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Thanks to the development, wide distribution and cheapness of the Internet, people began to resort more and more often to new forms of project development, its production, as well as financing. The Internet environment, due to its free conditions, significantly influenced the attitude of start-up companies and entrepreneurs to attracting capital. Basically, crowdfunding is used in North America and Europe. The popularity of using such funding raises topical research questions: is crowd-funding able to replace existing ways of financing? Is it more profitable for an entrepreneur than other methods of raising capital? It is these questions that formed the basis of this work. In contrast to the "traditional" sources of investment, the illumination in the literature is just crowdfunding remains low, despite the growing interest in this phenomenon. The uniqueness of crowdfunding lies in the fact that Internet-platforms are used to search for and attract financing, which help to receive both small and relatively substantial investments from a huge number of people. Thus, crowdfunding becomes a revolutionary new way of obtaining investment without the participation of banks, venture capitalists and the exchange. The market is becoming more segmented. Thus, it not only grows in monetary volume, but also constantly attracts all new and new audiences. Due to the growth in the number of platforms, competition has grown significantly and major platforms have to come up with new incentives for users to launch their projects on them. The subject of the study is crowdfunding platforms in Russia as a set of activities performed in the process of fundraising with the help of crowdfunding (for example, Boomstarter.ru, Planeta.ru, Yandex.Money, Together.ru, Blagobox.ru, Kroogi.ru). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, the most urgent issue that faces start-up entrepreneurs is the issue of attracting funding for the implementation of the project. Traditional forms of capital raising, such as credit, can solve these problems, but it may be problematic for start-up companies and individual entrepreneurs to take out loans on good terms. The problem of capital search served as an impetus for the development of new models for financing projects, one of which is crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is becoming an increasingly popular source of fundraising. The pace of expansion crowdfunding platforms in Russia and in the world, are very high. Already today they bring in amounts that are measured in billions of dollars a year. "Crowdfunding" - a term borrowed and quite new for Russia, its definition is not yet in the solid domestic financial and economic reference books and dictionaries. In this paper, we examined various methods of financing projects, comparing them with models based on crowdfunding. Since this model is a relatively new instrument of the financial market, the topic of its application has not yet been fully explored and is an urgent issue for economists to study. The goal of the final qualifying work is to reveal the financial features of the funding model based on crowdfunding. Objectives of the study: • Consider the nature and types of crowdfunding, as well as crowdfunding platforms; • Analysis of crowdfunding tools; • Consideration of the field of application of crowdfunding; • Identify features and problems of crowdfunding. The object of the study carried out in this work is the new method of financing projects, crowdfunding. The subject of the study is crowdfunding companies as a set of activities performed in the process of fundraising with the help of crowdfunding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vital need of the present-day development of Russian society regulates the theoretical conceptualization of the notion of civic participation, determination of the conditions under which it can develop, and identification of barriers obstructing this process. Promotion of the local population's social participation in public activities of municipalities is one of the primary tasks for a local government. The aim of the research is to identify means and conditions for promoting civic engagement in local communities at the municipal level. The scholars use methods of structural-functional, comparative, and systemic as well as factor analysis for their studies. The authors come to the conclusion that civic engagement at the municipal level is possible to mobilize through the process of dialogue, local authorities and population's mutual interest in cooperation. Maintaining a local community is rather difficult because of closed customary authorities on the one hand and socially uncooperative population groups on the other hand, an immature civil society. The agents' relationship of social interaction is treated as a principal factor that shapes steady and sustained functioning of society. It results in establishing a local community as a whole. The authors indicate factors that define socially inactive population in municipalities, and the rationale for improving the pattern of cooperation between the government and population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are diseases that can be identified by the data obtained through laboratory and instrumental analysis but there also a lot of diseases that do not have explicit morphological substrate and can be diagnosed only on the basis of patients' reports. Pain is one of the most frequent medical problems of the second type, and the task of clinical linguists is to help neurologists and other doctors treating pain to organize the effective communication with patients and help them to find the appropriate words for their feelings. Verbal communication difficulties in the process of collecting anamnesis vitae can lead to an incorrect diagnosis and complicate the recovery. The most difficult task is to receive the precise description of pain from the patients with alexithymia. Alexithymia is usually regarded not as a disease, but as a specific cognitive feature. Currently, alexithymia is considered as a non-specific risk factor for psychosomatic diseases. The patients with alexithymia are not able to express their feelings verbally. They can hardly execute the procedure of naming their sensations. In everyday life it may be not so important, but when they communicate their complaints of pain to a doctor, it causes a lot of problems in diagnosis. In this situation the help of linguists is really necessary because they help establish contact with the patient and choose the appropriate speech material. They create pain questionnaires and sets of descriptors which can be offered to the patients with alexithymia to make diagnosis easier. The first step was the survey conducted in population without alexithymic features. The respondents were asked to describe their pain. First, respondents were tested on the Toronto alexithymia scale (validated Russian version of TAS-20) to identify the level of alexithymia. The survey involved males (15) and females (25) between the ages of 20-45 years. The sample was random. Then, this group of people was asked to describe headache, back pain and heart pain (the respondents were tested on the McGill Pain Questionnaire). The results were analysed and included into the database of descriptors for later use in clinical practice in application to the patients with alexithymia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]