MULTITASKING NEWS: A New York Times reporter, chronicling a kind of reverse anthropomorphism displayed by busy multitasking individuals, consulted Psychology Professor Earl Hunt on the phenomenon. “You can do several tasks at once, but not all of them get done as well. That is why I feel that car phones are a bad idea,” said Hunt. The Times report revealed that as time for completing tasks appears to be dwindling, many Americans are changing the rhythms of their own behavior to match the multitasking capabilities of their computers. Professor Hunt pointed out that computers are actually doing the tasks serially, albeit at blinding speed and that mere humans are having difficulty aping the process “They [computers] switch faster than we do, it’s hard to get around the forebrain bottleneck. Our brains function the same way Cro-Magnon brains did, so technology isn’t going to change that.”

ENTROS BY THE BAY: When the San Francisco Chronicle reported on a Seattle company’s new restaurant and high-tech gaming center due to open in a South Beach neighborhood they called on Sociology Professor Pepper Schwartz for the lowdown. Schwartz admitted to an occasional visit to the Seattle Entros, “When I first heard about this I thought what a cockamamie idea.” The Chronicle report said Schwartz now sees Entros as “a real desire for community that cubicle dwellers miss, it’s a combination of using your brain and using your body that brings people together in a way that’s really bonding.”

COMPUTER COOKIES: A Chronicle of Higher Education article examining the use of “cookies,” small computer files that track a user’s Web travels, led with a positive assessment by Computer Science and Engineering Professor Oren Etzioni. “I’m pretty pro-cookies; for research purposes cookies are a good thing.” Etzioni and doctoral student Michael Perkowitz are using cookies to try to develop “adaptive Web sites” —sites that can change based on the user’s needs. “To do that, we really need to record where people go at the site,” Etzioni said. “I don’t see that as a major violation of privacy.” Critics of the practice claim the cookies are used to gather data without the consent of Web surfers.

INTERNET ADDICTION: A story in the Chronicle of Higher Education talked about the work of Kimberly Young, a researcher on Internet addiction, and featured comments by Speech Communication Professor Malcolm Parks. Said Parks, who is critical of Young’s work, “There are some people out there who have some real problems with this stuff (Internet use). But those people would probably be having problems somewhere else if the Internet didn’t exist. The Internet is the symptom, not the disease.” Parks made similar comments when contacted by the New York Times about another study involving 14 people who overused the Internet. “Based on 14 cases, I don’t know that we’d conclude much of anything,” he said. “The question is, could you find 14 people equally weird who didn’t use the Internet?”

Newmakers is a periodic column reporting on the coverage of the University of Washington by the national press and broadcasting services. ¶