Más Wired is co-sponsoring a Latino entrepreneur meet and greet in Austin, Texas on Thursday, May 29 and we’re very excited! We invite you, or anyone you know in the Austin area, to attend. The idea behind the meet and greet is to begin to build a community of Latino and Latina entrepreneurs — both tech and non-tech — to share opportunities. Essentially, the networking event is aimed at helping Latino and Latina entrepreneurs expand their resource pool. Co-sponsors of the event include: Capital Factory, Avinde, Texans for Economic Progress, Mando Rayo Collective, Fwd.US, Latino Startup Alliance, Mercury Mambo and Emprende.… more

Miguel Vázquez is 23 and has already founded two companies. The Mexican immigrant and his family came to Austin from Saltillo, Mexico in 2009 when they received residency visas — after 8 years of working through the immigration system. Vázquez told Más Wired he became interested in technology when he was in high school in the Austin area. One of his teachers started a computer science class, and that was where Vázquez said his life changed. “I started creating these small apps for computers, that’s where I got really interested in computer engineering.… more

DIY Girls is a non-profit aimed at helping girls become excited about engineering before they hit junior high and encourage them to become engineers and pursue careers in STEM. The organization is the brainchild of Luz Rivas, herself an MIT- and Harvard-educated engineer who started the project at the elementary school she attended in Pacoima, California and is currently running a fundraising campaign to include more elementary students, continue to mentor junior high students, and involve high school students in the program.… more

The Carlos Guerra Memorial Scholarship at Texas A&M University – Kingsville was awarded to 8 students this year, each in the amount of $500. Guerra was a longtime activist, writer, journalist, columnist and friend who died unexpectedly in 2010. The Carlos Guerra Communications and Theatre Arts Scholarship is for students at the university who first-generation college students from South Texas. The winners this year are:

• Jazmin Alvarado, senior from Pharr Communications and Spanish major.

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When people ask me what I do for a living, I reply simply: I work at at tech company. It’s funny to say because if you would have asked me before last year, I would have told you the last thing I would be doing was working in technology. But now that I’m doing it, I find that, as a woman and a Latina, the so-called “barriers” to entering the field were largely myth and all untrue. There were 3 main reasons why I thought I wasn’t smart enough to ever work in technology and initially pursued a career in journalism.… more

In Atherton, California, it appears that automobile code violations are almost entirely composed of out-of-town Hispanics – a population which seems much larger than it is by looking at these violations. The database of arrests was compiled by Kent Brewster, and pulled from the police blotter’s public records from February to June 2013 and includes “an ongoing parade of first world problems” such as loud parties, loud subjects, leaf blowers, and so on. The data is relatively bland — until one comes to the vehicle code violations section.… more

Latino students in environments built on tech and information growth are being failed by educational systems, creating a group of students who struggle with algebra — who are very unlikely to go onto college successfully, according to a report published by Joanne Jacobs, Matt Hammer and Dr. Linda Murray for Innovate Public Schools. The report, “Broken Promises: The Children Left Behind in Silicon Valley Schools” has follows five racial categories: Latino, Black, Asian, Pacific Islander, Filipino, and White.… more

Barely a day after it became public that Disney had made a move to trademark Dia De los Muertos for an upcoming Pixar film about the holiday, the company has given up the effort. A company spokesperson has stated that the effort to trademark Dia was given up as the film’s title would change. However, the backlash regarding the move was enormous — and almost instant. Many were furious that Disney had attempted to turn their culture into a piece of consumerism. The effort to fight off this cultural appropriation is certainly admirable and a testament to how the Internet can become a loudspeaker for the marginalized, however, Dia De los Muertos did not escape unharmed, and the exploitation of the holiday continues unabated — with icons and symbols being sold constantly to naive consumers at Hot Topic.… more

A new study from researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough recently found that our brains respond differently to people of different races. In the study white participants watched men of different races pick up a glass of water and take a drink. Researchers reported that, typically, when we watch people perform a task a part of our brain fires that correlates with when they themselves would perform that task. But in this study:

…participants’ motor cortex was significantly less likely to fire when they watched the visible minority men perform the simple task.

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An interesting cultural development on the Internet in China is the “human-flesh search engine.” It’s a site notorious for ripping apart people, spreading gossip, and being part of the nature of the Internet. However, is the human search engine ever going to come to the United States and other regions of the Internet? This isn’t Google-powered by corpses or anything as grotesque as it sounds. The engine is merely crowd-sourcing to acquire and disseminate information. Its functions have been numerous, with strong repercussions in the real world.… more