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TED News in Brief: EyeWire looks to 100K users, Chaz Ebert conducts a review experiment, and more

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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.”