As homeland security policy makers seek to funnel scarce resources to the most vulnerable areas, geographic impact studies have become ever more crucial since the events of September 11, 2001. In the sense that the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports are among the largest in the world, service interruptions there would have nation-wide economic impacts. Because foreign and domestic imports are in ...

1 This working paper is based on a thesis project carried out by Alessia Romanow.

Cueing strategies, such as real-time reminders, are among the most effective methods of persuading individuals to perform healthy behaviors such as taking their medication and exercising. However, these reminders often represent a task interruption for users who are engaged in work activities. This paper presents the results of a study which explores strategies for interrupting users at work to...

his article highlights a large-scale field experiment conducted at an informational Web site where the timing of pop-up promotions being offered was varied. The experiment examines the Web user’s reaction to the promotion in terms of (a) a direct response to the promotion (i.e., clickthrough) and (b) any indirect response in terms of the user’s Web-site-exit behavior. Factors such as delay in o...

Previous studies have estimated the "human capital depreciation" of women re-entering the work force after voluntary, lengthy interruptions. Those studies have found reduced real wages and furthermore the decrease is positively related to the length of the interruption. Upon re-entry, however, real wages grow rapidly as human capital is restored. This paper develops a model of the wage historie...

Interruption of the aortic arch is a rare and usually lethal congenital anomaly that is often associated with multiple cardiac malformations. Most neonates with aortic arch interruption perish once the ductus arteriosus closes after birth. However, sporadic cases have been reported to survive into adulthood uneventfully. Here, we report a 19-year-old male with a 3-month history of exertional dy...

Two experiments examined how interruptions impact reading and how interruption lags and the reader's spatial memory affect the recovery from such interruptions. Participants read paragraphs of text and were interrupted unpredictably by a spoken news story while their eye movements were monitored. Time made available for consolidation prior to responding to the interruption did not aid reading r...

It is very difficult to find pre-emptive scheduling algorithms that consider all the main characteristics of computer vision systems. Moreover, there is no generic algorithm that considers interruption costs for such systems. Taking the interruption of tasks into account scheduling results can be improved. But it is also very important to take the costs that arise from interruptions into accoun...

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Studies on talker normalization have reported that contexts would affect how a vowel/consonant/tone is perceived, which suggests that listeners use cues in the context as a reference for speech perception. However, it is unclear how the cues of the context are encoded in memory, and to what extent the context effects are influenced by interruption in sensory memory and reduction in attentional ...