Polite Computers

First off, I'd be remiss if I didn't give mad props to Pharma Watch. Michael Lascelles of Australia is the man behind that blog, which casts a much wider net than 'Your Attention, PLEASE', covering the whole spectrum of abuses in the world of pharmaceutical promotion. I'd say something about how I chose to use this exact same blog template independently, before I was aware of Pharma Watch, but nobody will believe me.

Here's a good article by Katie Hafner from the New York Times, thoughtfully reprinted by the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, so you won't have to mess with that annoying as all get out 'free registration' that the NYT wants you to do: You there at the computer: pay attention.

The article discusses how a combination of email, IMs, and the Web conspire together to time-slice our attention spans into oblivion. Help is on the way, though, even if you don't want to roll the dice with Strattera and possibly trade in your comfortable old nickname 'absentminded professor' for 'constipated curmudgeon'. It seems HCI (human/computer interaction) researchers at the University of Maryland and the University of Washington are working on ways to make computer applications less annoying.

Researchers at Microsoft's R&D labs (lately also referred to as 'people who couldn't get jobs at Google Labs', which is not very nice, so stop it) have the ambitious goal of developing software that can tell when it's a good time to interrupt you!

"We can detect when users are available for communication, or when the user is in a state of flow," said Eric Horvitz, a senior Microsoft researcher who directs the project.

Given the people possessing fully functional human brains I've worked with who never seemed to have a clue about when was a good time to interrupt me, I remain skeptical. Still, these goals are worthy, certainly more noble than figuring out new ways to thwart Hotmail's spam filters, and I can only wish them success with their efforts.