What Would Margaret Chase Smith Have Made of Bill Clinton’s Tragi-Comedy?

In the Margaret Chase Smith Essay, Charles Calhoun reflects on President Bill Clinton’s presidency, with its accomplishments and his personal flaws. He speculates on what Margaret Chase Smith would have thought about Clinton

Promoting Cultural Tourism

Cultural tourism is one of the fastest growing segments of the tourism industry, attracting visitors who tend to stay longer, spend more, and travel in the off-season. Yet, as Calhoun observes, the idea that Maine offers culture as well as scenery is still not part of the state’s self-image. Calhoun urges regions to think creatively and comprehensively about their cultural resources. Among other things, Calhoun encourages the development of regional cultural trails where tourists are linked from one destination to the next. He argues that in the southern- and mid-coast regions, such an approach could help to alleviate coastal pressure by directing tourists inland. Calhoun concludes with eight recommendations for Washington County, Maine, where tourism is vital to a more prosperous economic future

A Small College in Maine

A Small College in Maine (1993), by Charles Calhoun and published in conjunction with Bowdoin’s bicentenary, provides a readable, illustrated history of the College. Calhoun cites numerous primary resources that are helpful for further historical inquiry.https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoin-histories/1001/thumbnail.jp

National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling Program Evaluation: Final Report, Rounds 1 and 2

The National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling (NFMC) program is a special federal appropriation, administered by NeighborWorks (NW) America, to support a rapid expansion of foreclosure intervention counseling in response to the nationwide foreclosure crisis. As this is a federal appropriation, NW America must inform Congress and other entities of the NFMC program's progress. The Urban Institute (UI) was selected by NW America to evaluate the NFMC program. This report presents the final results from UI's evaluation of the first two rounds of the NFMC program (people receiving counseling in 2008 and 2009), including a detailed analysis of program outcomes first described in preliminary reports of November 2009 (Mayer et al.) and December 2010 (Mayer et al.). According to those reports, homeowners receiving NFMC counseling avoided entering foreclosure, successfully cured existing foreclosures, and obtained more favorable loan modifications. This report updates previous analyses and also includes revised models of several homeowner outcomes for NFMC clients counseled in 2008 and 2009. These new models use an improved comparison sample selection design, which addressed potential issues raised by reviewers of earlier analyses, and a better method for controlling for possible selection bias in the NFMC sample. The additional analyses in this report include models of non-modification cures, non-modification redefaults, and foreclosures avoided

National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling Program Evaluation: Final Report, Rounds 3 Through 5

The Urban Institute completed a four-year evaluation of Rounds 3 through 5 of the National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling (NFMC) program. Using a representative NFMC sample of 137,000 loans and a comparison non-NFMC sample of 103,000 loans, the Urban Institute was able to employ robust statistical techniques to isolate the impact of NFMC counseling on loan performance through June 2013.The final evaluation of Rounds 3 through 5 conducted by Urban Institute indicates that the NFMC program continues to have positive effects for homeowners participating in the program Counseled homeowners were more likely to cure a serious delinquency or foreclosure with a modification or other type cure, stay current after obtaining a cure, and for NFMC clients who cured a serious delinquency, avoid foreclosure altogether

Shake Rattle and Roll / words by Charles Calhoun

Cover: photo of Joe Turner; Publisher: Progressive Music Co. (New York)https://egrove.olemiss.edu/sharris_e/1082/thumbnail.jp

Study of the Improvement of the Ninth Grade in the Fundamental Processes

School of Teaching, Learning and Educational Science

Developing a Mechanism to Study Code Trustworthiness

When software code is acquired from a third party or version control repository, programmers assign a level of trust to the code. This trust prompts them to use the code as-is, make minor changes, or rewrite it, which can increase costs and delay deployment. This paper discusses types of degradations to code based on readability and organization expectations and how to present that code as part of a study on programmer trust. Degradations were applied to sixteen of eighteen Java classes that were labeled as acquired from reputable or unknown sources. In a pilot study, participants were asked to determine a level of trustworthiness and whether they would use the code without changes. The results of the pilot study are presented to provide a baseline for the continuance of the study to a larger set of participants and to make adjustments to the presentation environment to improve user experience