The family meal, a tradition which has for centuries helped strengthen family ties, is becoming a rare phenomenon, increasingly replaced by a fast food culture and various individual dietary strategies, according to Irina Sokhan, Associate Professor at the HSE's Department of Applied Political Science (St. Petersburg).
The personality traits of Russian students do not have an overall significant impact on academic performance at the university. In the West, those who are more responsible, open and inclined to take risks turn out to be better students, Ekaterina Kochergina and Ekaterina Orel said at an academic seminar of HSE’s Centre for Institutional Studies.
Commenting on Live Journal is often concentrated around the most popular bloggers. Who authors the posts plays a more significant role in forming discussions than the subject matter. These are the conclusions of researchers at the HSE Laboratory of Internet Studies LINIS, Olessia Koltsova, Sergey Koltsov and Sergey Nikolenko.
Over the course of 20 years, since the beginning of contemporary medicine’s transition into a digital format, a vast amount of largely unused data has amassed. The analysis of these data and the extraction of a new logic of control from them is one of the most popular areas of focus in applied mathematics, Oleg Pianykh, Professor in HSE’s Department of Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence and an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, said in a report. His report, 'Big Data in Medicine: How to Make them Work,' was presented at HSE’s academic seminar 'Mathematical Models of Information Technologies.'
Russia's cooperation with China on a natural gas deal over the next few years will marginally improve Russia's economic performance and bring additional revenues, but is unlikely to offset the country’s sluggish economic growth rates, according to the recent issue of 'New Comments on the State and Business' published by the HSE Centre of Development Institute.
Education and professional experience in reaching success are not as important for Russians as useful connections. It is specifically connections in the majority of people’s perception that play the main role in climbing the social ladder. Such mind-sets of the population do not allow for the national economy to grow or develop, the head of the Institute of Humanitarian Development of the Megapolis’ Center for Scientific Research and Education, Elena Avraamova, concluded during a research study presented at the HSE.
Many patients are dissatisfied with the health services they receive, but prepared to pay doctors extra for quality care. Doctors, in turn, consider it normal to receive cash or gifts from grateful patients. However, the line can be very thin between gratitude and extortion, according to a study by Alla Chirikova, Senior Research Fellow of the RAS Institute of Sociology, and Sergei Shishkin, Academic Supervisor of the HSE's Institute for Health Economics, published in the Universe of Russia journal.
Russia will better be able to treat cancer, tuberculosis, HIV, strokes and heart attacks if it develops its own success stories in several medical fields of the future. Firstly, it is necessary to improve regenerative medicine, biomedicine, genomic research, the production of medicines that target specific health problems, and molecular diagnostics. It will otherwise be difficult to increase the life expectancy in the country and strengthen Russia’s position on the world market for medical technologies, Alexander Chulok says in an article published in HSE’s journal Foresight, 7(3), for 2013.
Immigrants from Central Asia are only partially integrated into life in Moscow and are not using many of the city’s resources and opportunities. Their way of life and living standards differ drastically from those Russians who live and work in the Russian capital. Immigrants from former Soviet republics work on weekdays and do household chores or socialise among themselves on weekends, and thus have difficulty adjusting to life in a big city, according to a study by Ekaterina Demintseva and Vera Peshkova published in the HSE's Demoscope Weekly.
The number of foreign specialists working in Russia has been declining rapidly over the last several years. These specialists often perceive Russian capitalism as something temporary that depends on oil prices. Under such conditions, expats are not likely able to make a serious contribution to the modernization of the Russian economy, but their view of local realities is nonetheless valuable for understanding the processes that hinder economic development, researchers from HSE’s Laboratory for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Development Vladimir Karacharovskiy, Ovsey Shkaratan and Gordey Yastrebov concluded from a research study.
