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Interruptions are prevalent in knowledge work, and their negative consequences have driven research to find ways for interruption management. However, these means almost always leave the responsibility and burden of interruptions with individual knowledge workers. System-level approaches for interruption management, on the other hand, have the potential to reduce the burden on employees. This paper’s objective is to pave way for system-level interruption management by showing that data about factual characteristics of work can be used to identify interrupting situations.

The authors provide a demonstration of using trace data from information and communications technology (ICT)-systems and machine learning to identify interrupting situations. They conduct a “simulation” of automated data collection by asking employees of two companies to provide information concerning situations and interruptions through weekly reports. They obtain information regarding four organizational elements: task, people, technology and structure, and employ classification trees to show that this data can be used to identify situations across which the level of interruptions differs.

The authors show that it is possible to identifying interrupting situations from trace data. During the eight-week observation period in Company A they identified seven and in Company B four different situations each having a different probability of occurrence of interruptions.

The authors extend employee-level interruption management to the system-level by using “task” as a bridging concept. Task is a core concept in both traditional interruption research and Leavitt's 1965 socio-technical model which allows us to connect other organizational elements (people, structure and technology) to interruptions.

Traditional embedded operation systems are resource consuming multitask, thus they are not adapted for smart wireless sensors. This paper presents a super‐small distributed real‐time microkernel (SDREAM) dedicated to wireless sensors. SDREAM is a tuple‐based message‐driven real‐time kernel. It adopts a meta language: Kernel Modeling Language to define and describe the system primitives in abstract manner. The IPC and processes synchronization are based on the LINDA concept: the tuple model implemented by two light primitives (SND: OUT & RCV: IN). In SDREAM, tasks are classified into two categories: periodic and priority. The periodic task has the highest priority level and is responsible for capturing sensor signals or actuating control signals; the priority task has various priority levels and is suitable for time‐constraints applications. A two‐level task scheduling policy scheme, named priority‐based pre‐emptive scheduling, is used for task scheduling. SDREAM is simple and efficient. It has a flexible hardware abstraction capability that enables it to be rapidly ported into different WSN platforms and other tiny embedded devices. Currently, it has been ported and evaluated in several hardware platforms. The performance results show SDREAM requires tiny resource and is suitable and efficient for hard real‐time multitask WSN applications.

This chapter examines the perspectives of culturally responsive teachers of immigrant and refugee youth in a high performing school in the Baden-Württemberg region of Germany. Academic success in the region has been traditionally designated for ethnic Germans and nonnatives who suppress their culture and assimilate into normative German culture. Assimilating to normative German culture through the lens of global meaning making is a preordained social order that perpetuates exclusion for immigrants in society and school. The consequences of failed intercultural education in Europe have prompted increased demands to consider diversity in teacher training and to provide more equitable opportunities for immigrants. Gymnasium Baden welcomed a few Syrian refugees where immigrant youth represented one 10th of the population during the 2015–2016 academic year. In a broader context of limited access and opportunity to higher education among immigrant and refugee youth, this chapter examines teachers who interrupted existing frames and maintained high expectations and mindfulness for their students. The perspectives and voices of teachers who employ culturally responsive practices were documented through interviews and examined through the lens of Tierney's (2018) dimensions of global meaning making, more specifically the models of interrupting existing frames, critical literacies, and being mindful. Participants' perspectives interrupted existing frames and were documented against the grain of a conservative region that has experienced dilemmas of integrating immigrants and refugees into school and society. An examination of interview transcripts revealed teachers who maintained high expectations through an asset orientation and were overwhelmingly supportive and responsive to longtime immigrant and newcomer refugee youth.

In this short chapter, we seek to begin to understand what it might mean to ‘interrupt the legal person’. We do this in two parts. In the first part, we begin with the phrase itself and interrogate its components. Interrogating these components leads us to think of the legal person as a technical and grammatical question that varies across different legal traditions and jurisdictions, i.e., across different ways of living and speaking law (recall that juris-diction says to speak the law). In the second part, we briefly explore four versions or declinations of interruptions, each corresponding to a different kind of juris-diction or legal tradition. We see this chapter as itself a friendly interruption in (or of) a broad and rich conversation so as to encourage ourselves to be struck again by some things we may take for granted.

The use of email by employees at the Danwood Group was studied and it was found that the interrupt effect from emails is more than generally believed. Employees allowed themselves to be interrupted almost as frequently as telephone calls and the common reaction to the arrival of an email is to react almost as quickly as they would respond to telephone calls. This means the interrupt effect is comparable with that of a telephone call. The recovery time from an email interruption was found to be significantly less than the published recovery time for telephone calls. It is to be concluded, therefore, that while Email is still less disruptive than the telephone, the way the majority of users handle their incoming email has been shown to give far more interruption than expected. By analysing the data captured the authors have been able to create recommendations for a set of guidelines for email usage within the workplace that will increase employee efficiency by reducing the prominence of interruptions, restricting the use of email‐to‐all messages, setting‐up the email application to display three lines of the email and to check for email less frequently. It is recommended that training should be given to staff on how to use email more effectively to increase employee productivity.

IOS firmware diversity, the unintended consequence of a complex firmware compilation process, has historically made reliable exploitation of Cisco routers difficult. With approximately 300,000 unique IOS images in existence, a new class of version‐agnostic shellcode is needed in order to make the large‐scale exploitation of Cisco IOS possible. The purpose of this paper is to show that such attacks are now feasible by demonstrating two different reliable shellcodes that will operate correctly over many Cisco hardware platforms and all known IOS versions.

The paper examines prior work in the area of Cisco IOS rootkits and constructs a novel IOS version‐agnostic rootkit called the interrupt‐hijack rootkit.

As the experimental results show, the techniques proposed in this paper can reliably inject command and control capabilities into arbitrary IOS images in a version‐agnostic manner.

The authors believe that the technique presented in this paper overcomes an important hurdle in the large‐scale, reliable rootkit execution within Cisco IOS. Thus, effective host‐based defence for such routers is imperative for maintaining the integrity of our global communication infrastructures.

This paper aims to analyze the key factors influencing the synchronization performance of distributed motion control system and to improve the synchronization performance for peripherals control of this system.

This paper deals with the software synchronization problems of distributed motion control system based on real-time Ethernet. First, combined with communication and control tasks, the key factors affecting synchronization performance of system are analyzed. Then, aiming at key factors and considering the synchronization of system bus, protocol conversion and task scheduling, a software synchronization method based on CANopen protocol and real-time Ethernet is proposed. Finally, the feasibility of this method is verified by establishing distributed motion control system and testing the synchronization performance of terminal control signals of slaves.

Based on this method, the results show that the synchronization accuracy for peripherals control of all slaves could be about 100 ns.

This research provides high-precision synchronization method, which could lay a foundation for the application of distributed motion control system in the field of assembly automation, such as multi-axis assembly robots control.

In distributed motion control system, many factors affect the synchronization performance. At present, there is no synchronization method that could comprehensively consider these factors. This paper not only analyzes the key factors influencing the synchronization performance of system but also proposes a synchronization method. Therefore, the method proposed in this paper has certain theoretical value and engineering significance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of a process interruption on the tensile properties of AlSi10Mg samples produced by selective laser melting (SLM).

Using identical processing parameters, cylindrical samples were produced in either a continuous or interrupted SLM build operation. The tensile properties and microstructure of the samples were determined as a function of process type as well as orientation.

All samples produced in this paper displayed superior tensile properties to those produced in high pressure die casting. In general, the samples produced in the continuous build process had higher strengths and microhardness than those produced in the interrupted process. However, while most samples displayed random failure locations, the vertical samples produced in the interrupted build process showed a strong tendency for localized failure in the vicinity of the stoppage plane.

This paper demonstrated that samples produced in an interrupted build process tend to have poorer mechanical properties than those produced in a continuous process. Together, these observations highlight the importance of a suitable technique for restarting and completing an interrupted build process to ensure the production of high quality components.

In this chapter, Arendt’s reflections on the question of personal responsibility are taken as a discussion of ‘interrupting the legal person’. Examining trials that took place after World War II, Arendt observes in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, ‘What the courts demand … is that the defendants should not have participated’ (pp. 33–34). Following Arendt, the author argues that thinking could have enabled possible perpetrators of great evil to meet this demand, for when a person stops to think, whatever they are doing is interrupted. What is more, the person who stops to think is themselves interrupted by thinking. In brief, becoming aware of the possibility that they exist as a person in a mode other than what Ngaire Naffine calls ‘the responsible subject’, thinking disrupts the legal person. A discussion of thinking as interrupting the legal person thus illuminates not only what may turn a person away from participation in the life of a criminal state, but also what that turn means for responsibility.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of e‐mail interruptions on tasks and to explore the concept of e‐mail addiction within the workplace.

Data were collected from a large car rental company in the UK. The first collection method involved observing the effects of simulated e‐mail interruptions on seven employees by measuring the interrupt handling time, the interrupt recovery time, and the additional time required to complete the task given the number of interruptions. The second part of the study involved a questionnaire sent to 100 employees to capture addictive characteristics in employees' e‐mail communication behaviour.

E‐mail interruptions have a negative time impact upon employees and show that both interrupt handling and recovery time exist. A typical task takes one third longer than undertaking a task with no e‐mail interruptions. The questionnaire data show clinical characteristics classify 12 per cent of e‐mail addicts, and behavioural characteristics classify 15 per cent of e‐mail addicts in the workplace.

Observation was constrained by the timeframes and availability of the participating organisation. Measuring an employee receiving e‐mail interruptions over a greater time period might achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the impact.

The small study is the first to determine the impact of e‐mail interruptions on work tasks by observing employees, and to present a method to determine e‐mail addiction. By understanding these factors, organisations can manage workflow strategies to improve employee efficiency and effectiveness.