On Tuesday, RPI is RPI not Rensselaer, a student- run group, held its first public meeting to discuss their mission on campus as well as their views on policy changes and campus current events. According to the website, http://www.rpiisrpi.com/ the group was recently created with the intent of organizing students and was building a public voice for their concerns regarding RPI in general. Read more...

Although a name change for the Information Technology program has not yet been finalized, there has been an outcry among the sophomore IT class about the proposed change. Assistant Dean of Information Technology and Chair of the Tetherless World Constellation Jim Hendler held a meeting on Tuesday with sophomore IT students to discuss the changes that will be publically announced in the near future—pending approval of the New York State Education Department. Read more...

“Hope is not a strategy on the plains of the Serengeti!” These are the words of David Westol, past executive director of Theta Chi fraternity, and the keynote speaker of the third Annual Greek Leadership Summit. Held last Satuday in the Great Room of the Heffner Alumni House to a full-capacity crowd, Westol delivered an excellent presentation to the active and rising greek leaders. Read more...

At RPI, it can be all too easy to ignore anything beyond the demands of your homework or your favorite video game. Despite the rigorous academic nature of being a student here, it is both your right and your responsibility to be aware of your community and to participate. As paying the student activity fee makes you a constituent of student government organizations and paying tuition makes you a customer of this institution, it is in your best interest to be informed and to speak up. Read more...

I like poetry. This is a contrast to a lot of other students at RPI; when heckling for Selections for Statler & Waldorf, I’d often get the response, “But I don’t ‘get’ poetry.” This annoys me, because poetry isn’t something you have to beat a meaning out of. Instead, it can simply be the way something sounds that makes you happy, and that’s what was displayed at Friday night’s poetry slam. Read more...

No longer does the Big Red Freakout! hold the illustrious title it once did, as the Engineers dropped their third-straight match in the annual contest, bringing the team’s winless streak to four in the event. After clinching home ice advantage in the upcoming ECAC playoffs with a stunning 5-3 victory over the Quinnipiac University Bobcats, RPI failed to deliver in a jam-packed Houston Field House, dropping a hefty 7-0 loss to the Princeton Tigers. Despite the loss, Rensselaer still has an opportunity to qualify for a first-round bye, as long as the team is able to sweep in the Finger Lakes region this upcoming weekend. Read more...

Following a lengthy review process, the Department of Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems officially changed their name to Industrial Systems Engineering this semester. Charles Malmborg, current department head of ISE, stated that this marks an important milestone in a five-year program designed to improve the department. This program began following a 2007 external review of the department, which advised either rebuilding or reorganizing the department. Read more...

Back in the November 18, 2009 issue, I wrote a controversial editorial about the faults of the intramural athletics program here at Rensselaer. Needless to say, I received some flack about it (from irate club hockey players and their girlfriends), and had a sit-down with the director of athletics, Jim Knowlton. I love the criticism and knowing that people at RPI (and other schools apparently!) take the time to actually read all the stuff I spend hours crunching away on a weekly basis (20-straight hours on layout and writing alone this past week, for example), but having a one-on-one meeting with Knowlton? I honestly thought I was not going to make it out of his beautiful new office overlooking the new football stadium at the East Campus Athletic Village alive. Read more...

I have lived in the same house, in the same city, in the same state for my entire life. So when it comes to cultural exposure, I’m quite lacking. I knew back in Massachusetts that people did different things in different ways around the country, but I didn’t quite grasp the extent of this fact until I was put into a place where different people from different cultures were placed into close living quarters. Read more...

There are few areas of campus life that the RPI community can come together for, certainly academics (or at least I’d hope), but there is something else. It boosts school spirit, builds a community, and helps define the image of our school: ice hockey. Read more...

The spirit of RPI was alive this past Saturday as a sea of red scarves and red shirts looked over the rink in the center of the Houston Field House. The results of Big Red Freakout! are best forgotten, but the excitement leading up to the game are worthy memories. The Red Army had its tailgate, while Puckman was available for photos, and fans were bedecked in scarves handed out by RPI’s Club Hockey and the Rensselaer Union’s Executive Board. Read more...

BioShock 2 was released on Tuesday of last week. It is an enjoyable game and very similar to its 2007 predecessor, but I’m sure there will be a review of it in the Features section soon. Instead, I’d like to write about the game’s setting and theme. While the central story of the game has taken a more emotional than philosophical turn this time around, it still takes place in the defunct, dystopian city of Rapture, which itself was created based on the philosophy of objectivism. Read more...

In my time at RPI, I’ve read my share of ignorant political columns in The Poly, but the College Republicans’ piece from February 10 lowered the bar even further. I have several issues with Ashlee Giacalone’s ’10 column, and, grammar and punctuation errors aside, I will attempt to succinctly lay them out below. Read more...

Last week, I talked about the significance of microexpressions and how they can reveal the true emotions people try to hide. Today, I would like to briefly explore the importance of body language. Body language is a form of non-verbal communication that consists of body positioning, body motion, and eye movement. Similar to microexpressions, body language expressions are usually subconscious and involuntary movements. Body language can reveal a person’s state of mind, even if it is not intended. Read more...

As Grand Marshal Week approaches, many RPI students, both male and female, are embarking on the campaign process with high hopes of holding office in 2010. However, it is important for the well-being of all RPI students that our student government adequately represents RPI’s female population. For this reason, 10 female students have founded Women at the Top, an initiative on campus to ensure the involvement of women in student government at RPI. Read more...

The Industrial Revolution was born in the late 1700s; however, it took the development of railroads to get it to its feet, to stitch together all the components into a functioning system. If widgets were originally made by hand, a dozen or so at a time, horse-and-wagon over muddy rutted roads would suffice to get them to market—assuming they were even distributed outside the town limits. But if an inventor or industrialist set up a factory to make them by the thousands, it does no good without a vastly larger market and supply of raw materials. Railroads could do this on a large enough scale to match the ramp-up in industrial production. Otherwise, widgets would just pile up outside the factory door. Read more...

Have you ever wondered what other colleges are like? Especially schools that are not tech schools? Well this weekend four of us got the opportunity to spend three days and two nights (crashing on the floor of a random student’s dorm) at Boston College. We were there as a part of the Real Food Challenge, a leadership training conference about food issues on college campuses. We got to meet over 30 students from other schools who, in many instances, had vastly different ways of thinking about issues than a typical RPI student. Us science-y kids tend to focus on the analytical and practical, even if by doing so we undermine the goals we are trying to reach. This weekend the four of us got to focus on how to stop worrying temporarily about about the ifs and buts and just get things done. Read more...

The concept of market failure exists within the neoclassical lassiez-faire framework, in that the economists who use it think of failed markets as exceptions to the rule that regulation of markets is undesirable. In other words, free markets are desirable in all contexts except those where market failure is likely or inevitable. Thus, our understanding of market failure defines the rightful place of government regulation of the economy. A new book, How Markets Fail, by longtime economics journalist John Cassidy, introduces this important concept. Read more...

The Black Students Alliance hosted its annual fashion show last Saturday, February 20, in the McNeil Room. The show chronicled the progression of fashion from the Roaring ’20s up to the ’90s. The models showcased styles that incorporated decade-specific details into contemporary pieces, as well as designs more strongly influenced by the individual decades. Read more...

The weekend had both its ups and downs for the women’s hockey team. Despite falling to both No. 9 Cornell University and Colgate University in the final two games of the regular season, RPI finished fifth in the league, setting up for a playoff date against the No. 4 seed Quinnipiac University this Friday and Saturday. Rensselaer, with the two losses, finishes the regular season 14-13-6 overall and 11-7-4 in ECAC action, while Cornell improves to 14-8-6 overall and 13-2-6 in the league and Colgate increases their overall record to 12-18-4 and its conference record to 8-10-4. Read more...