Why Local Authorities Partner With Regional Railways In Russia?

The paper studies the process of PPP formation on the suburban passenger transport in Russia. Empirical evidence on the nature of relationship between local authorities and regional railway undertakings has been provided to rationalise basic assumptions made in the theoretical model. The theoretical findings show that PPP arrangement provides better incentives to invest in quality of services though direct welfare comparison with Compensatory Agreements is not possible due to different objectives of the parties.Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies. Faculty of Economics and Business. The University of Sydne

Vertical divestiture as a competitive strategy: The case of railway passenger transport reform in Russia

We consider the vertical access model of the rail passenger sector in Russia and formally analyse the attractiveness of complete vertical divestiture as an option for the future reform steps. The integrated infrastructure company (RZD) serves also the passenger market and is engaged in sabotage in order to disadvantage existing or potential rivals of its downstream affiliate – Federal Passenger Directorate. We found that the welfare gain from the vertical divestiture may depend on the nature and toughness of downstream competition and be irrelevant to the size of scope economies and maximum level of sabotage. JEL classifications: L51, L22 Key words: downstream competition, constrained capacity, sabotageInstitute of Transport and Logistics Studies. Faculty of Economics and Business. The University of Sydne

Territorial structure of the denominational space of the South-East Baltic

The South-East Baltic is a meeting place of three branches of Christianity: Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Lutheranism. Dominant in the Baltic region, these religious confessions define the cultural landscape of the area. At the same time, they have an indirect effect on socio-economic development. In this study, we aim to identify the main components of the territorial structure and the formation and transformation factors of the denominational space in the South-East Baltic. The complexity of the denominational structure of the local population stems from the centuries-long position of this region as a political buffer zone. We calculate the potential denominational structure and the potential religious fractionalisation index at the level of basic territorial units and regions southeast of the Baltic Sea. Based on this, we identify the main components of the territorial structure of the denominational space, which includes three denominational shields and contact zones between them. From a practical viewpoint, these components suggest a new variant of the territorial differentiation of the Baltic region. This variant has only limited relevance to ethnic and socioeconomic zoning

FORMATION OF RISK-BALANCED STYLE OF PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY AMONG UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

The basis of the sustainable development of society with ever-growing scientific and technical progress is noxology as a science about the dangers of the world, since the risk of being in modern society is higher than ever. In this regard, a scientific noxospheric picture of the world is being formed as an integrative knowledge system, which should be the basis for the formation of a new, noxological worldview, in which security is the main value norm of risk-oriented thinking. The article is aimed at the theoretical substantiation of the necessity of developing a risk-balanced style of professional activity among university students on the basis of risk-thinking as an objective property of the personality. The article also reveals the authors’ concept of the noxological consciousness and explains the term of a risk-balanced style of professional activity. The definition, structure and main constituent elements of this personal phenomenon are given. It is determined that noxological style of professional activity includes such components as risk-thinking, self-regulation, intellectual features and capabilities, “labor model”, individual biological rhythms, will, as well as habits and special techniques of activity. Various characteristics of risks in the professional activity of a specialist are considered. Based on the analysis of scientific and pedagogical literature on the problem and the method of observation, the modeling of the pedagogical system of training a specialist with a risk-balanced style of professional activity is presented, the effectiveness of which is confirmed by the formative experiment

Analysis of pump station control systems

Systematization and comparative analysis of circuit solutions of pump station control systems has been carried out. The main features at operation of various control systems of the automated stations are presented. The criteria for selection of the efficient configurations of control systems are formulated

Physical education and human health

Physical education is an organic part of human culture, its special and independent field. Health is the most important treasure not only for an individual, but for the whole society as well. Physical education can be considered a special activity that provides useful results for an individual and the society. It is a very important way of raising students’ efficiency in study and in their social activityФизическая культура - органическая часть общечеловеческой культуры, ее особая самостоятельная область. Здоровье - бесценное достояние не только каждого человека, но и всего общества. Физическая культура рассматривается как особая деятельность, результаты которой полезны для общества и человека. Она является крайне важным средством повышения работоспособности студентов в учебном процессе и их общественной активност

Engineering MultiQueues: Fast relaxed concurrent priority queues

Priority queues with parallel access are an attractive data structure for applications like prioritized online scheduling, discrete event simulation, or greedy algorithms. However, a classical priority queue constitutes a severe bottleneck in this context, leading to very small throughput. Hence, there has been significant interest in concurrent priority queues with relaxed semantics. We investigate the complementary quality criteria rank error (how close are deleted elements to the global minimum) and delay (for each element x, how many elements with lower priority are deleted before x). In this paper, we introduce MultiQueues as a natural approach to relaxed priority queues based on multiple sequential priority queues. Their naturally high theoretical scalability is further enhanced by using three orthogonal ways of batching operations on the sequential queues. Experiments indicate that MultiQueues present a very good performance-quality tradeoff and considerably outperform competing approaches in at least one of these aspects. We employ a seemingly paradoxical technique of "wait-free locking" that might be of more general interest to convert sequential data structures to relaxed concurrent data structures

A Bulk-Parallel Priority Queue in External Memory with STXXL

We propose the design and an implementation of a bulk-parallel external memory priority queue to take advantage of both shared-memory parallelism and high external memory transfer speeds to parallel disks. To achieve higher performance by decoupling item insertions and extractions, we offer two parallelization interfaces: one using "bulk" sequences, the other by defining "limit" items. In the design, we discuss how to parallelize insertions using multiple heaps, and how to calculate a dynamic prediction sequence to prefetch blocks and apply parallel multiway merge for extraction. Our experimental results show that in the selected benchmarks the priority queue reaches 75% of the full parallel I/O bandwidth of rotational disks and and 65% of SSDs, or the speed of sorting in external memory when bounded by computation.Comment: extended version of SEA'15 conference pape