Recent News

August 26, 2011

  • Pugwash's meetings of the Fall 2011 semester will take place at 5:30pm on Tuesdays, in BH235A.
  • Pizza will be served at each meeting.
  • Meeting topics and other information will be sent out to our d-list

October 24, 2010

  • Pugwash's next meeting of the Fall 2010 semester will be at 4:30pm on Tuesday, October 26, in Warner Hall CCR East. As usual, there will be pizza.
  • One pugwasher has re-suggested the idea of copyright as a meeting topic, particularly as it relates to filesharing. We discussed intellectual property in general a few weeks ago, but there's much more here to talk about. So that there is less overlap with our previous meeting, let's start off by thinking about filesharing after the coming 3d-printing revolution.

    In case you're still interested in other viewpoints on copyright, here is the article that was suggested.

September 22, 2010

  • Pugwash's third meeting of the Fall 2010 semester will be at 4:30pm on Wednesday, September 22, in Warner Hall CCR East. As usual, there will be pizza.
  • By popular demand, we will be discussing intellectual property this week. There have been hundreds of news stories over recent years regarding the conflict that copyright and patent laws have caused, particularly as the internet has made copying so much easier. September 2010 has already brought at least two that could be Pugwash meetings by themselves.

    The first is the case of senate candidate Sharron Angle, who republished two news articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Noticing the copyright infringement, the company Righthaven did what it always does: it bought the rights to the articles and filed a lawsuit, claiming copyright violation even though Righthaven weren't the work's original authors.

    The second is the publication by the United States Patent Office of their data visualization dashboard, along with the admission that the patent application process is in far worse disarray than the Bush administration had led us to believe.

    Please bring along any other articles that may help us understand the current state of intellectual property, as well as its possible future.

September 14, 2010

  • Pugwash's second meeting of the Fall 2010 semester will be at 5:00pm on Wednesday, September 8, in Warner Hall CCR East. Please note the change in meeting time. As usual, there will be pizza.
  • For this week's meeting, we will discuss the article, Genetically modified canola "escapes" farm fields, which is about genetically modified canola cross-pollinating wild varieties. The article makes the case that genetic engineering of food crops may sometimes have unexpected consequences. For example, research is showing that 86% of wild canola in North Dakota now contains modified genes.

September 3, 2010

  • Pugwash's first meeting of the Fall 2010 semester will be at 4:30pm on Wednesday, September 8, in Warner Hall CCR East. As usual, there will be pizza.
  • The topic of discussion will be a story in which a college student ended up being arrested because of something he posted on Facebook. The message he posted contained a suspicious combination of words, which internet scanning software run by the FBI labeled as threatening. Natural language processing software is only going to get better, so this seems like a good time to ask the question of whether our government should be using it to mine social networking sites in this way.

April 6, 2010

  • Today's meeting will be in Porter A19A at 4:30

March 3, 2010

  • Today's meeting will be in Warner Hall CCR East at 4:30

February 24, 2010

  • Today we will be screening The Power of the Sun in Doherty A310 rather than our usual meeting. The time will be 6:30pm.

January 26, 2010

  • Meetings have moved to Porter Hall A19A

December 1, 2009

  • Meetings have moved back to Warner Hall CCR East

November 17, 2009

  • Meetings have moved back to Baker Hall 231 A

November 2, 2009

  • The meeting for Wednesday, November 3 2009 has been canceled.

26/10/2009

  • Meetings have moved back to Warner Hall CCR East

20/10/2009

  • Meetings have moved back to Baker Hall 231 A

15/10/2009

  • The readings archive (in Resources) is again up-to-date.
  • Meetings have tentatively moved to Warner Hall CCR East until further notice. Updates will be posted to the bboard (assocs.pugwash) and this website.

20/1/2009

  • The Spring Semester of 2009 begins for Carnegie Mellon Student Pugwash!
  • Meeting Minutes have been completely updated to reflect all archieved notes.
  • Resources (namely the Readings Archive) has been updated with some new material!
  • Please remember to check the Bboard for the most recent announcements! (assocs.pugwash).