Interruptions are typically considered disruptive for organizational members, hindering their performance and effectiveness. Although interruptions can have negative effects on work performance, they also can serve in multiple ways as facilitators of performance. In this paper, we discuss four key types of interruptions that have different causes and consequences: intrusions, breaks, distractio...

Willa Cather's 1913 novel, O Pioneers! concludes with an unexpected moment of extreme violence as two young lovers, Emil Bergson and Marie Shabata, are murdered by Marie's husband in a mulberry orchard. Cather's novel is almost wholly devoted to the psychological interior of the protagonist, Alexandra Bergson, thereby rendering this violent interruption more dynamic as it essentially undercuts ...

Social geometry is a novel technique for reasoning about the engagement of participants during group meetings on the basis of head orientation data provided by computer vision. This form of group context can be used by ubiquitous environments to route communications between users, or sense availability of users for interruption. We explored problems of distraction by co-workers in office cubicl...

In Experiment 1 the behaviour of black-capped chickadees timing intervals of 12.5 or 37.5 s was studied using the peak procedure. Average rate of responding peaked near the trained FI on test trials, while the spread of the response distribution was larger for the longer FI. On individual trials, chickadees showed a break-run-break pattern of abrupt changes in rate of responding. These results,...

Smartphone notifications are often delivered without considering user interruptibility, potentially causing frustration for the recipient. Therefore research in this area has concerned finding contexts where interruptions are better received. The typical convention for monitoring interruption behaviour assumes binary actions, where a response is either completed or not at all. However, in reali...

The chemical potential of a graphene layer can be locally interrupted by electrostatic gating or chemical doping. When properly designed, electrically small local interruption can possess quasistatic resonance and be strongly excited by electromagnetic field. This excitation generates a mixed-type semilocalized plasmon wave, e.g., it launches TM mode within the interruption domain and TE modes ...

In this paper, the network reconfiguration in the presence of distributed generation units with the aim of improving the reliability of the network is studied. For this purpose four reliability parameters in the objective function are considered, which is average energy not supplied system average interruption frequency index, system average interruption duration index and momentary average int...