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TED News in Brief: Chip Kidd writes a design book for kids, Young-ha Kim on spirituality in South Korea

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Chip Kidd, who spoke about book cover design at TED2012, has written a children's design manual. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Chip Kidd, who spoke about book cover design at TED2012, has written a children’s design manual. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Over the past week, we’ve noticed a lot of TED-related news items in the ether. Here, some highlights:

Chip Kidd (watch his TED Talk) has just released a new book: a how-to guide to graphic design for kids. Read The New York Times Q&A with him in which he says, “I was utterly floored [when an editor wrote me about the book idea]. I said: ‘I don’t know anything about kids. I don’t know how to talk to them effectively. I don’t have them. I don’t even like them. This puts me out of my comfort zone. And so I’ll give it a shot.’”

Meanwhile, Young-ha Kim (watch his talk) has written a great op-ed in The International New York Times about the practice of South Korean businessmen consulting spiritual advisers on their decisions.

This week, The Economist takes a look at a troubling phenomenon in science — that the results of many studies fail to be replicated — and asks a scary question: is science self-correcting? Psychologist Daniel Kahneman (watch his TED Talk) is quoted in the opening sentence saying, “I see a train wreck looming.”

Conrad Wolfram (watch his talk) is hosting a Computer-Based Maths Education Summit in New York next month, and it’s being hosted in collaboration with UNICEF. The event will address the question: “How do we improve life opportunities worldwide by rethinking the math curriculum?”

Alissa Walker of Gizmodo took inspiration from Jeff Speck’s recent TED Talk on making cities more walkable, and gathered websites, apps and initiatives designed to make walking more viable as a form of transportation. Why? Because, as she puts it, “I live in L.A., a land of 20-lane interchanges, parking lots the size of football stadiums, and mind-bending, soul-crushing, life-altering traffic … because, a half-century ago, my city decided to redesign itself for cars, not humans.”

Over at Forbes.com, contributor Erika Andersen uses Dan Gilbert’s TED Talk “The Surprising Science of Happiness” as a leaping off point for the piece “5 Ways To Get Happier — Starting Right Now.”

Julie Taymor (watch her TED Talk) is bouncing back from Spider-man with her new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring 17 fairy children and a simple flying machine. The show premieres at the new Brooklyn Theatre for a New Audience this week.

Andras Forgacs (watch his TED Talk) and his bioprinted meat got a mention in a great article via Phys.org called “The ultimate iron chef: When 3-D printers invade the kitchen.” Part of the discussion focused on whether printed meat would be considered halal, kosher or vegetarian. (See our TED Blog piece asking vegetarians if they’d eat this meat.)

Jeff Bezos (watch his TED Talk) is the subject of a new book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

And finally, the website DC.StreetsBlog.org gives a shout-out to Janette Sadik-Khan’s talk, “New York’s streets? Not so mean anymore.”