Psychological Correlates of Achievement Motivation on the Personal-meaning Level

This article is devoted to the study of psychological correlates of the achievement motivation on the personal-meaning level of the first-year psychology students. The author revealed a wide range of psychological correlates of achievement motivation: value orientations (universal values, power, self-development, etc.), the parameters of existential fulfillment (self-transcendence, freedom, etc.) and the general level of life meaningfulness, self-actualization parameters (creativity, self-acceptance, spontaneity, etc.). Based on the conducted correlation research, the author developed a training program aimed at actualization and growth in the motivation of the firstyear psychology students. The study involved experimental and control groups. Inthe course of the study, when comparing the data of preliminary and final testing, the dynamics of achievement motivation indicators in the experimental group was revealed in the direction of increasing the achievement motivation, while in the control group there were no significant differences in the level of achievementmotivation, which indicates the effectiveness of the training developed by author. At the same time, it is shown that the growth of the achievement motivation occurred due to the growth of its transcendent component, which is a good indicator, since psychology students with high motivation of transcendence are predominantlyoriented toward acquiring knowledge and mastering the profession. The data obtained in the study enriches author’s understanding of the psychological phenomenon, such as achievement motivation, and have applied significance: the training program developed by the author can be used to increase the achievement motivation of students and can also be tested on another contingent. Keywords: achievement motivation, value orientations, existential fulfillment, self-actualization, psychology student

Overweight: What Are its Costs and What Could Be Done?

Global patterns of overweight and obesity trends, main factors influencing the process and instruments for public intervention are discussed. Special attention is paid to implications (economic costs) of overweight. By using RLMS data the authors estimate prevalence of overweight and obesity in Russia and identify its specific features. Estimations of direct and indirect costs of overweight for Russia are provided.overweight; obesity; public health; body mass index; direct and indirect costs of overweight

Optimized Acoustic Localization with SRP-PHAT for Monitoring in Distributed Sensor Networks

Acoustic localization by means of sensor arrays has a variety of applications, from conference telephony to environment monitoring. Many of these tasks are appealing for implementation on embedded systems, however large dataflows and computational complexity of multi-channel signal processing impede the development of such systems. This paper proposes a method of acoustic localization targeted for distributed systems, such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The method builds on an optimized localization algorithm of Steered Response Power with Phase Transform (SRP-PHAT) and simplifies it further by reducing the initial search region, in which the sound source is contained. The sensor array is partitioned into sub-blocks, which may be implemented as independent nodes of WSN. For the region reduction two approaches are handled. One is based on Direction of Arrival estimation and the other - on multilateration. Both approaches are tested on real signals for speaker localization and industrial machinery monitoring applications. Experiment results indicate the method’s potency in both these tasks