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News Blog

MIIS Hosted the Second TEDxMonterey on Friday

The second iteration of TEDxMonterey, an independent…colloquium? symposium? presentation?…gathering of ideas, let's call it, began like any good intellectual discourse or inquiry would: With questions. What is innovation? How do we apply it to these days? Beryl Levinger spoke early during the all-day affair, on "Questioning: A Subversive Act." Then the Monterey Institute of International Studies organizers unfurled a tapestry of speakers and performers across the Irvine Auditorium stage, including Julio Toribio Kancho ("Martial Arts & the Warriors Way"), Margarita Quihuis ("Collective Action for Revolutionaries") and the Shinsho-Mugen Daiko drummers.

Though tickets, free this year courtesy of the Clara Yu Fund for Innovation and the MIIS Digital Media Commons, were all spoken for, people filtered in and out between presentations and video screenings, leaving a healthy amount of rotating empty seats. The theme, Cultivating Innovation, was reflected in the organizers' use of technology.

The proceedings were interpreted into five languages on the fly by a roster of MIIS students. Jean Han, a MIIS translation student who speaks English and Korean, was listening to the presentations live in English and listening to the translation through a remote earphone device, at the same time, in order to evaluate the translation for her own improvement. The entire event was streamed live by AMP Public Access Media, with as many as 160 people following online. But a sticky slide show controller and remote voting devices that didn't work also reflected one of the facets of innovation: errors occur.

But it didn't seem to get in the way of the progressive messages and optimistic content being championed. Dan Fernandez gave a slide show presentation, "From Fog to Water: A Coalescence of Tiny Drops," about the use of special mesh nets that capture moisture from fog in places with little precipitation but a population who need water. He showed a video of a man in Nepal explaining the breakdown, in liters, of how the captured water is used in his village. Big Sur is home to three experimental versions.

Video footage from the big TED Conference, which took place last month, was screened, including Mick Ebeling and his team's invention of reading glasses that allow paraplegic people to write and draw—an invention that they gave away for free by releasing the specs and the source code so people could replicate it.

F. Noel Perry, whom TEDxMonterey curator Maureen Fura says was quoted by Bill Gates at the big TED, was a victim of technology failure at the beginning of his presentation when the voting devices passed out to the audience (which included a little boy eager to vote) did not register responses to Perry's pop quiz on the California budget. But Perry was prepared and forged on, abetted by a smooth working series of illustrative slides and his passion for the subject.

The six-plus-hour event, which will be re-webcast at tedxmonterey.org and broadcast on AMP Public Access Media in a "couple of months," was broken up with a free lunch, a snack break, and ended with a happy hour at, according to event's program, Peter B's. With the innovative ideas and the motivated intellects and doers brought together by TEDxMonterey, that happy hour cocktail may foment for a long time—years even.