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TED News in Brief: Wired profiles Sugata Mitra, while Andrew Bird plays a concert for the National Parks

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Peter Yang photographs 12-year-old Paloma Noyola Bueno, in a profile about how her life was impacted by TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra.

Peter Yang photographs 12-year-old Paloma Noyola Bueno for <em>Wired</em>’s profile about how her life was impacted by TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra.

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

A fascinating new article in Wired takes a look at 12-year-old Paloma Noyola Bueno, a schoolgirl in Mexico whose classroom got an intense shake-up from teacher Sergio Juárez Correa, with incredible results. So what inspired Correa to rethink how a classroom should run? Apparently, TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra (watch his talk on the School in the Cloud) and his bold idea that, given an encouraging atmosphere, kids are able to teach themselves incredibly advanced concepts.

Musician Andrew Bird (watch his TED Talk) hosted “The Quietest Show on Earth” last week at Joshua Tree National Park to support the National Parks Association. The show went on, even despite the US government shutdown.

As of today, the International Herald Tribune has become the International New York Times. And new members of the editorial board include TED speakers Mustafa Akyol and Young-ha Kim.

The Fifth Estate, a new film about Julian Assange (watch his talk) and WikiLeaks, and co-produced by Participant Media (watch founder Jeff Skoll’s talk) will be released this Friday,

Phil Hansen is hard at work on another crowd-sourced art piece. This time he is asking: How has philanthropy changed your community? Hansen is collecting answers now and painting them into a piece called the Art of Philanthropy, to be unveiled on October 30 to celebrate the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100th anniversary. In the past 24 hours, Hansen has gotten contributions from people in 30 countries, including an anecdote from Elton John.

The language-learning website Duolingo lets people learn a new language while helping to translate the web. (Watch Luis von Ahn’s TED Talk about it.) According to Technology Review, the site will soon be rolling out a language incubator that offers up languages like Dothraki and Elvish as options. Speaking of Dothraki, make sure to read this interview with David Peterson about how he created the language.

The New York Times takes a look at what makes content go viral on Upworthy.com, a site for sharing forward-looking videos and graphics. The site was co-founded by Eli Pariser (watch his talk on online “filter bubbles”), and its rules for writing great headlines are unmissable.

Candy Chang is about to launch a book based on her Before I Die I Want To … project. (Watch her talk about it.) See images from the book, or pre-order it.

The website Hello, tailor has uncovered a TEDxPacificPalisades talk from Kristin Burke, the costume designer hard at work on the new Sleepy Hollow TV series. In the write-up, the author defends the choose to have lead character Ichabod Crane, a time-traveler in the series, wear the same costume episode-after-episode.