Computer screen pop-ups may slow down your work more than you think, according to new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Although the actual interruption may only last a few moments, the study shows that we then lose more time when we try to find our place and resume the task that was interrupted.

The research, led by Dr Helen Hodgetts and Professor Dylan Jones at Cardiff University, examined the cost of on-screen interruptions in terms of the time taken to complete a simple seven-step computer task.

The researchers found that, even after only a five second interruption, people take longer than normal to complete the next step in the task they are working on.

“The interruption breaks our cognitive focus on the task in hand, so we have to work out where we were up to and what we were planning to do next before we can resume the task at our original speed” explains Dr Hodgetts.

The interruptions only caused a few seconds delay in resuming the simple task set in the experiments but in a more realistic work environment, where there is more information to retrieve after the interruption, the loss of concentration could have a greater impact on work performance.

“Our findings suggest that even seemingly brief and inconsequential on-screen pop-up messages might be impacting upon our efficiency, particularly given their frequency over the working day,” says Dr Hodgetts.

Other results from the study show that an interruption lag – a brief time between a warning for an upcoming interruption and the interruption itself- can reduce the time we lose trying to find our place again

A warning sound was found to be most effective because it allows us to consolidate where we are in the current task before transferring our attention to the interruption. In contrast, a flashing warning signal on the computer screen can be just as disruptive as the interruption itself

The benefits of having time to rehearse our place or lay down mental ‘cues’ to help us back to where we were in a task (before we divert our attention to deal with an interruption) has practical implications for the design of computer pop-ups.

The researchers suggest that e-mail alerts and similar pop-up messages should be as small and discrete as possible and should not obscure the original activity. Better still, any visual alert should disappear after a few seconds if not responded to, so that we can be aware that there is incoming information without having to interrupt our current task.

The researchers also point out obvious practical steps that computer users can take to minimise unscheduled pop-up notifications, particularly whilst engaging in tasks that require a lot of planning or concentration:

Instant-messenger systems should be turned off or at least set to ‘busy’ so that colleagues are aware that unimportant interruptions are not welcome; and e-mail alerts could be turned off or only enabled for messages that the sender tags specifically as high priority.

Dr Daniel Müllensiefen

Software developed by an academic at Goldsmiths, University of London could spell the end for future melody plagiarism.

Dr Daniel Müllensiefen, from the Department of Psychology and formerly working in Computing, has co-published research on how to predict court decisions on music plagiarism using cognitive similarity algorithms.

The study has recently been published by the European specialist journal Musicae Scientiae and results were presented publicly for the first time at the international conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences in Music (ESCOM) in Finland in August.

Daniel worked alongside Marc Pendzich, an expert on cover versions and music re-mixes from the Institute of Musicology University of Hamburg, on the software which is based on modelling court decision for cases of alleged melodic plagiarism employing a number of similarity algorithms.

The two researchers used court cases from the US as a testbed for their software and 90 per cent of the court decisions were predicted correctly by the newly developed algorithms.

Tune plagiarism in pop music is a common and often feverishly debated phenomenon, so controversial due to the vast amounts of money involved in today’s pop music industry.

Artists as high profile as Madonna, George Harrison and the Bee Gees have all been involved in music plagiarism cases.

The similarity between melodies is assumed to be a very important factor in a court’s decision about whether a new tune is an illegitimate version of a pre-existing melody.

Under the current system, the jury is advised by expert witnesses to come to a decision – something both Daniel and Marc have indeed done – but they admit that one of the long term effects of their work could substantially alter the need for a jury and expert witnesses.

“The most provocative question you could ask is whether this software could replace a jury and expert witnesses in court,” Daniel said.

“Also, on a very popular level you could claim that the software can detect melodic plagiarism in popular music automatically. Thus, in principle we could develop this into a business where songwriters and music publishers submit songs and we test against a database whether there are any highly similar pre-existing melodies in it.”

Currently these developments are hypothetical due to the sample of cases it has been tested on being so small (20 cases), but Daniel and Marc are working on a follow-up study to include more US cases and to test whether the prediction accuracy holds also true for British and German plagiarism suits.

Sending science down the phone

Scientists from the University of Bath have helped to develop new mobile phone software that will help epidemiologists and ecologists working in the field to analyse their data remotely and map findings across the world without having to return to the lab.

Dr Ed Feil and PhD student Fadaa al Own from the Department of Biology & Biochemistry, working with academics from Imperial College, say the software will also enable members of the public to act as ‘citizen scientists’ and help collect data for community projects.

The researchers have developed an application for ’smartphones’ that allows a scientist or member of the public to collect and record data, photos and videos – for example to document the presence of an animal or plant species – and then send this information to a central web-based database. The website records the user’s location, using the phone’s GPS system, and it can then display all of the data collected on this topic across the world, using Google Maps.

Users can also use their smartphones to request and view all the maps and analyses available. The new technology, which is funded by the Wellcome Trust, means that groups of researchers should be able to quickly and easily build up and share maps of, for example, the distribution of an endangered species or cases of a disease, and analyse patterns that emerge. The Imperial team is currently using the software, known as EpiCollect, as a tool in their studies of the epidemiology of bacterial and fungal infectious diseases.

Dr Ed Feil said: “This is a very exciting project and opens up all sorts of possibilities for amateurs, research scientists, and teachers alike, by exploiting the sophisticated features of mobile phone technology.”

The technology has already been used by Dr Nick Waterfield, also from the University’s Department of Biology & Biochemistry to study nematode worms, which are pathogenic to insects, from various sites throughout Thailand.

The researchers suggest that members of the public could also get involved in scientific research using the tool and that schools could also use the software, for example on biology field courses.

Suitable smartphones for EpiCollect use the Android open-source operating system, developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. It means that software developers can produce their own applications to run on the phones and anybody can download the software for free. There are currently several different handsets available in the UK and the new software will be available to anybody with one of these phones. The researchers have also produced a beta version for the iPhone, so the software will soon be available to even more people.

In order to use the new system, a researcher sets up a web database for their particular study and a specific version of EpiCollect is produced that can be loaded on multiple phones, allowing users to start collecting and submitting data.

Dr Ed Feil and Fadaa al Own are two of five authors of the study that was published in PLoS One.

Professor Anatoly Zayats

Computers which use light to process large amounts of data faster than ever before are just one of many ground-breaking potential applications of a new £6 million research programme at Queen’s and Imperial College London, launched today, 1 September 2009.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is funding the two universities to establish a world-leading research programme on the fundamental science of so-called ‘nanoplasmonic devices’.

Nanoplasmonic devices’ key components are tiny nanoscale metal structures – more then 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair – that guide and direct light.

The structures have been tailor-made to interact with light in an unusual and highly controlled way. This means they could one day be used to build new kinds of super-high-speed ‘optical computers’ – so named because they would process information using light signals, instead of the electric currents used by today’s computers.

At present, the speed with which computers process information is limited by the time it takes for the information to be transferred between electronic components. Currently this information is transferred using nanoscale metallic wires that transmit the signals as an electric current.

To speed up the process, the scientists at Queen’s and Imperial hope to develop a way of sending the signals along the same wires in the form of light.

In order to achieve this, they are developing a raft of new metallic devices including tiny nanoscale sources of light, nanoscale ‘waveguides’, to guide light along a desired route, and nanoscale detectors to pick up the light signals.

Similar approaches may also help in the development of devices for faster internet services.

Professor Anatoly Zayats, from the Queen’s University’s Centre for Nanostructured Media, who leads the project said: “This is basic research into how light interacts with matter on the nanoscale. But we will work together with and listen to our industrial partners to direct research in the direction that hopefully will lead to new improved products and services that everyone can buy from the shelf.”

Professor Stefan Maier, who leads the research team at Imperial, added: “This is an exciting step towards developing computers that use light waves, not electrical current, to handle data and process information. In the future these optical computers will provide us with more processing power and higher speed. This will also open the door to a world of possibilities in scientific fields at the interface with the biosciences, and perhaps even in the world of personal computing.”

The project is also supported by INTEL, Seagate, Ericsson, Oxonica, IMEC and the National Physics Laboratory.