Measuring and Explaining House Price Developments

This study discusses ways of measuring and explaining the development of house prices. The goal of the research underpinning this dissertation was to develop a methodological framework for studying these developments. This framework relates, first, to correcting for changes in the composition of dwellings and, second, to the fundamentals of the price development. Using the weighted repeat sales method and sale price appraisal ratio (SPAR) method, house price indexes were developed for the Netherlands. Both the Dutch land registry office and Statistics Netherlands publish the SPAR based house price index monthly. To explain and predict changes in prices, a house price model is presented. As suggested in literature on western housing markets, the Dutch house price developments can be explained by demand-oriented short-run term variables and a long-run term variable. Using the house price model, this work identifies the fundamental factors in the development of house prices, a long-run equilibrium between interest payments and income, and the weak relationship on an aggregated level between house prices and newly built dwellings

Content And Multimedia Database Management Systems

A database management system is a general-purpose software system that facilitates the processes of defining, constructing, and manipulating databases for various applications. The main characteristic of the ‘database approach’ is that it increases the value of data by its emphasis on data independence. DBMSs, and in particular those based on the relational data model, have been very successful at the management of administrative data in the business domain. This thesis has investigated data management in multimedia digital libraries, and its implications on the design of database management systems. The main problem of multimedia data management is providing access to the stored objects. The content structure of administrative data is easily represented in alphanumeric values. Thus, database technology has primarily focused on handling the objects’ logical structure. In the case of multimedia data, representation of content is far from trivial though, and not supported by current database management systems

Simulation of position sensitivity of the anomalous Hall effect on a single magnetic dot

To overcome the superparamagnetic effect caused by scaling bit and grain sizes in magnetic storage media different approaches are investigated. One alternative is bit patterned magnetic media (BPM) where each bit is represented by a single domain magnetic dot. A key problem with BPM is the large difference in magnetic field necessary to switch the magnetization direction of the various dot which is characterized by the switching field distribution

The Transition to Open Access: The State of the Market, Offsetting Deals, and a Demonstrated Model for Fair Open Access with the Open Library of Humanities

In this article, we explore the state of the OA market and the current situation with respect to offsetting deals in the Netherlands. We then offer a case study of the LingOA model for a transition to open access, backed by a consortial funding mechanism: the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). We also suggest how this approach can be extended into new disciplinary spaces (in particular, mathematics and psychology, where there is already some willingness from editors)