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.… more

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

A new study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly found that Latino and African American males scored the lowest on 10th grade math and science tests while Asians, particularly male Asians, scored the highest. The study examined 10th grade year-end tests in math and science at five Philadelphia, Pennsylvania high schools with diverse populations.
According to a report:
The researchers took family income and education levels into account, finding that white students in the sample were much more likely to come from higher-income families with greater parental education and more books in the home, despite living in the same neighborhoods and attending the same schools as their peers from other ethnic groups.… more

A study from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) in the United Kingdom titled, “Who Matters Online: Measuring influence, evaluating content and countering violent extremism in online social networks” has examined the problem of extremists using social media.
Utilizing white supremacists in the United States as an example, the study isolated several factors that people can use to measure who is worth “keeping an eye on” when it comes to extremism on social media.… more

A recent data set released by the Pew Research Hispanic Center allows us to look at the dominance of the Mexican vote, the crawl to Puerto Rican statehood, and the issues that the Hispanic population present to the U.S. economy. We strongly encourage reading the linked part one and part two of this series of articles for additional context.
1.) There is no such thing as “the Latino vote.”
Yep, there is no Latino vote. It’s simply the Mexican vote as far as national politics are concerned.… more

The Pew Hispanic Center recently released data on the Latino population in the U.S. The first of Más Wired’s look at the Pew Center’s massive data release, we focused on population data and other demographics. Now we are going to look at education and economics.
When talking about immigrants, there is always the issue of language. Language can help create distinct divisions in the culture of a nation, and be a source of resentment among the established population. In some locals like Canada, entire regions of a country can be left speaking a different language, and living in a different culture, than the majority of the country.… more

A study from the National Center for Educational Statistics recently looked at the educational attainment of Latino and Asian immigrants, and undergraduates who had immigrant parents. The study compiled data from the 2007-2008 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study.
The study, “New Americans in Postsecondary Education,” found that immigrants’ educational attainment rates lag behind the native-born U.S. population.
According to the study about 23% of all undergraduates were immigrants, 10%, or had an immigrant parent, 13%.… more

A recently published paper by Microsoft employees is taking a close look at Twitter usage during the Mexican drug wars.
The paper, “The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare,” written by Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Danah Boyd, Emre Kiciman, Munmun De Choudhury, and Scott Counts analyzes hashtag use by people in four cities in Mexico, tweet volume in periods of peace and violence, as well as an analysis of the rise of civilian public information officers in the Twitter world.… more

This post is republished with permission from Latinopia.com.
I live on the Internet, so, sometimes my perspective on things can be a bit warped. How some people have managed to avoid Facebook and Twitter escapes me, for example, but then again not everyone works in the media industry. But, being that I do occupy the digital space so often, there’s a very stark and obvious problem that I frequently encounter: just like real life, Latinos are not as populous online.
Let me define what I mean a bit more.… more