Complementary Domain Adaptation and Generalization for Unsupervised Continual Domain Shift Learning

Continual domain shift poses a significant challenge in real-world applications, particularly in situations where labeled data is not available for new domains. The challenge of acquiring knowledge in this problem setting is referred to as unsupervised continual domain shift learning. Existing methods for domain adaptation and generalization have limitations in addressing this issue, as they focus either on adapting to a specific domain or generalizing to unseen domains, but not both. In this paper, we propose Complementary Domain Adaptation and Generalization (CoDAG), a simple yet effective learning framework that combines domain adaptation and generalization in a complementary manner to achieve three major goals of unsupervised continual domain shift learning: adapting to a current domain, generalizing to unseen domains, and preventing forgetting of previously seen domains. Our approach is model-agnostic, meaning that it is compatible with any existing domain adaptation and generalization algorithms. We evaluate CoDAG on several benchmark datasets and demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in all datasets and evaluation metrics, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness in handling unsupervised continual domain shift learning

Critical Language Pedagogy in a Neoliberal Space (Hagwǒn) in Korea : Student Awareness and Engagement in Critical Dialogue

Critical Pedagogy (CP) has been carried out in many contexts, and reports of its success in language teaching in various countries have increasingly appeared (Bennet 2018; West 2014). However, South Korea (henceforth Korea) is not well-known for critical inquiry in language education, especially in private language institutions, so-called hagwǒn. The Korean language education system still widely accepts the grammar-translation methodology and problem-solving techniques to prepare students for standardized tests, even though this system is considered a form of oppression by English learners (J. Park 2011). This might be thought as particularly the case in neoliberal spaces — not ideal for CP. Nevertheless, this study explores the possibility of adopting a CP framework in one such space, a Korean private language school. I investigate participants’ awareness of a Korean labor issue, their metaphorical language use for indicating power relations, and their recognition of the relationship between English and power. Through analyzing the participants’ critical dialogue using the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, I conclude that students’ engagement with critical dialogue, an essential component of CP, is feasible. Thus, CP is applicable even in a neoliberal space such as a hagwǒn

Impact of personal income on mortality: Decomposition into biological

Humans have two facets, biological and social. Whereas it is a common idea that poor social conditions affect the biological facet for instance by reducing life expectancy, there are few known cases where an economic effect is affected by the biological facet in a way which can be predicted. The purpose of the paper is to present such a case. In other words, we are going to decompose an economic phenomenon into its biological and social components, a step which provides a marked conceptual simplification. The economic phenomenon that we consider here is one of the most basic that one can think of, namely the relationship between personal income and life expectancy. Intuitively, one is not really surprised that wealthy people live longer than poor people. Here, however, we show an effect which is far less obvious, namely the fact that this relationship does not hold at both extremities of the lifespan interval. The disconnection between income and neonatal (i.e., in the first 28 days after birth) mortality is quite impressive. This observation is particularly significant on account of the fact that the infant mortality (i.e., in the first 365 days after birth) is often taken by economists as a proxy of development when no reliable income data are available. This indicator may be valid for very poor countries where the burden of death due to infectious diseases remains very high, but it is not valid in developed countries such as those considered in this paper. More specifically, we explore the influence of income on mortality by age, separately in France, the United States and South Korea. The same pattern appears for the curves of the (income-mortality) correlation as a function of age. We conjecture that this pattern will be observed in any developed country where the test can be performed. For the test to be possible the main requirement is the availability of income and age-specific mortality data at regional level