Exchange Rate Misalignments at World and European Levels: a FEER Approach

Since the mid-1990s, we observe an increase of world current account imbalances. These imbalances have only been partially reduced since the burst of the crisis in 2007. They reflect, to some extent, exchange rate misalignments, an issue which has been frequently studied in the literature. However, these imbalances, which have reinforced in the 2000s, are also important inside the Euro area. This analysis cannot be reduced to simple estimates of euro misalignment at the world level because of the specific constraints that exist for each member of the Euro area. This article aims to examine to what extent the intra-European imbalances reflect exchange rate misalignments for each "national euro".Equilibrium Exchange Rate; Current Account Balance; Macroeconomic Balance

Language learners' perceptions of having two interactional contexts in eTandem

The aim of this study was to gain insights into how language learners perceive two online interactional contexts and how these perceptions impact the learners’ participation in eTandem learning. This study incorporated pair work with group discussion as interactional contexts, connecting Korean language learners with English language learners. Pair work included online chatting and personal blog writing where each pair exchanged feedback on one another’s L2 writing. Group discussion included interaction among all the participants in a group blog where they discussed weekly topics. The study found that individual participants differently perceived the effectiveness of the two interactional contexts: some thought that both contexts were helpful together for developing L2 skills and for acquiring cultural knowledge, while others thought that these two contexts together were not as effective as expected. These perceptions affected not only the participant’s own participation in the project, but also others’ participation. This study offers pedagogical implications for ways in which researchers can further improve the design of eTandem learning

Affordances and Challenges of Telecollaboration for Pre-service Teachers

Telecollaboration has received growing interest in second language teacher education, due to the link between knowledge and practice in telecollaboration. The current research examined affordances and challenges of telecollaboration in teacher education by connecting American pre-service teachers to Korean pre-service teachers. The data for this paper focused on pre-and post-questionnaires, reflective journals, blog posts, and interviews from nineteen American pre-service teachers. This study provides an empirical account of how pre-service teachers benefit from interacting with international partners for improving ICC, teaching skills, and digital literacy skills. The study also presents some challenges of implementing telecollaboration. By presenting the affordances and challenges of telecollaboration in a teacher training program, the study provides implications for educators about how to better assist preservice teachers while using telecollaboration

VEHICLE SECURING SAFETY ASSESSMENTS OF A KOREAN COASTAL CAR FERRY ACCORDING TO ACCELERATION PREDICTION APPROACHES

The capsize and subsequent sinking of a coastal car ferry occurred along the Korean coast, resulting in hundreds of casualties. The rapid course change of the ship might have forced improperly secured cargoes to rush to one side and accelerated the capsizing event. This paper provides a comparative study of vehicle securing safety assessments composed of evaluations of the external inertia forces and lashing strengths for a car and a truck. The external inertia forces were evaluated based on the IMO CSS (CSS approach) and rule-based maximum motion angles (RULE approach). Being a car ferry as a target ship, the sea states were collected along the most frequent seagoing routes of the target ship. Frequency domain seakeeping analyses (FSA approach) were carried out and then the long-term motion components were derived using the collected sea state data. The long-term motion components were put forward based on time domain seakeeping analyses (TSA approach). The TSA approach estimated the most optimistic external forces, while the CSS approach provided the most conservative external forces. Assuming the vehicles were secured symmetrically with four steel wires, the lashing strengths were derived. More numbers of lashing cables were required for the heavy vehicles when the CSS approach was applied, while other approaches predicted sufficient lashing strengths compared to exerted forces

Contextual Linear Bandits under Noisy Features: Towards Bayesian Oracles

We study contextual linear bandit problems under uncertainty on features; they are noisy with missing entries. To address the challenges from the noise, we analyze Bayesian oracles given observed noisy features. Our Bayesian analysis finds that the optimal hypothesis can be far from the underlying realizability function, depending on noise characteristics, which is highly non-intuitive and does not occur for classical noiseless setups. This implies that classical approaches cannot guarantee a non-trivial regret bound. We thus propose an algorithm aiming at the Bayesian oracle from observed information under this model, achieving $\tilde{O}(d\sqrt{T})$ regret bound with respect to feature dimension $d$ and time horizon $T$. We demonstrate the proposed algorithm using synthetic and real-world datasets.Comment: 30 page