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

On the Roles of Trait Anxiety and Toll Like Receptor 4 in Amphetamine Sensitization in Adolescent Male Rats

Mammalian adolescence can be a difficult transition from childhood to adulthood, where increases in impulsivity and novelty- and risk-seeking are combined with heightened affect and elevated sensitivity to stress. Indeed, during adolescence, first drug use patterns emerge and in the continental United States, increasing misuse of amphetamines has been observed in adolescent youth. Myriad neural mechanisms underlie this shift in adolescence, including the dynamic remodeling of the mesocorticolimbic (MCL) pathway. Repeated drug administration affects neuroimmune substrates within the MCL circuit including toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4)Advances in addiction neuroscience indicate that drugs of abuse activate neural TLR4 and implicate glial TLR4 activation in neuroplasticity associated with the progressive stages of drug addiction. The present dissertation explores the roles of MCL TLR4 activity and extreme trait anxiety-like behavior in the expression and maintenance of amphetamine sensitization in male adolescent Long-Evans rats through a systematic review and two experimental studies. We prospectively registered our systematic review in PROSPERO to minimize bias, to increase transparency, and to avoid duplication of our review aims. PROSPERO allows for the authors to identify the intended processes, and to serve as guideposts for readers to assess whether these processes were followed. We followed a PECO (Population, Exposure, Comparator, Outcomes) framework for developing our research question: For in vivo rodent models of psychostimulant abuse, do variations in sex, anxiety-like profiles, and neuroinflammatory signaling affect addiction-like behavior during adolescence? Results from the systematic review revealed that (1) there is poor standardization of studies using females, (2) there are relatively few studies that include relative parameters when they do include females (e.g., stage of estrous, monitoring cycling, removing and replacing hormones), (3) adolescent age, stress and anxiety are also not standardized or operationalized in studies (4) dopamine, GABA, glutamate, and 5-HT and their associated receptors, enzymes, and metabolites are implicated in addiction models as well as (5) pro-inflammatory marks linking (6) to key regions of the brain reward pathway and those involved in anxiety. To further examine the neuroinflammatory role in adolescent addiction and anxiety, we devised two experimental studies. In the first experiment, we developed a low dose repeated amphetamine paradigm to distinguish locomotor sensitization to amphetamine between adolescent Long Evans male rats showing high (HAn) and low (LAn) anxiety-like behavior. Our results show that from a purchased line of rats, individual differences emerged for HAn and LAn profiles; we were able to separate adolescent males along these extreme lines. Using a 4-day repeated amphetamine regimen, we found that HAn adolescent males developed sensitization over the treatment days, and after a 7-day withdrawal. Within these same animals, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), caudate putamen (cPU), nucleus accumbens (NAcc), and basolateral amygdala (BLA) were stained for anti- TLR4, NFkB, TNFa, and GDNF. AMPH animals expressed more mPFC TLR4 protein than SAL controls. For NFkB, within the mPFC HAn animals expressed more NFkB protein than LAn animals; within the cPU we observed a trait effect, where HAn SAL-treated animals expressed more NFkB than LAn SAL-treated controls. We also observed interaction effects, where HAn Sal-treated expressed more NFkB relative to LAn drug-treated animals. Finally, we observed within-subjects effects, where for HAn animals, SAL-treated animals expressed more NFkB than AMPH-treated animals. For LAn animals, this was reversed, where AMPH-treated animal expressed more NfkB than SAL-treated controls. For TNFa, in the mPFC we saw a trait effect where HAn SAL-treated animals expressed more TNFa than LAn drug-treated animals. Finally, for GDNF we observed main trait effects across all regions of interest, where HAn animals expressed more GDNF than LAn animals. GDNF is a neurotrophic factor canonically associated with the survival of midbrain dopamine neurons and motor neurons and is upregulated in response to an immune challenge via NF-kB signaling. In the final experiment, we evaluated whether the downstream mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway might contribute to the elevated response to amphetamine in the HAn lines. MAPK is important for proinflammatory and plasticity cellular response and the potent inhibitor, SB239063, was administered prior to amphetamine on the challenge day of the regimen. Our results indicate that this MAPK inhibition effectively attenuated the expression of sensitization in the HAn lines. Furthermore, there was increased BLA TLR4, a region implicated in the neuroplasticity and exaggerated learning that is a hallmark of addiction. Together, our work on the systematic review and subsequent experimental studies implicates pro-inflammatory cascades as important targets for further study as they may hold promise as novel therapeutic targets for disrupting the learned associations of addiction

Violence, Youth and A Way Out

It is a conviction shared by those who care for young people and their families that violence among youth has reached intolerable levels and that a response is demanded. The homicide statistics are chilling: In 1986, four to five people under age 18 were murdered per day, 10 percent more than in 1985. Equally chilling, three to four people under 18 were arrested for murder every day, a seven percent increase over 1985

Statistical Inference on Desirability Function Optimal Points to Evaluate Multi-Objective Response Surfaces

A shortfall of the Derringer and Suich (1980) desirability function is lack of inferential methods to quantify uncertainty. Most articles for addressing uncertainty usually involve robust methods, providing a point estimate that is less affected by variation. Few articles address confidence intervals or bands but not specifically for the Derringer and Suich method. This research provides two valuable contributions to the field of response surface methodology. The first contribution is evaluating the effect of correlation and plane angles on Derringer and Suich optimal solutions. The second contribution proposes and compares 8 inferential methods--both univariate and multivariate--for creating confidence intervals on each desirability function solution for first order and second order models. The effect of the Derringer and Suich method parameters, objective plane angles, and differing correlation between response surfaces are examined through simulation. The 8 proposed methods include a simple best/worst case method, 2 generalized methods, 4 simulated surface methods, and a nonparametric bootstrap method. One of the generalized methods, 2 of the simulated surface methods, and the nonparametric method account for covariance between the response surfaces. Bivariate examples showcase these methods in the first order and second order models. A multivariate real-world case with 3 objectives is also examined. While all 7 novel methods and the best/worst method seem to perform decently on the second order models. The methods which utilize an underlying multivariate-t distribution, Multivariate Generalized (MG) and Multivariate t Simulated Surface (MVtSSig), are recommended methods from this research as they perform well with small samples for both first order and second order models with coverage only becoming unreliable at non-optimal solutions. MG and MVtSSig inference should be used in conjunction with robust methods such as Pareto Front Optimization to help ascertain which solutions are more likely to be optimal before constructing confidence interval

Reciprocity: A Major Paradigm Shift

It is not news to the youth-serving community that something new is afoot regarding how we think about and work with youth. Well known is the stir on the national level: President Bush\u27s YES initiative; numerous pieces of congressional legislation whose proposals range from school-based programs through conservation and urban corps to mandated national service. Locally, projects of various sorts are springing up in schools, youth-serving agencies and in other organizations whose functions impinge on youth. Not so well known-or fully understood-is a key notion that could well be lost amid the legitimate clamor and enthusiasm for the concept, namely, that youth service is not simply a program. It is infinitely more powerful, for it is also a perspective. And its implications are dual: first, that we view youth in a new and fresh way, as a potential resource and not just as a tangle of pathology to be sorted out; and second, that all agencies which work with youth can become involved. Additional resources are helpful but not in all cases are they necessary. Most agencies working with young people can shift policy and practice to embrace a youth-as-resources dimension. Thus, it is both a program and a perspective

Characterizing Uncertainty in Correlated Response Variables for Pareto Front Optimization

Current research provides a method to incorporate uncertainty into Pareto front optimization by simulating additional response surface model parameters according to a Multivariate Normal Distribution (MVN). This research shows that analogous to the univariate case, the MVN understates uncertainty, leading to overconfident conclusions when variance is not known and there are few observations (less than 25-30 per response). This research builds upon current methods using simulated response surface model parameters that are distributed according to an Multivariate t-Distribution (MVT), which can be shown to produce a more accurate inference when variance is not known. The MVT better addresses uncertainty in the parameters which can affect the frequency of treatments appearing on the Pareto front resulting in potentially different proposed solution spaces from that of the MVN