Russia’s banking sector during the pandemic

Quarantine and self-isolation have become a new challenge for the Russian economy, changed many areas of our life, revealed new weaknesses in the banking system and monetary regulation of the economy, and also become a good test for the post-crisis financial system. In this article using a systematic approach to the study of information, analytical and graphical methods the dynamics of the Russian banking sector during the development of the coronavirus pandemic and the specifics of recovery from the crisis have been investigated. The innovations and improvements brought about by the pandemic have been studied. The Central Bank of Russia’s monetary policy instruments used to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on the real economy in general and on the banking sector in particular have been reviewed. The features of anti-crisis measures taken by the monetary authorities in our country have been revealed.

Refinement of the method for selecting the width of the conductor of printed circuit boards on a metal base, working in the absence of convection

The article proposes a refined method for calculating the width of the conductors of printed circuit boards on a metal base for the onboard devices of spacecraft, depending on the current flowing. The constructed refined mathematical model of the process of conductive heat exchange between the conductors and the metal base is described. The results of calculations of various, most common, locations of layers of printed circuit boards are presented. An analysis was carried out and a refined methodology was developed based on the results obtained. It allows you to easily (without complicate calculations) calculate the necessary values of the width of conductors. This technique is based on graphical methods, but allows you to perform technical calculations with sufficient accuracy. Accuracy is achieved by using special formulas that simplify the determination of the value of a physical quantity on a logarithmic scale. The disadvantages of the proposed method are indicated.

DEPOPULATION IN PERIPHERAL REGIONS OF EASTERN POLAND – DETERMINANTS AND CONSEQUENCES

The study examines demographic processes and the resulting challenges for the development of areas at risk of depopulation. The research covered regions defined as NUTS 2 in European Union nomenclature and classified as the Eastern Poland Macroregion in Polish regional policy. This macroregion is counted among the peripheral regions of Poland. The demographic processes taking place within these regions, and especially in many local administrative units (LAU 2), point to a threat of depopulation. The scope of the detailed study is from 2010 to 2020. Descriptive, tabular and graphical methods, as well as demographic projections until 2040 were used to analyse and present the materials for the analysed provinces. It was found that unfavourable demographic processes are intensifying and pose a threat to socio-economic development, especially for the peripheral rural communes of these regions. Progressing decline in fertility, increasing life expectancy, as well as intensified migration processes lead to unfavourable changes in the population structure, and, in the long run, to depopulation, which will undoubtedly multiply economic and social problems in these regions.

Comparison of prices and consumer price indices: traditional data collection and alternative data sources

One of the major challenges official statistics is faced with in the 21st century is the use of alternative sources of price data in order to modernise consumer price statistics and, as a result, to improve the accuracy and reliability of inflation data. Data collecting based on the traditional method encountered numerous difficulties caused by COVID-19 (distance-keeping restrictions limiting price collectors’ fieldwork, closures of points of sale). As a consequence, the work on alternative data sources intensified. The article presents the results of an experimental study involving the use of prices collected by means of the traditional method (by price collectors), and scanner and web scraped data from one of the retail chains operating in Poland. The aim of the study was to investigate the occurrence of differences in prices and price indices of selected food products and to estimate them, using the traditional method and alternative data sources, i.e. scanner and web scraped data. An additional goal was set to identify sourcebased reasons for these differences. The empirical study covered the period of February and March 2021. The results based on data from different sources were compared using both graphical methods (histograms, box plots) and the calculation of elementary price indices according to the Dutot, Carli and Jevons formulas. The findings revealed certain, sometimes serious discrepancies in the distributions of prices obtained from various data sources, which suggests that the application of scanner and web scraped data may lead to the over- and understating of price indices obtained via the traditional method. The article also discusses the main methodological aspects of obtaining and applying data from alternative sources, and indicates the probable causes of the differences observed both in distributions of product prices and in monthly price indices calculated using data from various sources.

EvoLaps: a web interface to visualize continuous phylogeographic reconstructions

Background Phylogeographic reconstructions serve as a basis to understand the spread and evolution of pathogens. Visualization of these reconstructions often lead to complex graphical representations which are difficult to interpret. Result We present EvoLaps, a user-friendly web interface to visualize phylogeographic reconstructions based on the analysis of latitude/longitude coordinates with various clustering levels. EvoLaps also produces transition diagrams that provide concise and easy to interpret summaries of phylogeographic reconstructions. Conclusion The main contribution of EvoLaps is to assemble known numerical and graphical methods/tools into a user-friendly interface dedicated to the visualization and edition of evolutionary scenarios based on continuous phylogeographic reconstructions. EvoLaps is freely usable at www.evolaps.org.

Cumulative deviation of a subpopulation from the full population

Assessing equity in treatment of a subpopulation often involves assigning numerical “scores” to all individuals in the full population such that similar individuals get similar scores; matching via propensity scores or appropriate covariates is common, for example. Given such scores, individuals with similar scores may or may not attain similar outcomes independent of the individuals’ memberships in the subpopulation. The traditional graphical methods for visualizing inequities are known as “reliability diagrams” or “calibrations plots,” which bin the scores into a partition of all possible values, and for each bin plot both the average outcomes for only individuals in the subpopulation as well as the average outcomes for all individuals; comparing the graph for the subpopulation with that for the full population gives some sense of how the averages for the subpopulation deviate from the averages for the full population. Unfortunately, real data sets contain only finitely many observations, limiting the usable resolution of the bins, and so the conventional methods can obscure important variations due to the binning. Fortunately, plotting cumulative deviation of the subpopulation from the full population as proposed in this paper sidesteps the problematic coarse binning. The cumulative plots encode subpopulation deviation directly as the slopes of secant lines for the graphs. Slope is easy to perceive even when the constant offsets of the secant lines are irrelevant. The cumulative approach avoids binning that smooths over deviations of the subpopulation from the full population. Such cumulative aggregation furnishes both high-resolution graphical methods and simple scalar summary statistics (analogous to those of Kuiper and of Kolmogorov and Smirnov used in statistical significance testing for comparing probability distributions).