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Side showBy SHARON FINK
© St. Petersburg Times, EVOLVING INTERNET DYSFUNCTIONS: He said the Internet makes you depressed, withdrawn, sad and lonely, and set off the first great debate over computer use. Three years later, he says he was wrong. Maybe. "I guess you could say that the story isn't in yet," says Robert Kraut, a social psychologist and telecommunications researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. Kraut made his initial conclusions after studying 93 families in eight Pittsburgh neighborhoods. He has restudied the families and concluded that though the Internet might affect people negatively at first, those effects wear off. He thinks. "Here, the thing we're studying is evolving even as we're studying it," Kraut tells the Palm Beach Post. Kraut says he does stand by one of his original conclusions: The Internet makes extroverts more extroverted and introverts more introverted. YOU! WHAT PLANET IS THIS?: "When I first started to go to these things in the '70s, there were a lot of men and a lot of boys who read comic books. I was outnumbered 10 to 1. You'd walk in the door and people would stop talking and stare for a minute." -- Alyson Abramowitz, 43, of Cupertino, Calif., on how the World Science Fiction Convention has changed over the years. THE PRICE OF GETTING CLOSE TO FAME: It makes performing on an Disney World stage for eight people five times a day in July sound almost appealing. Five singing duos desperate for a break stood in New York's Grand Central Terminal during morning rush hour and sang a jingle parody for an air freshener so they could win $5,000 (before taxes) and the chance to sing a real jingle. Glade sponsored the contest to promote a new product called Duet. ("Whatever smelly circumstance is in your home -- from last week's workout clothes to this week's garbage -- Glade Duet captures the natural fragrances at the peak of freshness to handle any situation.") The five duos, chosen based on videos they did, were judged last month by a panel that included the Captain & Tennille. The winners: Richard and Kim Reda from Merrimack, N.H.
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From the wire |
