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  3. Bestcom—Considerate Computing

Bestcom—Considerate Computing

游客2024-01-07  8
问题                                                 Bestcom—Considerate Computing
    ’Your battery is now fully charged,’ announced the laptop to its owner Donald A. Norman in a synthetic voice, with great enthusiasm and maybe even a hint of pride. For the record, humans are not at all unfamiliar with distractions and multitasking. ’We are used to a complex life that gets constantly interrupted by computer’s attention-seeking requests, as much as we are familiar with procreation,’ laughs Ted Selker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab.
    Humanity has been connected to approximately three billion networked telephones, computers, traffic lights and even fridges and picture frames since these things can facilitate our daily lives. That is why we do not typically turn off the phones, shut down the e-mail system, or close the office door even when we have a meeting coming or a stretch of concentrated work. We merely endure the consequences.
    Countless research reports have confirmed that if people are unexpectedly interrupted, they may suffer a drop in work efficiency, and they are more likely to make mistakes. According to Robert G. Picard from the University of Missouri, it appears to build up the feeling of frustration cumulatively, and that stress response makes it difficult to focus again. It is not solely about productivity and the pace of life. For some professionals like pilots, drivers, soldiers and doctors, loss of focus can be downright disastrous. ’If we could find a way to make our computers and phones realise the limits of human attention and memory, they may come off as more thoughtful and courteous,’ says Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research. Horvitz, Selker and Picard are just a few of a small but prospering group of researchers who are attempting to make computers, phones, cars and other devices to function more like considerate colleagues instead of egocentric oafs.
    To do this, the machines need new skills of three kinds: sensing, reasoning and communicating. First, a system must sense or infer where its owner is and what he or she is doing. Next, it must weigh the value of the messages it wants to convey against the cost of the disruption. Then it has to choose the best mode and time to interject. Each of these pushes the limits of computer science and raises issues of privacy, complexity or reliability. Nevertheless, ’Attentive’ Computing Systems have started to make an appearance in the latest Volvos, and IBM has designed and developed a communications software called WebSphere that comes with an underlying sense of busyness. Microsoft has been conducting extensive in-house tests of a way more sophisticated system since 2003. In a couple of years, companies might manage to provide each office employee with a software version of the personal receptionist which is only available to corner-suite executives today.
    However, the truth is that most people are not as busy as they claim to be, which explains why we can often stand interruptions from our inconsiderate electronic paraphernalia. To find out the extent to which such disruption may claim people’s daily time, an IBM Research team led by Jennifer Lai from Carnegie Mellon University studied ten managers, researchers and interns at the workplace. They had the subjects on videotape, and within every period of a specific time, they asked the subjects to evaluate their ’interruptibility’. The time a worker spent in leave-me-alone state varied from individual to individual and day to day, and the percentage ranged from 10 to 51. Generally, the employees wished to work without interruption for roughly 1/3 of the time. Similarly, by studying Microsoft workers, Horvitz also came to the discovery that they ordinarily spend over 65 per cent of their day in a low-attention mode.
    Obviously, today’s phones and computers are probably correct about two-thirds of time by assuming that their users are always available to answer a call, check an email, or click the ’OK’ button on an alert box. But for the considerate systems to be functional and useful, their accuracy has to be above 65 in sending when their users are about to reach their cognitive limits.
    Inspired by Horvitz’s work, Microsoft prototype Bestcom-Enhanced Telephony (Bestcom-ET) digs a bit deeper into every user’s computer to find out clues about what they are dealing with. As I said earlier, Microsoft launched an internal beta test of the system in mid-2003. Horvitz points out that by the end of last October, nearly 3,800 people had been relying on the system to field their incoming calls.
    Horvitz is, in fact, a tester himself, and as we have our conversation in his office, Bestcom silently takes care of all the calls. Firstly, it checks if the caller is in his address book, the company directory, or the ’recent call’ list. After triangulating all these resources at the same time, it attempts to figure out what their relationship is. The calls that get through are from family, supervisors and people he called earlier that day. Other callers will get a message on their screens that say he cannot answer now because he is in a meeting, and will not be available until 3pm. The system will scan both Horvitz’s and the caller’s calendar to check if it can reschedule a callback at a time which works for both of them. Some callers will take that option, while others simply leave a voicemail. The same happens with e-mails. When Horvitz is not in his office, Bestcom automatically offers to transfer selected callers to his cellphone, unless his calendar implies that he is in a meeting.
    Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? In boxes on your answer sheet, write
    TRUE          if the statement agrees with the information
    FALSE         if the statement contradicts the information
    NOT GIVEN     if there is no information on this [br] Microsoft is now investigating a software which is compatible with ordinary offices.
选项 A、TRUE
B、FALSE
C、NOT GIVEN
答案 B
解析 微软正在研发一款适合日常办公的软件。题干关键词为Microsoft、now、software、is compatible with ordinary offices。根据Microsoft定位到第3到4段，扫读发现第3段讲的是干扰对人们造成的危害，而第4段讲了各个公司对于软件的开发。其中谈到微软自2003年后一直在对一种更为复杂的系统进行广泛内测，而数年之后，各个公司有希望让每个员工都能用上这款个人接待员的软件，这一软件目前只适用于高管阶层。从中也可以看出，未来各个公司可能会用上的这款个人接待员日常办公软件正是微软目前正在内测的软件。因此，本题的答案为True。
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