Standard Assembly Research Articles

The effect of graph standardization on intervention evaluation of practitioner‐created graphs

AbstractSingle‐case design (SCD) is frequently utilized in applied contexts, such as schools or clinics, due to its utility in evaluating individual intervention effects of students. Data collected in SCD are often displayed in a linear graph, which can vary drastically in their construction leading to inconsistencies in rater interpretation. This has led to a need for a standardized format for linear graphs for practitioners and researchers to follow when constructing graphs. The purpose of this study was both to evaluate how well practitioner‐created graphs adhered to Standard Assembly (SA) guidelines and to investigate visual analytic differences in graphs generated by practitioners and the same data replotted in adherence to SA guidelines. Practitioner graphs were collected from fourteen practicing school psychologists and evaluated against SA guidelines. Graphs were found to have vast differences in graph characteristics. Twenty‐seven participants, faculty members with experience in SCD, were asked to evaluate 32 graphs—16 of which were practitioner created and the other 16 being the same data sets regraphed according to SA standards. Participants were asked to rate the interpretability of each graph and evaluate the magnitude of the intervention effect. Results indicate that there were no significant differences between the practitioner‐created graphs and SA graphs in intervention effect estimates, but the SA graphs were rated as significantly more interpretable.

Implementation and Optimization of an Enhanced PWD Metric for H.264/AVC on a TMS320C64 DSP

A common method for selecting the best prediction mode based on block matching algorithm is to compare, for each source block, the associated distortions among the available prediction candidates. The human visual perception is sensitive to luminance contrast rather than absolute luminance values. In fact, the human eyes ability to detect the magnitude difference between an object and its background depends on the background luminance average value. The Perceptually Weighted Distortion (PWD) is a new distortion measure that can produce better image quality. In this paper, we propose to add a new feature to the PWD by introducing another diagonal component that yields to a significant quality improvement. The enhanced PWD metric actually outperforms the original PWD and the SAD metric, according to the experimental results, especially in the aspect of reducing block artifacts. An increase in terms of implementation complexity will be noticed as a result of this contribution. Therefore, optimized implementation of the Enhanced PWD exploiting the C64 DSP-Core assets will be presented. In fact, Standard Assembly (SA) is used to implement the different Enhanced PWD functions in order to exploit efficiently the C64 internal architecture and resources. Experimental results show more than 85% improvement in terms of cycle cost compared to C code.