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Critical Time Intervention (CTI) is designed to reduce the risk of homelessness and other adverse outcomes by providing support to individuals during challenging life course transitions. While several narrative reviews suggest the benefit of CTI, the evidence on the model's effectiveness has not been systematically reviewed. This article systematically reviews studies of CTI applied to a variety of populations and transition types. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis for protocols (PRISMA-P) guidelines, we reviewed 13 eligible experimental and quasi-experimental studies. Findings were summarized by individual outcome domains, including housing, service engagement use, hospitalization or emergency services, mental health, substance use, family and social support, and quality of life. CTI had a consistent positive impact on two primary outcomes—reduced homelessness and increased service engagement use—among different populations and contexts. Despite the effectiveness of CTI, the specific mechanisms of the model's positive impacts remain unclear. Implications for practice, policy and research are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on applying a new sign bit hiding method to improve the video coding efficiency. Sign bits account for a large proportion of the encoded stream conforming to the latest high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard; hence, its hiding technique is of great significance. In this paper, an extra sign bit hiding algorithm is proposed. The parity of the sum of the first and last nonzero coefficients in a coefficient group is used to predict the sign bit, and one more bit could be hidden at the coefficient group level based on state-of-the-art algorithms. The proposed algorithm could recover transform coefficients with minor adjustment on multiple sign bit hiding technique in HEVC. Evaluation results on standard test sequences demonstrate -0.06% BD-rate gain compared to well-known multiple sign bit hiding method. Besides, either the quality loss or complexity increase is negligible with the proposed algorithm, which is applicable in real-time processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]