Is housing overvalued?

This paper examines whether it is more expensive to own a house or to rent. The paper assesses houses as ‘overvalued’ if home buyers pay too much, in the sense that they would be better off renting than buying. This involves comparing the financial cost of renting a home with the cost of owning a similar dwelling, where the latter depends on the purchase price, interest rates, repairs, council rates and so on. The paper also briefly examines non-financial costs but find these are small, on average. This paper finds if real house prices grow at their historical average pace, then owning a home is about as expensive as renting. If prices grow more slowly, as some forecasters predict, the framework used in this paper suggests that the average home buyer would be financially better off renting. House prices are decomposed into contributions from rents, interest rates and expected capital gains, which may help policymakers in the detection of housing bubbles. Recent data do not show signs of a bubble

International Dimensions in the Financing of Higher Education

This chapter compares and contrasts international experience with respect to higher education financing. The size and payment forms of tuition, and the different types and levels of public sector support, are illustrated for a large number of countries. A major aspect of the discussion concerns the conceptual bases and the costs and benefits of the two different instruments of government intervention for student financing: guaranteed bank loans, and income contingent loans. It is argued that income contingent loans have a number of advantages over government guaranteed bank loans, and this seems to be increasingly recognised with respect to international adoption of the former. However, to be efficacious income contingent loan systems require sophisticated institutional and administrative repayment collection arrangements.government guaranteed bank loans, higher education, income contingent loans, student loans, tuition

An Assessment of Mechanical Behavior on High Temperature and Different Volume Fraction of Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer Composites

Fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composite materials are the primary choice in various structural and high performance application facilitating the need from the last four decades. High specific strength, high specific modulus, high stiffness to weight ratio, and design flexibility enables FRP composite materials to be used in a large number of critical structural components in aircrafts, satellite structures, various automobile components, wind turbine blades, sport goods etc. The mechanical properties of glass fiber/epoxy composite is significantly altered by high temperature and volume fraction which exhibits the various types of the failure modes (e.g. delamination sites, debonding, fiber pullout regions, crack propagation front, striations and bubble bursting in the matrix). The glass/epoxy composites were prepared for two different volume fraction of 50/50 and 60/40 and SBS samples were thermally conditioned at 500c at ambient and for different time duration period of 1hr, 5hr and 7hr. Interlaminar shear behaviour may be used to characterize FRP composite material.DSC analysis shows Tg value increases with increase in thermal conditioning time w.r.t ambient Tg value for glass/epoxy composites. From the FTIR analysis we observe the band at 550-650 cm-1 is the spectra range of 50/50 volume fraction of the glass/epoxy system with the shifting of bandwidth with decrease in thermal conditioning time

ELUCIDATING GENE SIGNATURES THAT CONTROL THE CIRCADIAN RHYTHM IN CYANOBACTERIA USING BIOINFORMATICS METHODS

poster abstractBackground: The daily light-dark cycle govern rhythmic changes in the behavior and physiology of most species. This circadian rhythm, or bi-ological “clock,” allows the organism to anticipate and prepare for the changes in the physical environment that are associated with day and night, thereby ensuring that the organism carry our specific processes at the right time of the day. Studies have found that the internal clock con-sists of an array of genes and the protein products they encode, which regulate various physiological processes throughout the body. Cyanothece sp. ATCC 51142 is an organism that has both photosynthetic (producing oxygen) and nitrogen fixing ability. The N2-fixing enzyme, nitrogenase, is highly sensitive to oxygen for which it has developed a temporal regula-tion in which N2 fixation and photosynthesis occur at different times throughout a diurnal cycle with very high levels of CO2 fixation during the light and high levels of N2 fixation in the dark. The mechanisms underly-ing the circadian rhythm and the signature genes elucidating this mecha-nism are addressed in this research. Objective: The objective is to integrate gene expression data with da-ta and knowledge from prior studies using bibliomics techniques, in the de novo construction of quasi-complete transcriptional regulatory networks to identify gene signatures in functional motifs and elucidate their role in circadian rhythms in cyanothece sp. ATCC 51142. Methodology: The sequence data of Transcription profiling time se-ries of cyanothece sp. ATCC 51142 grown in 12-hour light/12 hour dark then 24 h light from Array Express was used to construct the initial global regulatory network. Different network topological features (degree, betweeness and eccentricity) are used to identify the signature pathways during the day and night. The genes of the global regulatory network were used to construct networks of homologous species. The functions of the already known genes in well-studied homologous species were mapped to the function of the unannotated genes of cynaothece sp. ATCC 51142. Results: We have identified significant (p<0.05) signature pathways like photosynthesis, pantothenate and CoA biosynthesis and Glyoxylate and dicarboxylate metabolism that operate during the day. And during the night, pathways such as ribosome, riboflavin metabolism, and fatty acid biosynthesis sulfur metabolism were found to be significant (p<0.05). We will further investigate the genes that were already known to be significant using cyanobase database in a particular biological path-way and the novel genes that are identified by bibliomics approach

Development and Modeling of a Biosensor Platform using AlGaN/GaN HEMT Devices

The history of biosensors began in 1962 with the invention of enzyme electrodes by Leland C. Clark. Since then, biosensors have come a long way with simultaneous contributions in various fields such as biology, chemistry, material science, electronics, physics and VLSI. With the advancement in science and technology, smaller, more sensitive and dependable biosensors have become a reality. Still the need for cost-effective, sophisticated, reliable, robust biosensors that can be used to detect multiple types of biomolecules remains a technological challenge to be resolved. The proposed AlGaN/GaN High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs) have excellent prospect to become the biosensor platform of the future, as is investigated in this work in contrast to other types of biosensors. These devices excel over their silicon counterparts because of their inherent properties such as chemically stable bulk and surface properties and the availability of high-density two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) at the hetero-interface which allows a highly sensitive detection of the surface-charge related phenomena. Using a floating gate configuration, only the drain current changes pertinent to biomolecule immobilization are observed. The test results are correlated with an analytical model which provides insight into the device physics. The high mobility and sensitivity inherent in its material system as well as device structure, robustness due to wide bandgap and system-level advantages make it the ultimate choice as a biosensor platform