TED Blog

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TED News in Brief: EyeWire looks to 100K users, Chaz Ebert conducts a review experiment, and more Posted: 10 Dec 2013 12:10 PM PST Join EyeWire, a game to map the brain, from Sebastian Seung’s lab at MIT (watch his TED Talk). The game’s one-year anniversary is today, Dec. 10, and they’d love to hit their goal of 100,000 players. Jump in. The new book, Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture from Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden (watch their TED Talk, “What we learned from 5 million books”), is coming out later this month. Here, a short profile of their Ngram Viewer in The New York Times. Onstage in 2011, Chaz Ebert spoke the words of her husband Roger Ebert’s beautiful TED Talk. Last week at TEDWomen, she was reminded of an experiment she and Roger talked about a few times. They’d both wondered: Do film reviewers who are women share a noticeably different sensibility, or a different tone, from men? This week on RogerEbert.com she’s booked a slate of women to review new and classic films. Read and decide. The results of the latest PISA survey, a comparative test of 15-year-old students around the world (watch Andreas Schleicher’s TED Talk about it), were released on Dec. 3. Read this great analysis of the results. (Why is Finland falling in the rankings?) Or sample the test questions yourself and ask — are you smarter than a 15-year-old? Forbes’ kind of awesome headline for their article on our latest conference: TEDWomen Shows ‘Binders of Women’ Not Needed To Find Talented Tech Thinkers After three years as the head of RISD, John Maeda (watch any of his three TED Talks) is leaving in January to take a new job, as design director at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, reports Tech Crunch. At KPCB, he’ll work with John Doerr (watch his talk). Maeda explains the move in the announcement above. What do dogs think? Laurie Santos wants to know. Known for her work on monkey intelligence (watch her TED talk), this week Santos opens the Canine Cognition Center at Yale. At the center, local dogs of all breeds can drop by and play games that test their cleverness and ability to learn — and that might offer insight into how humans learn, too. Svante Pääbo (watch his TED Talk) would like to introduce you to Homo heidelbergensis, a humanlike species who lived 400,000 years ago. Pääbo and collaborators have reconstructed a nearly complete mitochondrial genome of this ancient ancestor — the oldest humanlike DNA yet recovered. Read the abstract. Edge.org continues its HeadCon 2013 with video from Nicholas Christakis (watch either of his two TED Talks) Check out his thoughts on The Science of Social Connection. And finally, Denise Morrison — who spoke at TEDWomen last week — shares with Bustle.com “3 Things You Need to Know About Your Career Right Now.”

Gallery: A school and a clinic, built from compressed clay Posted: 10 Dec 2013 08:19 AM PST Kéré designed a primary school for the village of Gando in Burkina Faso in 1999. With the help of residents of the village, construction was completed in 2001. The school’s walls are made from compressed clay, and the ceiling is made of corrugated metal on a steel truss to let air flow freely. The school has three classrooms, separated by shaded outdoor spaces. Photo: Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk Diébédo Francis Kéré grew up in a small village in Gando, Burkina Faso, before heading to Germany to study architecture. And as a student there, he came up with a very ambitious project.Diébédo Francis Kéré: How to build with clay... and community “I wanted to open up better opportunities to other kids in Gando. I wanted to use my skills to build a school. But how do you do that when you’re still a student and don’t have money?” he says in this moving talk. “Fundraising was not an easy task. I even asked my classmates to spend less money on coffee and cigarettes, and sponsor my school project.” Amazingly, in just two years, Kéré raised $50,000. To hear how he rallied his village to help with the construction of the school — and how he got them to accept his very out-of-the-box idea to construct it out of compressed clay — watch this incredible talk. Below, see more images of the primary school that Kéré and his village built, as well as the school extension they completed seven years later. Also, take a look at the school’s teacher housing and Kéré’s most recent project, a health center in what he’s dubbed “Opera Village.” A look inside one of the primary school’s three classrooms. After Gando’s school was built, two neighboring villages were inspired to build their own schools. Photo: Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk A group of women and girls enjoy the shade outside the primary school. After the building was finished, local authorities opted to pay for the teaching staff. Photo: Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk One of the challenges of Gando’s school: attracting talented teachers to the rural location. And so, the village built six homes for teachers and their families, which are arranged in an arc to the south of the school. Construction was completed in 2004. Photo: Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk A detailed look at the roof of the teachers’ housing. The barrel vaults are made of compressed clay and corrugated steel. Photo: Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk By 2007, more than 280 students from Gando and its surrounding villages had enrolled at the primary school, and the community realized that it needed more room. Once again, the community contributed to building an extension, working with their hands to created the colorful windows and vaulted ceiling. The building was completed in 2008. Photo: Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk A group of children takes a break under a mango tree outside the Gando school extension. Photo: Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk Here, a new project: When a large section of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, was washed away in a flood — a section where Christoph Schlingensief had been planning to build an “Opera House for Africa” — Kéré dreamed up the idea for “Opera Village,” a way to help the people who lived there rebuild. The site, which is under construction now, will contain a theater, an arts school and many guest houses. This is a look at the new health clinic on the site. Photo: Francis Kéré Here, a look at the beautiful façade of the health clinic at Opera Village in Laongo, Burkina Faso. Photo: Francis Kéré