• Growing gambling problem at college. "Shannon Shorr remembers seeing emails about the dangers of gambling as a freshman at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, in 2003, but he wanted in on the poker boom. He started '$5 house games' with friends and quickly moved into Internet poker," the Christian Science Monitor reports. Lucky for him, his story is more about wins than losses, but he did lose $3,500 early on, which he admitted was an awful lot for a college student. Forty percent of 18-to-22-year-olds gambled monthly last year, it adds. "In a survey of 119 colleges, only 22% had a gambling policy, Harvard researchers found in 2005," but changing because another study, from the National Collegiate Athletic Association, "showed rampant gambling among student athletes."
• Virginia's Net-safety first. Virginia is the first US state to require online-safety instruction in its public schools, reports WDBJ 7 TV News in Richmond. The mandate "initially stemmed from concerns about sex offenders preying on children online and a general increase in Internet-based crime." Instruction has already begun. The Associated Press reports that, "nationally, Texas and Illinois are among states that have since passed their own Internet safety education laws, but unlike Virginia they don't make the courses mandatory. It took effect this school year.
• 11-year-old school network admin. A small private school in Arkansas was struggling to keep its network of 60 aging donated computers going on a shoestring budget, so one of its students helped out. "The first thing Jon found as he leapt into the role of network was that he had to map out the network to find out what was on it," NetworkWorld reports. So he simply bought some software that could do that at his local electronics store, and that helped him uncover "an ungodly amount of computer viruses and spam." Then he evaluated some more software and got things into shape. He was also being his mom's knight in shining armor - she was the school librarian and had just had "computer support" added to her duties.
• Netherlands' young phone coaches. It's kind of empowering to know that a lot of adults around the world need help learning about how to operate their cellphones. In New Zealand there's Mobile Mentors, springwise.com reports. But what makes even more sense is an initiative in the Netherlands that's "taking advantage of kids' innate cell phone proficiency by training them as 'phone coaches' and getting them to transfer their skills to older users," springwise also reports. That's kids 12-16, and "the program's goal is to improve their social skills and self-esteem, and give them access to corporate environments they might otherwise not be exposed to" (parents can do this at home by exchanging their street smarts (or life literacy) for their kids' tech literacy and have an ongoing mutually beneficial education program in place. Thanks to Susan in California for sending me a heads-up about this. About it she wrote: "My son, almost 11, thought this was a super idea. He thinks by the time he is 12 he can have a thriving business. I already use him to program my phone and everything else!"

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