Brazil topped the list of active countries on Facebook in a recent report from SocialBakers. The U.S., Spain, Colombia and Mexico also made the top 10 list.  Although the U.S. is the most “populous” country represented on Facebook, the report focused on high activity to Facebook pages: The report noted:

Our findings show that Pages in Brazil publish the most number of posts out of all Facebook countries. More than 800 Pages that we monitored kept their Facebook walls busy with almost 86 thousand posts per month!

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According to a campaign currently warning against the dangers of texting and driving, Latino teens may be more at risk than other groups:

What is surprising though is that Hispanics engage in this dangerous behavior of texting while driving in higher numbers than other ethnic groups.  Whereas 97% of all teens say that texting while driving is dangerous (with three out of four saying it is very dangerous), 78% of Hispanic teens say that texting while driving is common among their friends. 

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By Dr. Roberto R. Calderón, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas Texas’s future Latino majority is already reflected in its known current and projected public school enrollments. These numbers are widely available. A brief analysis of these numbers reveals the basic contours of Texas’s current and near-term future ethnic demographic changes. The state’s prosperity resides in the near- and long-term success of its Latino public school students.… more

This cool graphic from Upworthy shows ethnicities by region, state, city. As to be expected, much of the Southwest is Mexican or Hispanic. The image challenges the idea of a melting pot, at least, showing how the melting pot actually is a collection of clusters. Do you think this will change? Especially given how the Latino population is projected to grow in the future?… more

STEMinist did an interesting profile on Dr. Mary (María) Fernández, who currently works as Assistant Vice President, Information and Software Systems Research. She told STEMinist that she was attracted to the newness of computer science when she went to school:

 My first professor was Andres van Dam, who is a luminary of computer science in the US. He was an astonishing, fantastic teacher, who said all sorts of crazy things, like everyone will have a computer in their home someday and computers will be so small we will carry them around in our pockets.

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You may or may not know it, but you have a potential archive in your house. That pile of photos or newspapers in your garage may hold the key for a future historian to understand the way Latinos became a political force in Texas or how Latinos became a powerful demographic in Nebraska. The point is, archives are what academics and historians use to talk about the past, and in turn, understand the present. In order to understand how Latinos fit into this picture, I asked an historian very familiar with Latino archives about how anyone can create an archive — and why they should.… more

Adriana Ocampo said she grew up playing an astronaut instead of with dolls. And throughout all of her moves from her native Colombia to Argentina and finally the U.S., she worked towards the goal she had to work with NASA. Since 1988 she’s been at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. and answers letters from little girls in both English and Spanish. This is part of her work to mentor Latinas and girls in science, formalized in a group she works with called Latina Women of NASA.… more

A story in “Diverse: Issues In Higher Education” attempts to explain why it is that there are so few Latinos, and blacks, in the upper echelons of academia. Some of the explanation is obvious: racism. But the report is very detailed and gives a lot of nuance to this issue. The numbers are pretty dismal:

A 2011 report from the National Center for Education Statistics stated that, in fall 2009, 6.6 percent of faculty members were Black, 6 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander and 4 percent were Hispanic at all institutions, including historically Black colleges and universities.

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How can Latino parents interest their children in STEM? Here are a few suggestions from Jean Rockford Aguilar-Valdez, a doctoral student studying equity in science education and a former science teacher. Read this post in its entirety here.

1. Introduce children (and yourself) to Latino role models in STEM, and emphasize that it isn’t just old white males (usually with crazy hair and a lab coat) who are making a difference in STEM.
2. Connect the knowledge shared in the family in cooking, farming, home repair, car repair, health, nutrition, etc.

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Technology has become remarkably portable in the span of a single decade. We can now interact with billions of people seamlessly, but are these portable machines liberating us, or are we tethered to them like dogs to a leash? We’re part of a shrinking world. Globalization has forged uncountable bridges across the seas and land between places. Right now, somebody in Moscow is pirating a movie filmed and released in Mexico. People across the world engage in video games for fun or competition constantly.… more