首页
登录
职称英语
The Science of Interruptions In 2000,
The Science of Interruptions In 2000,
游客
2024-05-15
15
管理
问题
The Science of Interruptions
In 2000, Gloria Mark was hired as a professor at the University of California. She would arrive at her desk in the morning, full of energy and ready to tackle her to-do list. No sooner had she started one task than a colleague would e-mail her with an urgent request; when she went to work on that, the phone would ring. At the end of the day, Mark had accomplished a fraction of what she set out to do.
Lots of people complain that office multitasking drives them nuts. But Mark studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior, so she was able to do more than complain, she set out to measure how nuts we’ve all become. She watched cubicle (办公室隔间) dwellers as they surfed the chaos of modern office life and found each employee spent only ten-and-a-half minutes on any given project before being interrupted. Each short project was itself fragmented into three- minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages or working on a sheet.
Mark’s study also revealed that interruptions are often crucial to office work. The high-tech workers admitted that many of their daily distractions were essential to their jobs. When someone forwards you an urgent e-mail message, it’s often something you really do need to see; if a mobile phone call breaks through, it might be the call that saves your hide.
For some computer engineers and academics, this realization has begun raise an attractive possibility: perhaps we can find an ideal middle ground. If high-tech work distractions are inevitable, maybe we can re-engineer them so we receive all of their benefits but few of their downsides.
The Birth of Multitasking
The science of interruptions began more than 100 years ago with the emergence of telegraph operators--the first high-stress, time-sensitive information-technology jobs. Psychologists discovered that if someone spoke to a telegraph operator while he was keying a message, the operator was more likely to make errors. Later, psychologists determined that whenever workers needed to focus on a job that required the monitoring of data, presentation was all important. Using this knowledge, cockpits (驾驶舱) for fighter pilots were carefully designed so that each dial and meter could be read with just a glance.
Still, such issues seemed remote from the lives of everyday workers. Then, in the 1990s, computers began to experience a rapid increase in speed and power. "Multitasking" was born; instead of simply working on one program for hours at a time, a computer user works on several simultaneously. Office workers now stare at computer screens of overwhelming complexity, as they juggle (操纵) messages, text documents, PowerPoint presentations and Web browsers. In the modern office we are all fighter pilots.
Effect of Multitasking: Computer-affected Behavior
Information is no longer a scarce resource attention is. 20 years ago, an office worker had two types of communication technology: a phone, which required an instant answer, and postal mail, which took days. Now people have dozens of possibilities between these two poles.
The result is something like "continuous partial attention", which makes us so busy keeping an eye on everything that we never fully focus on anything. This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant email dinging makes us feel needed and desired. But what happens when you take that to the extreme? You get overwhelmed. Sanity lies in danger.
In 1997, Microsoft recruited Mary Czerwinski, who once worked in NASA’s Human- computer Interaction Lab, to conduct basic research to find out how computer affect human behavior. She took 39 office workers and installed software on their computers that would record every mouse click. She discovered that computer users were as restless as hummingbird. On average, they juggled eight windows at the same time. More astonishing, they would spend barely 20 seconds looking at one window before flipping to another.
Why constant shifting? In part it was because of the way computers are laid out. A computer offers very little visual real estate. A Microsoft Word document can cover almost an entire screen. Once you begin multitasking, a computer desktop quickly becomes buried in windows. When someone is interrupted, it takes just over 23 minutes to cycle back to the original task. Once their work becomes buried beneath a screenful of interruptions, office workers appear to forget what tasks they were originally pursuing. The central danger of interruptions is not the interruption at all, but the confusion they bring to our short-term memory.
Ways to Cope with Interruptions
When Mark and Czerwinski, working separately, looked at the desks of the people they were studying, they each noticed the same thing: Post-it notes. Workers would write brief reminders of the task they .were supposed to be working on ("Test DA’s PC, Waiting for AL... "). Then they would place them directly in their fields of vision, often in a circle around the edge of their computer screens.
These piecemeal efforts at coping pointed to ways that our high-tech tools could be engineered to be less distracting. Czerwinski also noticed many Microsoft people attached three monitors to their computers. They placed their applications on different screens--the email on the right side, a Web browser on the right and their main work project in the middle--so that each application was read at a glance. When the ding on their email program went off, they just peek to the left to see the message.
The workers said this arrangement made them feel calmer. But did more screen area actually help with cognition? To find out, Czerwinski had 1,5 volunteers sit in front of a regular size 38cm monitor and complete a variety of tasks designed to challenge their concentration--a Web search, some cutting and pasting, and memorizing phone numbers. Then the volunteers repeated the tasks using a computer with a massive 105em screen.
On the bigger screen, some people completed the tasks as much as 44% more quickly. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single change to a computer system so significantly improve a user’s productivity. The clearer your screen, the calmer your mind.
Looking for Better Interruptions
Mark compared the way people work when sitting in cubicles with how they work when they’re at different locations and interact online. She discovered people working in cubicles suffer more interruptions, but they have better interruptions because their co-workers have a social sense of what they’re doing. When you work next to others, they sense whether you’re deeply immersed or relatively free to talk and interrupt you accordingly.
Why don’t computers work this way? Instead of alerting us to email messages the instant they arrive, our machines could deliver them at optimum moments, When our brains are relaxed. Eric Horvitz at Microsoft is trying to do precisely that. He has been building automated reasoning systems equipped with artificial intelligence that observes a computer user’s behavior and tries to predict the moment the user will be mentally free and ready to be interrupted. [br] Eric Horvitz has been working on Al system that monitors a computer user’s behavior and predicts ______.
选项
答案
the best/the most appropriate moment to interrupt him
解析
参见全文最后一段最后一句: He has been building automated reasoning systems equipped with artificial intelligence that observes a computer user’s behavior and tries to predict the moment the user will be mentally free and ready to be interrupted.
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3600115.html
相关试题推荐
TheScienceofInterruptionsIn2000,
TheScienceofInterruptionsIn2000,
TheScienceofInterruptionsIn2000,
TheScienceofInterruptionsIn2000,
TheScienceofInterruptionsIn2000,
TheScienceofInterruptionsIn2000,
TheScienceofInterruptionsIn2000,
Insciencethemeaningoftheword"explain"suffers【C1】______civilization’
Insciencethemeaningoftheword"explain"suffers【C1】______civilization’
Insciencethemeaningoftheword"explain"suffers【C1】______civilization’
随机试题
[originaltext]W:HiChris,wouldyouliketodosomethingwithmethisweekend?
《饥火》表现了一种人类共有的情感历程:在黑暗中探索、在痛苦中挣扎、在期待中等待、
下列关于资产评估档案保密与查阅的说法中,不正确的是( )。A.评估档案涉及客户的
患者,女性,72岁。不慎摔伤右髋部。查体:右下肢短缩,外旋50°畸形,右髋肿胀不
胰岛A细胞分泌胰高血糖素,胰岛B细胞分泌胰岛素,造成这两种细胞上述差异的最可能原
在测绘项目中,关于甲乙双方义务的叙述,不正确的是()A:甲方应当向乙方提交该测绘
公安机关保护公共财产和个人合法财产应当做到( )A.要正确理解保护的对象 B
金融机构出于稳健经营的需要,必须对交易员可能的过度投机行为进行限制,适当的业绩评
某企业为增值税一般纳税人,对外出租房屋,适用简易计税方法,由于承租方(增值税一般
下列项选中,属于初步设计工作时间目标的是()。A.方案设计时间目标 B.基础设
最新回复
(
0
)