The new series of stories by V.P. Chichkanov contains examples of the highest professionalism and wisdom of life of the Chairman of the RF Government E.М. Primakov, scientific director of the Economic Research Institute of the RAS Far Eastern Branch P.A. Minakir, State Secretary – First Deputy Minister of the Interior of the Russian Federation V.I. Fedorov.

In the genre of political memories the author tells about the visit of the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the USSR Supreme Soviet V.M. Falin to the Western Europe leading organizations: the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, PACE, NATO and the non-existent already Western European Union.

For the employees of Scientific and Production Association “Burevestnik”, the main life result of Nikolay Ivanovich Komyak was foundation of the X-ray Instrumentation Association, which is still existing thanks to the powerful development impetus given to the team formed by Komyak.

Review of the new book by S.Y. Rybas “Leaders: a movie romance”, which is a large-scale historical epic work and, at the same time, screenplay for a fiction-historical sitcom.

The article continues the cycle of studies devoted to the study of the “crisis of crises” of the human population caused by the “re-quantization of reality” — the transition from the outdated forms of Zoopopulation to the new Psychosocial formation; at the same time, it is noted that the “Image of a bright future” as a system-forming factor of the New World is distorted by subjective and objective reasons. Among the objective reasons that impede his perception, the authors see a sharp threshold increase in the level of complexity of all system constructions, including society, which requires immediate changes in the modern methodology of science. Subjective factors are the persistent attempt to preserve the obsolete global world order and stagnate the development of mankind by various methods of social destruction, primarily by creating artificial inequality. In response to the specific Russian question “What to do?”, The authors propose the obvious: revival and transition to dominance of higher forms of motivation, development of moral and ethical qualities as relevant anti-entropic factors and development of closing technologies as the highest form of livelihood of the population — all on the platform of social of the state.

The article discusses various types of systems development cycles and their mechanisms. The paper presents development of socio-economic systems, describes periods of their dynamics, as well as sources of their formation and cycle stimulators in the form of innovations, values, needs with the dynamics of cycles speeding up. The combination of socio-economic and socio-cultural cycles in the spiritual life of society is described. A planetary model of society development is proposed. A variant of spiral-cyclical development of society in phases is formed.

An important management technology for trading business development is category management, focused on identifying groups of related or replacement products, based on consumer preferences analysis. Traditional method, including a survey of customers at the supermarket exit, is expensive and not very reliable due to the coverage of only relatively small groups. An alternative approach is the analysis of cash checks, which are essentially digital traces of purchases made while visiting a hypermarket. For identifying groups of related products, it is proposed to apply methods of hierarchical cluster analysis with the use of binary similarity measures, results of experiments on real data are presented, effectiveness of the Jacquard and χ2 measures are compared, methods for optimizing the number of clusters are analyzed.

Innovative potential of technology (IPT) is a set of single indicators reflecting the ability of a technological system to develop. Analysis allows us to interpret IPT as a characteristic of scientific and technical potential (STP) constituting a small increment of the function that describes the NTP of a technological system or its subsystem for a small predetermined period of time in the vicinity of the considered time point. This idea allows us to estimate the reserves of technology development and outline effective ways for its development.

Opening address of editor-in-chief.

Idea of the Big Eurasian Partnership was formulated in December 2015 by the President of Russia V.V. Putin, who launched an initiative to begin consultations on forming an economic partnership between the member states of the Eurasian Economic Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. According to the author of the article, partnership should be formed on the basis of a flexible system of legal norms, joint projects and institutions that take into account diversity of the participants’ interests and purely volunteer nature of cooperation. Options for integrating into the partnership can be of different speeds and different levels, providing each participant the freedom to choose a package of commitments.