Vol 88, No 1 (2018)

The authors consider the chronological relation of two groups of phenomena in the history of the Earth over the last 150 mln years. One of them is relatively short (a few million years) tectonic phases, or orogenic phases, identified by H.W. Stille in 1924 and characterized by an increase in compressive deformation in mobile belts of the Earth. Deformations that occur during such phases are quite explicable by collisional interactions of lithospheric plates. However, these interactions do not explain the synchronous occurrence of phases in different belts and on different continents. The other group is the frequency of magnetic reversals, i.e., changes such that the positions of magnetic north and magnetic south are interchanged. Tectonic phases are more frequent in epochs of frequent geomagnetic reversals. During the last 24 mln years, when geomagnetic reversals were especially numerous, tectonic phases came one after another in short intervals. An emerging trend for them is the lagging of phase peaks by one to two million years relative to the most frequent magnetic reversals. The chronological relations identified show that tectonic phases are determined not only by geodynamic processes in the lithosphere but also by the action of energy pulses that occur in the Earth’s core and at the boundary of the core with the mantle, where the Earth’s magnetic field is generated. On the geological time scale, this interaction takes place quickly, which excludes energy pulse convection and prompts the search for other mechanisms of this transfer. It is possible that it takes place because the lithosphere is affected by alternating body forces that occur under a change in currents in the core, which is followed by changes in the mode of the Earth’s rotation and the adaptation to it of lithospheric masses.

Challenges and risks in forming a digital economy in Russia are discussed. It is shown that they result from the fact that the country lacks companies economically and socially equipped to be leaders in the global semiconductor and radio electronics markets. Half of the global semiconductor market is controlled by US companies, which constitute the basis for the already formed “US digital economy of semiconductors,” Russia being a consumer of its products. “The US digital economy” is a project of global semiconductor market leaders, targeted at forming new global markets under the decreasing profitability of semiconductors. In the existing situation, the implementation of most of the National Technology Initiative’s projects will be based on borrowed technologies and components, endangering both Russia’s prospect to acquire any significant share of new global markets and its information security protection against growing cyberattacks. Russia can parry the challenges and risks of the formation of its digital economy through the creation of economically and socially significant IT companies, oriented at digitizing the country’s strategic industries and able to claim leadership in global markets.

Economic, technical, technological, and organizational problems of subsurface management, primarily oil and gas, are considered. The authors justify the necessity of cardinal restructuring of the valuation system for mineral resources and the assessment of the efficiency of their development projects. Social (economic) efficiency criterion should top the agenda here as in several developed countries. This will help not only consider the requirements of the country’s long-term sustainable development but also improve considerably the oil, gas, and condensate recovery factors and reduce the negative environmental consequences. Simultaneously, it is necessary to balance out the interests of the subsurface user, the state, and society, which requires certain changes in the organizational and economic mechanism of implementing subsurface management projects. If oil and gas projects are implemented in conditions of uncertainty and risk, the organizational and economic mechanism of their implementation should envisage the adaptation of projects to the changing conditions and the methods of valuation of reserves should be updated.

New trends resulting from the most considerable changes in the constitutions of the CIS countries and several other states of the former Soviet Union are analyzed. The constitutional model developed in Eurasian states of this region is transitional, incomplete, and hybrid, which predetermines the need for further modernization (novelization) of the constitutions. The common features of the initial period of independent development in this group of countries are undergoing substantial transformations; there have emerged multidirectional vectors of constitutional modernization with account for characteristic traits of the evolution of the political and legal systems of different states. The author’s conclusions concern the regimentation of the foundations of constitutional systems, forms of state, and human rights—the main subjects of constitutional–legal regulation in any state and the most important objectives of constitutional reform for constitutions under modernization. Study of the trends in the constitutional development of the post-Soviet countries of Eurasia, which is of significant interest for political sciences, contributes to the elaboration of the theory of postsocialist states and their constitutions.

The topic of attitudes to death is traditionally taboo in society but penetrates mass culture in the form of simulacra. The evolution of attitudes to death in the history of European civilization and in individual consciousness proceeding from the opinions of philosophers and theologians, as well as the results of empirical studies characterizing the attitude to death in mass consciousness, is shown. How popular is the belief in afterlife? Does religiosity have any effect on the fear of death? What are people afraid of when they think about death? Can one form a positive attitude to death? This article attempts to answer these questions.

Philosophical and methodological aspects of predictive mathematical modeling are considered. Predictive mathematical modeling in the epoch of technological challenges to postindustrial society is becoming a third way of cognition, supplementing and uniting classical theory and natural experiment. The author describes conceptual, architectoral, and technological problems of creating an integrated software environment for high-performance solutions to interdisciplinary direct and reciprocal new-generation problems for multiprocessor petascale computing systems with scalable parallelism. Trends are unfolding in the development of “neoinformatics” with the introduction of cognitive principles into the automation of model and algorithm building and into the creation of decision-making systems for a wide range of users from various production and social spheres. Constructive and infrastructural principles are proposed for the development of an open basic modeling system that supports all basic stages of science-intensive computer experimentation and is oriented at an effective long-life cycle and coordinated development by various design teams.

It has been presumed that an increase in economic growth rates automatically intensifies inflation processes, which provoke sensitivity among mass layers of the population. However, manifestations of interdependence between growth and inflation are different in different economic systems. Of importance are the degree of the maturity of the economic organism, its historical experience, and the sociopolitical context. Financial instability is a fundamental qualitative characteristic of the capitalist economy with its complex branched system of institutions. The suppression of inflation implies disciplinary actions from above, regulating the economic behavior of various groups of society. Rigid control over inflationary processes is characteristic of “late start” societies and, even more so, of states of the third wave of modernization, particularly India. Inflation in its acute forms turned out to be a result of the administration’s policy intended to form a middle class. The author of this article holds that the approach of India’s authorities to inflation problems is based on three strategic principles: measures to normalize circulation, to protect the poorest layers of the population from the consequences of inflation, and to find additional resources of the effectiveness of the country’s economic mechanism.