文档介绍：2014年职称英语考试理工类A级-阅读理解练习题及答案
A Phone That Knows You're Busy
It's a modern problem:you're too busy to be disturbed by incessant(连续不断的)phone calls so you turn your cellphone off .But if you don't remember to turn it back on when you're less 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(传感器)and a clever piece of software could do just that,by analyzing your behavior to determine if it's a good time to interrupt 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 stongly 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 puter 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(随意的)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,puter was actually better than people at predicting when someone was too busy to be interrupted . p