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"The thing about memes is that through repetition, they create a shared language," says Dr. Julie Levin Russo, an adjunct assistant professor at Brown's Modern Culture & Media Program. "If you understand the premise of the meme, you can communicate a lot very easily, with whatever twist you're putting on the meme structure."

On Jan 4, the "Shit Girls Say" meme was radically transformed. New York-based graphic designer & video blogger Franchesca Ramsey a.k.a. Chescaleigh unleashed "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls", and it blew up the Internet. In the video, Ramsey plays her blonde-haired white friend who she portrays as curiously confused, and innocently ignorant. "Why isn't there a white entertainment television? The Jews were slaves too, and you don't hear us complaining all the time," Chescaleigh-as-white-girl asks the camera. Her white friend is completely unaware of fundamental cultural and racial differences between her and her black friend. It's these awkward moments that fuel the humor in this viral video.

Unemployment among youth of color is widespread & complex; can a tech education startup change things?

The White House announced new participation in a jobs initiative yesterday from fast-growing technical education website Codecademy, as well as some venerable social justice oriented organizations Level Playing Field Institute and College Bound Brotherhood, a group dedicated to increasing the number of young African American men prepared for college. Called Summer Jobs +, the program aims to get young poor and marginalized people into paid technical training programs over Summer vacation.

It's an ambitious effort to tackle a very complicated problem. It's going to be a lot easier said than done.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is used for styling your site. It gives a wide variety of options, allowing you to change the size and style of fonts, colors, images and the positioning of elements on the page.

Identifying an element in CSS can be done in a number of ways. You can affect all instances of a tag, such as paragraphs, headers or links. You can also be much more specific by using an ID or a class.

So what's the difference between an ID and a class?

Two years ago, ethnographer danah boyd had the blogosphere abuzz with her look at class-based divisions between teens on MySpace and Facebook. The esteemed Microsoft researcher found that Facebook's collegiate origins encouraged a group of slightly more educated mainstream community members. Meanwhile, MySpace encouraged self-expression and the organizing of subcultures. boyd's latest paper entitled, "White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook" suggests that those same origins also propel race-based divisions. She likens the mass teen migration from MySpace to Facebook to "white flight".

Skip the lecture, download the podcast. That's probably not what university professors tell their students, but perhaps they should. New psychological research conducted by Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, shows that students who only listened to podcasts of lectures achieved substantially higher exam results than those who attended class in person.

The 20th century news and stock ticker used to be one of the most archetypal images of newsrooms all around the world. It was timely and exciting, if a bit impersonal, for editors to watch the wires for breaking news from the big news syndicates and select stories to run in the local paper. That ticker doesn't print everything out any more, though, and a constant stream of news is something that millions of consumers now see for themselves inside their RSS feed readers.

How are newspapers adapting to digital syndication? Today the Associated Press announced that more than 500 newspapers are using their service called the AP Member Marketplace. To web savvy consumers, the Marketplace might look like an RSS reader that publishes selected stories to a webpage built out of Del.icio.us badges. It's a pretty interesting program.