The Garbage Problem: How Russians Are Dealing with It
Waste sorting is recognized as the most effective way to deal with the world’s waste problem. Yet nearly 70% of Russians neither sort their garbage nor intend to. But this is no reason to underestimate the population: 86% of Russians have adopted at least one of the habits outlined below to reduce household waste. Marina Shabanova studied the forms, motives, and potential of these practices. The results of the study will be presented at the 20th Annual April Conference at HSE.
Too Much Thought: How to Stop the Flow of Bad Academic Publications
Redundancy and crisis — these are the words higher education experts Philip G. Altbach and Hans de Wit use to describe the situation in the global market of academic publications. It has been largely caused by external factors, such as the rise of university rankings that focus on the number of research and papers and pressure by publishers. But universities’ behavior is also an explanation for the crisis. Many of them try to imitate research universities and produce lots of publications of widely varying quality, the experts said in their paper in the HSE journal International Higher Education.
The Success of an Environmental Charge
In October 2015, England introduced a charge for single-use plastic bags in supermarkets. The charge was largely supported by the population, led to substantial reduction in plastic bag use, and catalyzed a wider support for similar measures aimed at tackling plastic waste.
How Equality Started in Research
Legally, the 1917 revolution solved the gender issue in the Russian academic community. The doors to the profession opened for women, but a ‘glass ceiling’ remained. Ekaterina Streltsova and Evgenia Dolgova studied who it affected and why. This study is the first to present a socio-demographic analysis of the female academic community in Moscow and Leningrad during the early Soviet era.
HSE Researchers Teach Neural Networks to Determine Crowd Emotions
Scholars from HSE University have developed an algorithm that detects emotions in a group of people on a low-quality video. The solution provides a final decision in just one hundredth of a second, which is faster than any other existing algorithms with similar accuracy. The results have been described in the paper ‘Emotion Recognition of a Group of People in Video Analytics Using Deep Off-the-Shelf Image Embeddings.’
Artificial Intelligence Learns to Predict Elementary Particle Signals
Scientists from HSE University and Yandex have developed a method that accelerates the simulation of processes at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The research findings were published in Nuclear Instruments and Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment.
One among Many: The Sociology of Moving in a Mob
Anyone moving in a large crowd, absorbed in their phone and yet avoiding collisions, follows certain laws that they themselves create. The movement of individuals as a condition for the movement of masses is the subject of a recent study by Dr. Andrey Korbut.
The Relationship Between Phonology and Mathematics: What Determines a First Grader’s Success
HSE researchers have shown that a child’s phonological abilities (including sensitivity to the sound composition of speech and the ability to identify individual sounds and syllables) are connected with mathematical aptitude in elementary school. However, the relationship between sound speech sensitivity and the development of mathematics varies depending on the socio-economic status of the child’s family.
Researchers Identify Possible Role of Foxp1 Protein in Control of Autoimmune Diseases
Scientists at the Higher School of Economics, the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IBCh RAS), and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center created a genetic model that helps to understand how the body restrains autoimmune and oncological diseases. The researchers published their results in Nature Immunology.
An Order of Emancipation: How Catherine I Established a Form of Distinction for Women
Established in Russia under Peter the Great and bestowed upon Catherine I who became its supreme head, the Order of Saint Catherine, or the ‘Order of Liberation’ (‘Orden osvobozhdeniia’), was the first order in Russia to be awarded to women. This small sliver of Petrine era history, as Professor Igor Fedyukin demonstrates in his new research, reveals the monarch’s wife’ serious political ambitions. Professor Fedyukin discusses how the history of the ‘ladies’ order’ reflects the former mistress’s plans to elevate her status and change the line of succession to the throne in her children’s favor.