Personal computers are loaded with toxic materials as dangerous to dispose of as the messy pile of paint cans and solvents in the corner of the garage. With more than 315 million computers expected to become obsolete by the year 2004, storage space is running out. Many companies and homeowners are starting to take out the electronic trash, and that concerns environmentalists.read full story

If you get the Food Network TV you may have seen Iron Chef the popular cult classic in Japan and the United States.This show pits master chefs in an hour long food cooking competition. The Iron Chefs are the top chefs in the culinary fields of Japanese, Chinese, French and Italian cooking. Each week, a challenger is selected to do battle with an Iron Chef they choose. The host presents a theme ingredient and the chefs have one hour to cook. Then, four judges taste the food and pronounce winner. Its got to be the best show on the foodtv network and has even spawned unofficial fan sites.

Teresa Hudock, an original GLO charter member, proudly sent us the following announcent from the National Endowment for the Humanities: "Ten schools around the nation (including Portola Middle School, a GLO partner school) have been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants totaling $1.4 million to integrate digital technologies into their humanities curricula, NEH Chairman William R. Ferris announced today. The grants are part of NEH's Schools for a New Millennium initiative, which helps K-12 schools develop creative new ways of teaching history, literature and languages using the Internet and CD-ROMs." (click National Endowment for the Humanities site for full announcement)

As schools scramble to drop wires in classrooms and labs, an important alternative is happily making its presence felt at least on a few universities these days. Given the cost, inconvenience and complications of most lan systems, wireless will prove to be a more viable option in the not-so-distant future as companies like AT&T drop the price and increase the bandwidth. Lisa Napoli reports: "One of the most exciting things about the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore is something you can?t see. Thanks to a wireless network, students are able to connect to the Internet from anywhere in the building, at any time ? and from the comfort of their laptop computers." (more from MSNBC)

We noticed in our site analysis tools that nearly 40 percent of Netscape users coming to our site have Flash pluggins. Given the fact that Internet Explorer 5.0 supports Flash without a pluggin, we think there's something underway that will radically change the way you are seeing the web. Leander Kahney reports, "Not so long ago, web designers who wanted to create fancy sites with dynamic interfaces had to take a deep breath and code their pop-up menus and glowing menu buttons in Sun's Java. But buggy Java engines, performance problems, and design tools geared toward programmers instead of graphic artists has prompted a mass exodus from Java to a once-obscure format originally intended for animators: Macromedia's Flash." (more from Wired)

Not everyone in the world is adopting the US regulatory approach to shielding children from the web's harmful ways. Few countries have adopted anything nearly as comprehensive as the Child Online Privacy Protection Act. Manny Frishberg reports, "...considering the European community's generally greater willingness to ban 'dangerous ideas' such as neo-Nazi propaganda, the European Commission has shunned efforts to regulate content in favor of a policy centered around parent education and a network of hotlines where people can report illegal and indecent websites or newscottroups." (more from Wired)

Welcoming GLO visitors from Poland, Greece, Mexico, Japan, the UK, Canada, Denmark and all across the USA. From wherever you may be connecting, click the Post a Comment link below left, and leave us a short hello in whatever language you feel most comfortable writing. We look forward to hearing from you.

Tom Campbell, Digital High School Coordinator from Bell HS near Los Angeles, sends us the following note: 'According to a new survey, "Teacher Use of Computers and the Internet in Public Schools," released today by the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, teachers with more than 32 hours of professional development are twice as likely to use computers as are teachers with no such training. The survey also showed that teachers working in high-poverty schools have less access to these technologies than teachers serving primarily more affluent students. Thirty-two percent of teachers in high-poverty schools say they use computers or the Internet "a lot" for creating instructional materials, versus 52 percent in low-poverty schools. In addition, teachers with nine or fewer years of experience are more likely to report using computers than teachers with 10 or more years in the classroom.' (for the entire survey, connect to the National Center for Education Statistics)

A mosquito bite is always a nuisance, but for a million Africans a year--most of them children--it is the kiss of death. Malaria, the mosquito-borne disease which threatens not only millions of Africans, but also tourists venturing further abroad, has brought leaders of 48 African nations to a gathering in the Nigerian capital Abuja where they are holding the first regional summit to combat the disease. They are there to promote "Roll Back Malaria," a program which aims to cut the 1 million annual deaths from the disease in half by 2010. (more from ABC News)

"The reality is I do too much computer servicing," said Paul Reese, a former fourth grade teacher who is now a staff developer for Project Smart, a New York city education technology initiative. "I went into a first grade class and the teacher and the paraprofessional said the computers weren't working. I probably spent two and a half hours fixing that. I was a technician for the afternoon." (more from the New York Times)