On Saturday, April 19, RPI lacrosse hosted St. Lawrence. Both teams came into the game recognizing the playoff implications that it held with RPI being ranked third in the league and St. Lawrence fourth. The Engineers, having lost their last two Liberty League matchups, were looking for a win to solidify themselves as the third seed in the Liberty League tournament. Read more...

Like any other RPI student, I have a lot on my plate on a day to day basis. I’ve got The Poly every Tuesday and Sunday, and fraternity business scattered throughout the week, in addition to a voluminous amount of class work. Don’t get me wrong; I love what I do, but I feel like I never have time for exercise. And I believe that exercise is an integral part of a healthy and well rounded life. Read more...

I was recently afforded the opportunity to try something new. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went with some friends to the Shining Rainbow in Albany. I was told it was Chinese, and it was good, which was all I needed. However, what I came to find during my lunch was that not only would this meal be very foreign experience, but one of the best I’ve had. Read more...

After splitting its first two doubleheaders with Plattsburgh State and the University of Rochester last Thursday and Friday, respectively, Rensselaer’s softball team swept the Rochester Institute of Technology at Doris Robison Field on Saturday April 19. Neither game was very close as RPI jumped out to a big lead early in both contests. With the two wins, the Engineers advance to 16-10 overall and 6-2 in the Liberty League while RIT falls to 4-18 overall and 2-6 against conference opponents. Read more...

One of the newest members of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Bioinformatics department is Dr. Catherine Royer. Joining the community last September, Dr. Royer was eager to do research at RPI. With a keen interest in proteins, she has spent the last 10 years doing different things with proteins and trying to understand how they have evolved, their structure, their stability and dynamics, and how they react and respond to each other. In her previous work, Dr. Royer states that she has not gotten bored or tired of working with them. Read more...

It appears that high profile entertainment acts are finally beginning to return to the Capital District, and I have high hopes that this will eventually trickle down to the RPI campus. Read more...

RPI’s very own David Vorick ’14 and Luke Champine ’13 have spent their time out of class founding Sia, a startup company with the aim of developing a superior form of cloud storage. The concept of Sia is simple and powerful. Instead of centralizing the massive hard-drive space needed to market online storage, Sia distributes its clients’ storage needs to a host of users, each of whom volunteer their own local disk space in exchange for payment. This model is beneficial in many ways: it outsources hardware costs to users, increases security by distributing files across many storage devices, and minimizes prices by providing a free marketing setting. Anybody with a hard drive and internet connection can join the network and immediately have paying customers. Read more...

This week’s athletes of the week are senior shortstop Tori Hunt and sophomore catcher Taylor Ten Eyck of softball. Read more...

On Friday, April 18, Richard Mastracchio ’87 was featured on the large screen in the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center while he answered questions from students. This all was done while he was freely floating, for he was speaking from outside of our world. Mastracchio is currently stationed on the International Space Station which hangs in low-earth orbit 250 miles above our heads. Read more...

Hey, everyone! Adjusting to the role of Grand Marshal has been exciting, and busy. Beyond my Senate duties, this weekend I joined the RPI Players for their final work party of the semester to help them finish the set for their upcoming performance, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The musical is in its final production stages, and will open its doors this Friday at 8 pm. I also had the privilege of attending the Rensselaer Music Association’s Annual Spring Concert in EMPAC. As an instrumental musician, it was great to watching so many fantastic performances; great job to everyone on RMA! Read more...

Tuesday, April 15

• Blitman Residence Commons Read more...

Today is the last day to apply to be a member of the Executive Board. Therefore, in my article, I would like to tell you a little about the E-Board and what an E-Board representative does. Read more...

Thank you for all of the time and energy that you’ve put into the election-related investigation, I personally appreciate being kept informed. There is nothing more important to a democracy than a well informed electorate, and as such, I would like to thank you and the members of RPI TV for your service. In the days of 24-hour cable “news,” it’s easy to consider journalism a dying art, but I’ve been happy to see throughout the proceedings of these past weeks, that isn’t true. You have restored my faith in journalism and I hope your actions will inspire others to join your ranks, and to spread the truth. Read more...

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Student Government has been recently impacted by an issue involving its highest elected members. These events directly impacted the Grand Marshal Week 2014 elections, and additionally the RPI campus as a whole. The entire issue surrounded the vote on amendments to the Rensselaer Union Constitution. These proposed amendments sharply divided campus and campus leaders. The changes included making the director of the Union an officer of the Union, changing human resource procedures, and altering the makeup of the Executive Board. Read more...

The staff of The Poly has made every attempt to remain unbiased and report vanilla news throughout the recent scandal. Before the incident, however, we released positive, editorial pieces on the officials involved—our endorsements of Charles Carletta ’14, Gretchen Sileo ’14, and Frank Abissi ’15 for their respective positions. After reviewing and discussing the situation, the Editorial Board decided to reconsider our endorsement motions, and in doing so, we have voted to retroactively not endorse any candidate, GM or PU during the 2013 elections and endorse no PU during the 2014 elections. With this decision, the previously printed endorsements have been declared void and effectively nullified. Read more...

If you’ve ever read any of my reviews, you’ve probably realized at least one thing: I really, really love movies. Maybe you’ve also picked up on the fact that I love superhero movies, animated movies, and pretentious, highbrow drama films (yes, I’m very guilty of that).There is one genre that I particularly love, that I may not have gotten into much outside of my reviews of the aforementioned superhero movies, and that is the action movie genre. Now, some of my favorite action films include foreign martial arts movies, such as Ip Man, Drunken Master, Enter the Dragon and Hero. I love martial arts choreography, as it always stuns me that there are actual people who can move that fast and hit that hard. However, these films tend to only have hand-to-hand fighting, and as much as I love that, that’s not the only thing that makes a good action movie. The Matrix showed us that a brilliant action film combines excellent martial arts choreography with intricate set pieces and explosive gunplay. I’ll be the first to admit that the genre hasn’t seen much groundbreaking work since The Matrix, though. That is, until director Gareth Evans burst onto the scene in 2011 with the Indonesian film The Raid: Redemption. Here was a film that had some of the most inventive and exhilarating action and fight scenes that anyone had seen in a long time. With genre aficionados’ hopes sky high, does The Raid 2: Berandal live up to its predecessor? The answer is a resounding yes. Read more...

On Saturday, April 12, RPI baseball hosted Union College for a doubleheader of Liberty League action. This matchup looked to be a good one as RPI entered the weekend with a record of 14-6 while Union began the series 9-4-1. Read more...

On Monday, April 14, the Student Senate’s Rules and Elections Committee released the results for most of the positions for this year’s Grand Marshal Week elections. Kyle Keraga ’15 was elected 149th Grand Marshal, while Erin Amarello ’15 becomes our 125th President of the Union. Turn-out was at record levels, with a little over 60 percent of the student body voting in the elections. Read more...

The Internet is a phenomenal innovation. I’m able to access a plethora of academic resources with the touch of my fingers, and it provides an immediate means of communication with friends and acquaintances. This lets me get ahead in my studies and stay close to my friends back at home. Skype, Gmail—you name it, I use it. However, this proves to be a double-edged sword for society’s behavior. Read more...