Pink Castle Pictures and the International Center for Professional Development (ICPD) have come together to produce a new web series aimed at getting teenagers interested in and engaged in the STEM fields. “SwivetZone” hopes to get middle school students excited about the STEM fields by telling the stories of high school students, and how they apply the things they learn in their courses to the real world, something which a lot of students might not be able to do. “We want to help ignite the spark that makes students want to learn, to ask questions, and to take on challenges,” said Scott May, executive director of the ICPD.… more

The Urban Institute, a non-partisan think tank has published a new interactive map that shows poverty density in the U.S., as well as the race of the impoverished. The new map, “Poverty and Race in America: Then and Now,” allows the map reader to examine poverty growth through race since the 1980s. It seems to show that Hispanic poverty, as well as all poverty in general, has ballooned since the 1980s and continues to grow. Overall, poverty is concentrated in the cities with minorities, though there has been growth in white poverty over time.… more

A cute, innocent commercial is making headlines for all of the wrong reasons. A white woman in a kitchen is asked by her biracial daughter if Cheerios are good for your heart. She tells her daughter that they are, and the next shot shows the father, a black man, sleeping on the couch with a bunch of Cheerios poured out on his chest. It’s cute, simple, and not even about race. It’s about selling cereal to people: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYofm5d5Xdw Yet, it’s managed to piss off a bunch of angry white trolls.… more

Immigration and tech may not seem to be intricately linked on the surface, but the current immigration reform debate in Congress and some recent data show otherwise. States where immigrants are concentrated have strong, and growing, tech sectors, and thus would likely benefit greatly from immigration reform. California and Texas ranked first and second, respectively, in tech employment, according to a recent Cyberstates report. These states also happen to be places where Latinos, and immigrants, are heavily concentrated.… more

The number of Latinos listening to online radio has almost doubled in the past year, according to a report. The Media Audit just released a report that found that a total of 32.7% of Latinos listened to the top Internet radio stations in March, that’s 4.2 million people, and they are 35% more likely to listen to Internet radio than the rest of the population. We previously wrote about how Pandora had been targeting the Latino community, whereas Spotify had basically been ignoring them.… more

Racism and homophobia on Twitter are concentrated pretty much all over the United States, according to a new mapping project that tracked racist tweets against geographic data. The Geography of Hate is a project from California focusing on the geographic centers of hate speech on Twitter. The map is part of the work by Humboldt State University’s Dr. Monica Stephens and students of her Advanced Cartography course. Using Google Maps, the researchers pulled geocoded tweets from June 2013 to April 2013 with “hate words” in them (150,000) and students classified them as negative according to a rubric, then these “hateful” tweets were used in the analysis for the map.… more

Freedom House and the International Center for Journalists (ICJ) is launching a digital and interactive map to track the attacks on journalists and bloggers in Mexico. According to a report from ICJ more than 80 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2005. Periodistas en Riesgo, Journalists at Risk, is a crowdsourced map that allows people to report assaults anonymously. You can see these reports reflected on the map or on a stream on the site, check out the map here.… more

The Boston attacks are still fresh in the minds of many. One suspect was killed in a firefight, another has been detained — and is reportedly being outfitted with a good defense team. However, there are still unresolved issues. We have no clear motive,  and the question of whether the FBI bungled it’s job are the two big questions. Despite the unresolved threads in the attacks, we have witnessed innovation in technology by bystanders and concerned persons. One of the most innovative uses of technology came in the form of crowdsourcing via “Google Person Finder.” It is not always easy to reach people during crises.… more

By Eduardo Stanley, www.eduardostanley.com FRESNO, California — On April 2, 2013, the Associated Press (AP), perhaps the biggest news agency in the world, announced it would no longer use the word “illegal” when referring to immigrants without legal residence or working permits. The announcement was made by Kathleen Carroll, Vice President and Executive Editor of AP, who explained that the change will be reflected in the organization’s influential “manual of style” — a must-have book in any news room and for any journalist.… more

Games are notorious for breeding racism. Not so much through in-game content, but through the charming player base. This is commonly looked down upon by computer players as a console player phenomena, but it is equally as common on computer games. A big part of it are national attitudes on race, given that game users can customize appearances in the games. Even if you don’t play video games much, the phenomenon of vicious gamers isn’t hard to get. Plenty of YouTube videos document it — the face of it often being a high-pitched, usually underage voice screaming homophobic slurs, or insulting your mother.… more