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...

I’ll preface this review by saying that if you’ve seen any Wes Anderson movie and not enjoyed it, then I can’t recommend this movie to you. You might as well stop reading now and ignore this film. However, if you are a fan or have not seen any of his films, then I cannot recommend this enough. Anderson has continually been perfecting his craft to deliver film treats that are truly unique from any other filmmaker. Read more...

During the week of April 6–11, the Grand Marshal Week Committee held many events. Three different t-shirts were revealed over the week, with free wings from The Ruck offered with the purchase of a t-shirt on some of the days. Dozens of clubs and fraternities held events and fundraisers, including Alpha Phi Omega, Colleges Against Cancer, Habitat for Humanity, Pi Kappa Alpha, Pi Lambda Phi, Red & White, Rensselaer Christian Association, RPI Crew, Sheer Idiocy, Rensselaer Music Association, Rensselaer Outing Club, Rensselaer Pride Alliance, RPI Quidditch, Tau Beta Pi, and weR. GM Week is a long-standing tradition at RPI. This year, it was Viking-themed. Members of the committee wore Viking-themed headdresses. Read more...

If there is one element of society (besides teenagers) who keep up with the latest technology, it’s the advertisement industry. This business is working hard to create advertisements that people will watch in their entirety, rather than simply mute or click away from. There are a lot of types of ads, and I’ll go into a few different ones, but first—YouTube. YouTube has a feature that I’m sure many of you have seen where longer ads are shown–the caveat—you can bypass the ad after a few seconds. This relatively new feature highlights an important trend in advertisements—making people find those ads enjoyable. Read more...

This Earth Day, April 22, from 1–5 pm, EcoLogic will be hosting its annual EarthFest event to celebrate the environment. EarthFest is a time for environmental clubs and outside organizations to get involved and showcase what they’re doing for the environment. Some clubs that traditionally attend and are environmentally geared are the Green Greeks, Hey Red, Go Green, Engineers for a Sustainable World, Engineers Without Borders, Student Sustainability Task Force, Terra Café, and Vasudha. Each of these clubs will have a table and will be promoting their environmental goals, some tables will have activities that attendees can participate in. Read more...