Thoughtful Computing System

A "Your battery is now fully charged," announced the laptop computer to its owner, Donald A. Norman, with enthusiasm and perhaps even a hint of pride in its synthetic voice. To be sure, distractions and multitasking are hardly new to the human condition.

"A complicated life, continually interrupted by competing requests for attention, is as old as procreation," laughs Ted Selker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. Increasingly, however, it is not just our children pulling us in several directions at once. There is also a relentless barrage of emails, alerts, alarms, calls, instant messages and automated notifications. None of them is coordinated, and all are oblivious to whether we are busy or even present.

"It’s ridiculous that my own computer can’t figure out whether I’m in front of it, but a public toilet can," exclaims Roel Vertegaal of Queen’s University in Ontario.

B Humanity has connected itself through roughly three billion networked telephones, computers, traffic lights and even refrigerators and picture frames because these devices make life more convenient and keep us available to those we care about. Although we could simply turn off our phones, close the email program and shut the office door when it is time for a meeting or a period of concentrated work, we usually do not. We simply endure the consequences.

C Numerous studies have shown that when people are unexpectedly interrupted, they not only work less efficiently but also make more mistakes. "It seems to add cumulatively to a feeling of frustration," Picard reports, and that stress response makes it difficult to regain focus.

It is not merely a matter of productivity and the pace of life. For pilots, drivers, soldiers and doctors, errors caused by inattention can be extremely dangerous. "If we could just give our computers and phones some understanding of the limits of human attention and memory, it would make them seem a lot more thoughtful and courteous," says Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research.

Horvitz, Vertegaal, Selker and Picard are among a small but growing number of researchers attempting to teach computers, phones, cars and other devices to behave less like egocentric fools and more like considerate colleagues.

D "Attentive" computing systems have begun appearing in newer Volvos, and IBM has introduced WebSphere communications software with a basic ability to detect busyness. Microsoft has been running extensive internal tests of a much more sophisticated system since 2003.

Within a few years, companies may be able to offer every office worker a software version of the personal receptionist currently enjoyed only by senior executives. However, anyone receiving such an offer should read the details carefully before agreeing. By definition, an attentive system is one that is always watching. A considerate computer may come to know more about a person’s working habits than the person does.

E Most people are not as busy as they think they are, which is why we can usually tolerate interruptions from inconsiderate electronic equipment. James Fogarty and Scott E. Hudson of Carnegie Mellon University recently worked with Jennifer Lai of IBM Research to study ten managers, researchers and interns at work.

They recorded the subjects on video and periodically asked them to rate their "interruptibility". The amount of time the workers spent in a leave-me-alone state varied from person to person and from day to day, ranging from 10 to 51 per cent. On average, the subjects wanted to work without interruption for about one-third of their time. In studies of Microsoft employees, Horvitz similarly found that they typically spent more than 65 per cent of their day in a state of low attention.

F Today’s phones and computers naively assume that users are never too busy to take a call, read an email or click "OK" on an alert box. They are therefore probably correct about two-thirds of the time. To be useful, considerate systems will consequently need to be more than 65 per cent accurate in sensing when users are approaching their cognitive limits.

G Bestcom/Enhanced Telephony, a Microsoft prototype based on Horvitz’s work, looks more deeply into each user’s computer to find clues about what the person is doing. Microsoft launched an internal beta test of the system in mid-2003. By the following October, approximately 3,800 people were using the system to handle their incoming telephone calls.

H Horvitz himself is one of those testers. While visitors talk to him in his office in Redmond, Washington, Bestcom silently handles one call after another. It first checks whether the caller appears in his address book, the company directory or its record of people he has recently called. By combining these sources, the system attempts to determine their relationship.

Family members, supervisors and people he called earlier that day are allowed through. Other callers see a message on their computer stating that he is in a meeting and will not be available until 3 p.m. The system scans Horvitz’s calendar and the caller’s calendar and offers to reschedule the call for a time that is free for both of them. Some callers select that option, while others leave voice mail.

Email messages receive similar screening. When Horvitz is outside the office, Bestcom automatically offers to forward selected callers to his cellphone unless his calendar and other evidence indicate that he is attending a meeting.

I Most large companies already use computerised telephone systems and standard calendar and contact-management software, so accessing these "sensors" should be relatively straightforward. However, not all employees will like having a microphone operating continuously in their office, and not everyone will want to expose their calendar to a program they do not ultimately control.

Moreover, some managers may be tempted to interpret a "state of low attention" as "wasting time" and punish workers who appear insufficiently busy.

Irish Elk

Sabre-toothed cats, mastodons, giant sloths, woolly rhinoceroses and many other large, shaggy mammals are widely thought to have died out around the end of the last ice age, approximately 10,500 years ago.

A The Irish elk is also known as the giant deer, or Megaloceros giganteus. Analysis of ancient bones and teeth by scientists based in Britain and Russia shows that the enormous herbivore survived until about 5,000 BC, more than three millennia later than previously believed.

The research team says this suggests that additional factors besides climate change probably hastened the giant deer’s eventual extinction. These factors may have included hunting or habitat destruction by humans.

B The Irish elk was given its name because its well-preserved remains are often found in lake sediments beneath peat bogs in Ireland. It first appeared approximately 400,000 years ago in Europe and Central Asia.

Through a combination of radiocarbon dating of skeletal remains and the mapping of the locations where the remains were discovered, the team showed that the Irish elk was widespread across Europe before the last major period of extreme cold. Its range later contracted to the Ural Mountains in modern-day Russia, which separate Europe from Asia.

C The giant deer made its final stand in western Siberia about 3,000 years after the ice sheets receded, according to the study’s co-author, Adrian Lister, Professor of Palaeobiology at University College London.

"The eastern foothills of the Urals became very densely forested about 8,000 years ago, which could have pushed them onto the plain," he said. Pollen analysis indicates that the region then became extremely dry in response to further climatic change, resulting in the loss of important food plants.

"In combination with human pressures, this could finally have eliminated them," Lister said.

D Hunting by humans has frequently been proposed as a contributing cause of the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna. However, the team said that its new date for the Irish elk’s extinction suggests an additional human-made problem: habitat destruction.

Lister explained, "We haven’t got just hunting 7,000 years ago. This was also about the time the first Neolithic people settled in the region. They were farmers who would have cleared the land."

The presence of humans may explain why the Irish elk was unable to survive the latest of many climatic fluctuations, despite having survived similar periods in the past.

E Lister also cast doubt on another possible explanation for the deer’s disappearance: the male’s enormous antlers. Some scientists have suggested that this exaggerated feature, resulting from females preferring males with the largest antlers, contributed to the animal’s extinction. The antlers may have advertised a male’s fitness but would have been a serious inconvenience in the dense forests that spread north after the last ice age.

Lister rejected this argument, saying that the deer had previously survived successfully during wooded interglacials, the warmer periods between ice ages.

Other research has suggested that insufficient high-quality food contributed to the elk’s extinction. Large quantities of calcium and phosphate compounds are required for antler formation, and therefore substantial amounts of these minerals were needed for the Irish elk’s massive antlers.

The males partly obtained the necessary materials from their bones and replenished them from food plants after the antlers had grown. They may also have recovered nutrients from discarded antlers, as has been observed in living deer. During the antler-growth phase, giant deer therefore suffered from a condition resembling osteoporosis.

When the climate changed at the end of the last glacial period, the vegetation in the animal’s habitat also changed towards species that may not have provided sufficient amounts of the required minerals, particularly in the western part of its range.

F The worldwide extinction of megafauna was almost complete by the end of the last ice age. It is believed that megafauna initially developed in response to glacial conditions and became extinct with the arrival of warmer climates.

Tropical and subtropical areas experienced less radical climatic change. The most dramatic transformation was the conversion of a vast area of North Africa into the world’s largest desert. Significantly, Africa escaped major faunal extinction, as did tropical and subtropical Asia.

The human movement out of Africa and into the Americas and Australia was also accompanied by climatic change. Australia’s climate changed from cold and dry to warm and dry. Surface water consequently became scarce. Most inland lakes dried up completely or became dry during the warmer seasons.

Most large animals that mainly browsed on vegetation lost their habitat and retreated to a narrow strip in eastern Australia, where permanent water and better vegetation remained. Some animals may have survived until approximately 7,000 years ago.

If people have lived in Australia for up to 60,000 years, then humans and megafauna must have coexisted for at least 30,000 years. Modern kangaroos, which were regularly hunted, survived not only 10,000 years of Aboriginal hunting but also an intensive campaign by commercial shooters.

G A group of scientists led by A. J. Stuart focused on northern Eurasia, including Europe and Siberia, where the best available evidence shows that animals became extinct in Europe during the Late Pleistocene.

Some cold-adapted animals survived into the final part of the cold stage and then became extinct. There were therefore two phases of extinction. Neither phase clearly coincided with the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans, and there was no obvious correspondence between the arrival of humans alone or climatic change alone and the extinctions.

During the final part of the cold stage, a fundamental climatic change reorganised the vegetation. The combination of climatic change and the presence of advanced Palaeolithic humans caused this wave of extinction.

There is a profound difference between the North American evidence and that from Europe. Extinctions in northern Eurasia were moderate and staggered, whereas those in North America were severe and sudden. These differences are related to the timing of human arrival. The extinctions resulted from human hunting, but only during periods of fundamental environmental change.