Efficiency Assessment of Regional Social and Demographic Process Management: Global Trends and Regional Specifics

The problem of management of regional social and demographic process becomes the most actual whereas its consideration through the lenses of global trends (small number of children in a nuclear family, higher life expectancy rate, objective ageing of the population). This population reproduction level is an irreversible consequence of the urbanization processes and entrance into the phase of postindustrial development. Nevertheless, this is not to say that management of regional social and demographic process is impossible. It indicates that there are limits of management opportunities. The irreversible nature of this change is more or less typical for all regions; however, it should not be reduced to a single direction of social and demographic change in the regions. Spatial differentiation and extremely unbalanced social and economic development of the Russian regions have a significant effect both on the social and demographic situation, and on the development of the respective management tools. The problem of management of regional social and demographic process lies in acceptance of the irreversible nature, and in taking into account of simultaneous impact of the global trends and regional specifics on social and demographic processes. In this connection, the research objective is identification of social and demographic processes which are in the social and demographic global trend line and its deviations that the efficiency of management of regional social and demographic process is assessed. This paper presents methodology for assessment of efficiency of the social and demographic processes management on a regional level. The methodology is based on indicative analysis techniques and procedures. Since the development of any management techniques recommendations should be based on a clear understanding of the nature of social and demographic processes in the region, this methodology also addresses the task of identification of social and demographic processes following the global reproduction of population trends, as well as any variations from these trends. In addition, for the purposes of assessing efficiency of management of social and demographic processes in the region, the authors recommend monitoring the amounts of financing of the socially significant budget items, which would provide a tool for rationalizing the investment requirements for the specific social and demographic projects. This paper presents the results of the methodology approbation in the Ural Federal District

Brexit: implications for IP rights

This presentation covers the international context of intellectua

The problem of middle income trap in the context of the Polish economy

Middle income trap is a phenomenon that occurs at the time of entry of the economy in the cycle of overheating, which in turn leads to economic stagnation or even recession in developing countries. This phenomenon is most common among the developing countries aspiring to catch up with developed countries in economic development. The purpose of this article is to analyze the degree of risk of the Polish economy of middle income trap. Furthermore, in the article it has been indicated action of the economic authorities in Poland, which are unavoidable in order not to fall into middle income trap. To achieve this objective the following research methods were used: a review of the scientific literature and methods of statistical presentation of economic phenomena. The paper identified a number of factors which pose a real threat of falling into the middle income trap in Poland. The originality of this study lies in noticing and highlighting the significance of the middle income trap problem for the Polish economy

On the Problem of Categorizing Students Based on their Cognitive Styles and Teaching Strategies

AbstractThe research determines different types of students according to their dominant cognitive learning styles. We are focused on the students of Russian language at high school, acquiring statistical representation of various typological groups we cluster the students into to verify whether the development of metacognitive skills does improve the efficiency of learning foreign languages.The research includes a survey based on the works by Howard Gardner and others. We categorize students according to their dominant cognitive learning styles and corresponding teaching strategies. Two hundred respondents were included in the survey. The paper also provides a historical background of the subject

Study of values in sociology of public administration on the example of public employees' values in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)

The article represents the results of public employees' axiological basis study in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). The authors analyse values within the sociology of public administration and management and in accordance with Talcott Parsons' concept, regarding them as regulators of interaction assigned to certain social roles. The study reveals that, in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), four groups of public employees can be distinguished based on the differences in their value systems. Young employees without any public service experience and employees of retiring age are more likely to share the values of openness and customer orientation, although pursuant to different motives: young employees are focused on career achievements and social status, and for senior employees these values go with the idea of "People's Government” model. Young employees with experience of civil service from 3 to 5 years and with the experience of more than 10 years share the values of classical bureaucracy. They are often disappointed in career prospects; however, seek to preserve the existing social status, while employees with less than 5 years experience show a lower level of loyalty

Why-Query Support in Graph Databases

In the last few decades, database management systems became powerful tools for storing large amount of data and executing complex queries over them. In addition to extended functionality, novel types of databases appear like triple stores, distributed databases, etc. Graph databases implementing the property-graph model belong to this development branch and provide a new way for storing and processing data in the form of a graph with nodes representing some entities and edges describing connections between them. This consideration makes them suitable for keeping data without a rigid schema for use cases like social-network processing or data integration. In addition to a flexible storage, graph databases provide new querying possibilities in the form of path queries, detection of connected components, pattern matching, etc. However, the schema flexibility and graph queries come with additional costs. With limited knowledge about data and little experience in constructing the complex queries, users can create such ones, which deliver unexpected results. Forced to debug queries manually and overwhelmed by the amount of query constraints, users can get frustrated by using graph databases. What is really needed, is to improve usability of graph databases by providing debugging and explaining functionality for such situations. We have to assist users in the discovery of what were the reasons of unexpected results and what can be done in order to fix them. The unexpectedness of result sets can be expressed in terms of their size or content. In the first case, users have to solve the empty-answer, too-many-, or too-few-answers problems. In the second case, users care about the result content and miss some expected answers or wonder about presence of some unexpected ones. Considering the typical problems of receiving no or too many results by querying graph databases, in this thesis we focus on investigating the problems of the first group, whose solutions are usually represented by why-empty, why-so-few, and why-so-many queries. Our objective is to extend graph databases with debugging functionality in the form of why-queries for unexpected query results on the example of pattern matching queries, which are one of general graph-query types. We present a comprehensive analysis of existing debugging tools in the state-of-the-art research and identify their common properties. From them, we formulate the following features of why-queries, which we discuss in this thesis, namely: holistic support of different cardinality-based problems, explanation of unexpected results and query reformulation, comprehensive analysis of explanations, and non-intrusive user integration. To support different cardinality-based problems, we develop methods for explaining no, too few, and too many results. To cover different kinds of explanations, we present two types: subgraph- and modification-based explanations. The first type identifies the reasons of unexpectedness in terms of query subgraphs and delivers differential graphs as answers. The second one reformulates queries in such a way that they produce better results. Considering graph queries to be complex structures with multiple constraints, we investigate different ways of generating explanations starting from the most general one that considers only a query topology through coarse-grained rewriting up to fine-grained modification that allows fine changes of predicates and topology. To provide a comprehensive analysis of explanations, we propose to compare them on three levels including a syntactic description, a content, and a size of a result set. In order to deliver user-aware explanations, we discuss two models for non-intrusive user integration in the generation process. With the techniques proposed in this thesis, we are able to provide fundamentals for debugging of pattern-matching queries, which deliver no, too few, or too many results, in graph databases implementing the property-graph model

Top-k Differential Queries in Graph Databases

The sheer volume as well as the schema complexity of today’s graph databases impede the users in formulating queries against these databases and often cause queries to “fail” by delivering empty answers. To support users in such situations, the concept of differential queries can be used to bridge the gap between an unexpected result (e.g. an empty result set) and the query intention of users. These queries deliver missing parts of a query graph and, therefore, work with such scenarios that require users to specify a query graph. Based on the discovered information about a missing query subgraph, users may understand which vertices and edges are the reasons for queries that unexpectedly return empty answers, and thus can reformulate the queries if needed. A study showed that the result sets of differential queries are often too large to be manually introspected by users and thus a reduction of the number of results and their ranking is required. To address these issues, we extend the concept of differential queries and introduce top-k differential queries that calculate the ranking based on users’ preferences and therefore significantly support the users’ understanding of query database management systems. The idea consists of assigning relevance weights to vertices or edges of a query graph by users that steer the graph search and are used in the scoring function for top-k differential results. Along with the novel concept of the top-k differential queries, we further propose a strategy for propagating relevance weights and we model the search along the most relevant paths

DebEAQ - debugging empty-answer queries on large data graphs

The large volume of freely available graph data sets impedes the users in analyzing them. For this purpose, they usually pose plenty of pattern matching queries and study their answers. Without deep knowledge about the data graph, users can create ‘failing’ queries, which deliver empty answers. Analyzing the causes of these empty answers is a time-consuming and complicated task especially for graph queries. To help users in debugging these ‘failing’ queries, there are two common approaches: one is focusing on discovering missing subgraphs of a data graph, the other one tries to rewrite the queries such that they deliver some results. In this demonstration, we will combine both approaches and give the users an opportunity to discover why empty results were delivered by the requested queries. Therefore, we propose DebEAQ, a debugging tool for pattern matching queries, which allows to compare both approaches and also provides functionality to debug queries manually

Clinical Presentation, Diagnosis and Management of TB-HIV Comorbidity in Children

The problem of combination of tuberculosis and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection remains urgent. Ninety percent of women with HIV infection are of childbearing age that results in increasing the number of children with HIV infection in perinatal contact. In Saint Petersburg from 2014 to 2017, about 5000 children were born from a perinatal contact for HIV infection; by 2017, more than 300 children have confirmed HIV infection. The comparative analysis of case histories of 25 children with TB/HIV combination and 50 children with tuberculosis without HIV infection was performed. Analysis of the study results showed that there are cases of late diagnosis of HIV infection. TB is detected clinically more frequently in children with HIV infection than in children without HIV infection (25 and 5%, respectively). More than one-third of the patients with coinfection had negative sensitivity to tuberculin and DST. The prevalence and the severity of TB in children with HIV infection correlates with the degree of immunosuppression. Eight percent of children had immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome. Treatment of patients with coinfection associated in most cases with the increased period of total treatment course. Four children with HIV infection vaccinated with BCG were diagnosed with generalized tuberculosis

Leveraging Flexible Data Management with Graph Databases

Integrating up-to-date information into databases from different heterogeneous data sources is still a time-consuming and mostly manual job that can only be accomplished by skilled experts. For this reason, enterprises often lack information regarding the current market situation, preventing a holistic view that is needed to conduct sound data analysis and market predictions. Ironically, the Web consists of a huge and growing number of valuable information from diverse organizations and data providers, such as the Linked Open Data cloud, common knowledge sources like Freebase, and social networks. One desirable usage scenario for this kind of data is its integration into a single database in order to apply data analytics. However, in today's business intelligence tools there is an evident lack of support for so-called situational or ad-hoc data integration. What we need is a system which 1) provides a flexible storage of heterogeneous information of different degrees of structure in an ad-hoc manner, and 2) supports mass data operations suited for data analytics. In this paper, we will provide our vision of such a system and describe an extension of the well-studied property graph model that allows to 'integrate and analyze as you go' external data exposed in the RDF format in a seamless manner. The proposed integration approach extends the internal graph model with external data from the Linked Open Data cloud, which stores over 31 billion RDF triples (September 2011) from a variety of domains