A Phone That Knows You're Busy
It's a modem problem: you're too busy to be disturbed by incessant (連續不斷的) phone calls so you turn your cell phone if you don't remember to turn it back on when you're less busy. You could miss some important calls if only the phone knew when it was wise to interrupt you, you wouldn't have to turn it off at all. Instead, it could let calls through when you are not too busy.
A bunch of behavior sensors (感測器) and a clever piece of software could do just that, by analyzing your behavior to determine if it's a good time to interrupt you. If built into a phone, the system may decide you're too busy and ask the caller to leave a message or ring back later.
James Fogarty and Scott Hudson at Camegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania based their system oil tiny microphones, cameras and touch sensors that reveal body language and activity. First they had to study different behaviors to find out which ones strongly predict whether your mind is interrupted.
The potential "busyness" signals they focused on included whether the office doors were left open or closed, the time of day, if other people were with the person in question, how close they were to each other, and whether or not the computer was in use.
The sensors monitored these and many other factors while four subjects were at work. At random intervals, the subjects rated how interruptible they were on a scale ranging from "highly interruptible" to "highly not-interruptible". Their ratings were then correlated with the various behaviors . "It is a shotgun (隨意的) approach: we used all the indicators we could think of and then let statistics find out which were important, " says Hudson.
The model showed that using the keyboard, and talking on a landline or to someone else in the office correlated most strongly with how interruptible the subjects judged themselves to be. Interestingly, the computer was actually better than people at predicting when someone was too busy to be computer got it right 82 per cent of the time, humans 77 per cent. Fogarty speculates that this might be because people doing the interrupting are inevitably biased towards delivering their message, whereas computers don't care.
The first application for Hudson and Fogarty's system is likely to be in an instant messaging system, followed by office phones and cellphones. "There is no technological roadblock (障礙) to it being deployed in a couple of years, " says Hudson.
問題
A big problem facing people today is that________.
must tolerate phone disturbances or miss important calls.
must turn off their phones to keep their homes quiet.
have to switch from a desktop phone to a cell phone.
are too busy to make phone calls.
37、 The behavior sensor and software system built in a phone________.
d help store messages
d send messages instantly
d tell when it is wise to interrupt you
d identify important phone calls
38、 Scientists at Carnegie Menon University tried to find out________.
office doors were often left open
it was a good time to turn off the computer
questions office workers were bothered with
h behaviors could tell whether a person was busy
39、 During the experiment, the subjects were asked________.
control the sensors and the camera
rate the degrees to which they could be interrupted
compare their behaviors with others'
analyze all the indicators of interruption
40、 The computer performed better than people in the study because________.
computer worked harder
computer was not busy
le tended to be biased
le were not good at statistics
41、根據下列材料，回答41-55題
Effects of Environmental Pollution
If pollution continues to increase at the present rate, formation of aerosols (浮質) in the atmosphere will cause the onset (開始) of an ice age in about fifty years' time. This conclusion, reached by Dr. S.I. Rasool and Dr. S.H. Schneider of the United States Goddard Space Flight Centre, answers the apparently conflicting questions of whether an increase in the carbon dioxide (二氧化碳) content of the atmosphere will cause the Earth to warm up or increasing the aerosol content will cause it to cool down. The Americans have shown conclusively that the aerosol question is dominant.
Two specters haunting conservationists have been the prospect that environmental pollution might lead to the planet's becoming unbearably hot or of these ghosts has now been use it seems that even an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to eight times its present value will produce an increase in temperature of only 2 ℃, which would take place over several thousand years. But the other problem now looms larger than ever.
