts, 96% of all payments and money transfers in Russia will be performed with the help of innovative services by 2035. The financial technology industry is trying to simplify interactions with money as much as possible. In this article, IQ.HSE draws on a report by the Centre of Development Institute to explain current developments in the fintech industry.

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.

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.

Unlike the case in many developed countries, the Russian government is ready to provide financial support to all people who are registered unemployed. Researchers from the HSE Centre for Labour Market Studies undertook a study of how the unemployed are treated in other countries and proposed measures for improving the situation on Russia’s labour market.