Books

A top economist weighs in on one of the most urgent questions of our times: What is the source of inequality and what is the remedy?

In Giving Kids a Fair Chance, Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman argues that the accident of birth is the greatest source of inequality in America today. Children born into disadvantage are, by the time they start kindergarten, already at risk of dropping out of school, teen pregnancy, crime, and a lifetime of low-wage work. This is bad for all those born into disadvantage and bad for American society.

Current social and education policies directed toward children focus on improving cognition, yet success in life requires more than smarts. Heckman calls for a refocus of social policy toward early childhood interventions designed to enhance both cognitive abilities and such non-cognitive skills as confidence and perseverance. This new focus on preschool intervention would emphasize improving the early environments of disadvantaged children and increasing the quality of parenting while respecting the primacy of the family and America's cultural diversity.

Heckman shows that acting early has much greater positive economic and social impact than later interventions -- which range from reduced pupil-teacher ratios to adult literacy programs to expenditures on police -- that draw the most attention in the public policy debate. At a time when state and local budgets for early interventions are being cut, Heckman issues an urgent call for action and offers some practical steps for how to design and pay for new programs.

The debate that follows delves deeply into some of the most fraught questions of our time: the sources of inequality, the role of schools in solving social problems, and how to invest public resources most effectively. Mike Rose, Geoffrey Canada, Charles Murray, Carol Dweck, Annette Lareau, and other prominent experts participate.

The monograph traces the main stages of the development of French radio and television broadcasting. The book examines the process of formation of the French audiovisual system against the backdrop of the country's internal social and political life, important international events, 20th century scientific and technological progress and the introduction of digital technologies in the early 21st century. The work focuses on the specifics of French radio and television functioning during the establishment of a state TV and radio monopoly in France. It examines in detail the legislation in the field of audiovisual media and its impact on the transformation of the French radio and TV broadcasting system.
For students, post-graduate students and teachers of faculties and departments of journalism, practical journalists, political scientists and media historians.

The textbook deals with the history, specific features and public functions of radio broadcasting, its place in the mass media system, the structure of its expressive means, radio broadcasting program genres and forms, questions of the methodology of the radio journalist's work both when broadcasting live and recording programs for future broadcasts as well as the typology of radio broadcasting organizations that has been established in Russia and abroad. It provides the first ever summary of foreign experience, international broadcasting experience and forms and methods of radio audiences surveys.
For students of journalism and television practitioners.

A common view is that folktales are for children. In general, this is not the case, let alone for Russian folktales. This becomes more obvious when we take a closer look at the rather violent content of these stories. Thus the challenge of this work is an attempt to reestablish the reality of these stories, intended primarily for the adult reader, by offering them accompanied by a philosophical analysis, as well as with questions inviting the amateur of tales to meditate further on the content of these narrations. Since one of the consequences of the infantilization of these stories is precisely that they tend to lose their function, which consists in making the listener reflect on the world, on humanity, on psychology, on himself etc. The allegories or metaphors they contain constitute in fact a kind of narrative philosophy, taking the form of fables or parables, all of which are meant to feed our thoughts. Of course, without excluding children.

The book is devoted to the construction of various versions of the theories of elastic thin bodies using the method of orthogonal polynomials. It deals with selected issues of classical and micropolar continuum mechanics and eigenvalue problems of tensor objects of any even rank with some applications to mechanics. Formulas expressing explicitly complete systems of orthonormal proper tensor objects are derived. Classifications of materials are given.

For researchers, undergraduates and postgraduates specializing in the fields of deformable solid mechanics and mechanics of thin structures.

Advertising and the media have been inextricably linked for several centuries. The monograph analyzes the current areas of research in advertising in mass media, the development of media advertising and those technological areas that are important for the survival of the advertising market and media business. The author considers typological features of media advertising and offers her model of advertising classification. The book is of scientific and practical interest and is addressed to teachers, graduate students, university students and a wide range of specialists working in the field of advertising and mass media.

The manual introduces the principles of stylistically correct and effective construction of advertising texts, requirements for their composition, language and style and specific features of their linguistic impact.
For mass media staff, advertising agents and writers of text ads.

The manual consists of lessons including adapted journalistic texts, lexical and creative tasks that motivate students to communicate on a given topic, to develop their practical skills and speech skills. The specific feature of the material organization is to get students to express their own opinion and conduct discussions when working in a group in Russian as a foreign language (the advanced stage) and in Russian as a non-native language. The goal of the course is to develop students’ language, speech and socio-cultural competence. The manual is aimed at improving all types of speech activity - reading, listening, speaking, writing. It covers a wide range of socio-cultural and public topics. All the texts are united by a common theme - ‘Topical issues of advertising’.
For students studying in different specialties and disciplines such as ‘Philology’, ‘Sociology’, ‘Journalism’, ‘Advertising and Public Relations’, ‘Intercultural Communication’, etc.

The book, which MSU professor emeritus V.Tropin wrote to mark the 80th birthday of academician A. A. Logunov, is devoted to the latter’s activities as Moscow university rector.
For all those who are interested in the history of Moscow University.

Evgeny Evgenievich Shiryaev, a Moscow University alumnus, who worked for many years at the Geological Faculty, has created a unique portrait gallery. Today, these portraits decorate the Rectors’ office-museum in the MSU building in Mokhovaya Street. Unfortunately, the portrait gallery is incomplete since the images of some of its rectors are unavailable now, however some background information about these rectors’ lives and activity still survives and is now on display at the museum.

This manual provides a systematic description of more or less every major religion that exists today, its main groups and trends and most important denominations. It shows the dogmatic and cult specificity of religious communities and indicates their organizational structure, number of followers and geographical distribution. The authors give brief information on the history of the major confessions, but focus largely on their current state. The educational and methodological value of this manual is that it not only provides students with very extensive information, but also contributes to their further independent work using the annexes and reference literature included in the manual. The manual is addressed to university students of history, but it can be useful for students studying in other specialties, as well as postgraduate students in the humanities.

The monograph explores a wide range of business communication issues. In modern information society, the sine qua non condition for successful commercial activity is the ability to create an effective system of business communications both within the organization and in the external environment. The monograph answers the questions about the ways of optimizing communication processes and teaching students to discern their mistakes and eliminate them.

For students, specialists in the field of business communications, businesspersons and all those who are interested in the questions of speech communication in business.

The book describes the lattice of closed classes of three-valued logic that are embedded in the precomplete class of self-dual functions. Unlike the linear class, this is the first precomplete class of which we have been able to obtain a description. With the help of this description, various properties of closed classes of self-dual functions are proved. In particular, all closed classes have been shown to have a (finite or infinite) basis, all finitely generated and predicate-decomposable classes have been identified, and the powers of the sublattices and sublattices for each closed class have been found.
For students, graduate students and researchers specializing in the field of discrete mathematics.

The book presents a profound conceptual structure of Vladimir Nabokov's novel ‘Gift’. Guided by the desire to give a textually substantiated analysis of the novel’s content, the author chose the quotational style of presentation. The book is addressed to students, specialists of philology and all those who are interested in the work of Vladimir Nabokov.

The monograph deals with the activity of sea ice as an agent of active and passive topographical feature formation. The zoning of the coastal shelf zone was carried out according to the types of ice formations and their impact on the sea coast and the floor. The monograph provides a description of the morphology and morphometry of the exarational and other forms of the relief, the formation of which is associated with the dynamics and seasonal presence of sea ice. An attempt was made to correlate the intensity of ice impacts and the safety of the forms of ice grinding. The book assesses the impact of climate change and ice cover on the dynamics of Arctic coasts. The monograph is intended for a wide range of readers: from scientists and professionals - oceanologists, geomorphologists, engineers engaged in the design of hydraulic structures in the offshore shelf zone of the freezing seas, to students and postgraduates studying the physical essence and geography of natural processes in the Arctic, Caspian and other natural regions.

This book offers a new reading of Alexander Pushkin’s ‘The Captain's Daughter’. The well-known literary critic Yu.M. Lotman rightly remarked: What’s happening with ‘The Captain's Daughter’ is the same as what happened to such works as Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’: the novel being too serious even for an adult reader, it has been transferred to the category of children’s books.’ The manual is addressed to high school students, applicants, students and teachers.

How much did the original design of Goncharov’s central novel change? What is his true conflict, what forms the foundation of its plot and why is ‘Oblomov’ made up of four parts? What gave the main character of the book a national and universal significance, and put Oblomovism on par with such notions as ‘Hamletism’, ‘Platonism’, ‘Quixotism’, ‘Don Juanism’, etc.? How are all the male and female characters in the novel systematized and how do the ‘notions of life’ including those of love, marriage and familial home they embody differ from each other? What does Olga Ilyinskaya yearn for in the ‘Crimean’ chapter of the novel? These are but only some of the questions to which this book offers detailed answers. Written by the famous historian and popularizer of Russian classical literature and a Goncharov literary prize-winner, the book is a fascinating guide to the artistic text of Goncharov’s famous masterpiece on every content level and facet - from social, everyday, topical and folklore to mythological and symbolic ones.

For teachers of schools, gymnasiums and lyceums, high school students, university entrants, students and teacher of philology and all admirers of Russian literary classics.