'U.S. News' ranks JHU at No. 16, Engineering at No. 14

It's had its ups and downs over the years, but most of them have been small; in general, Hopkins has held strong in its mid-positioning on U.S. News and World Report's annual ranking of the top 25 national universities. For 2001, the magazine puts Hopkins at No. 16, in a tie with Brown, its partner last year at No. 15.

The top spots were held by repeaters from 2000: Princeton at No. 1, Harvard and Yale tied at No. 2 and Cal Tech at No. 4. MIT, which last year held the remaining top-five spot, is joined there by Stanford and Penn.

In the rankings of best undergraduate engineering programs among schools whose highest degree is a Ph.D., Hopkins lands at No. 14, tied with Northwestern and Penn State. In 1999, the last time this category was carried, the program also tied for 14th, up from a tie for 17th in 1995 and 1996, the only two times previously that undergraduate engineering had been ranked.

In engineering specialties, JHU landed at No. 1 in biomedical engineering, the first time BME has been ranked.

Condoleezza Rice to give Rostov Lecture at SAIS

Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser and assistant to President George W. Bush for national security affairs, is scheduled to give the annual Rostov Lecture on International Affairs at SAIS on Tuesday, Sept. 11. Rice, who most recently was provost at Stanford University, is expected to give a talk titled "Foreign Policy Under the Bush Administration."

Established in 1990, the Rostov Lecture on International Affairs honors the memory of Johns Hopkins alumnus and businessman Charles Rostov. Audio of Rice's lecture will be available online at www.sais-jhu.edu after Sept. 11.

Hopkins, Technion meet for first joint biomedical symposium

Leading biomedical scientists and engineers from Johns Hopkins and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology will share information about important avenues of research during a symposium Tuesday and Wednesday in Clark Hall on the Homewood campus.

Top researchers and administrators from the School of Medicine and the Whiting School of Engineering will welcome about 16 visitors from Israel's leading center for applied scientific and technological research and education. The event was organized in the wake of an agreement adopted last year by Johns Hopkins and the Technion, calling for joint medical science and biomedical engineering research projects and an exchange of faculty members and students.

Among the participants in the symposium will be Lior Gepstein, one of the leaders of a Technion team that recently reported that it had grown the precursors to human heart cells from human embryonic stem cells. Other speakers will discuss their research in leading-edge areas such as computational medicine, tissue and cell engineering, image-guided surgery and medical robotics.

Libraries to sponsor forum on science publishing alternatives

Scientists, scholars and researchers confronting the impact of electronic publishing and the Internet on scientific and scholarly research and publication are invited to join the discussion at an upcoming Hopkins Libraries-sponsored forum.

This forum will address such questions as whether publishing in an electronic journal as opposed to an established print journal hurts or helps chances for tenure and whether cost is a barrier to online access to the scientific record.

David E. Schulenburger, provost of the University of Kansas, and Jim Neal, former dean of university libraries and current vice president of information services and university librarian at Columbia, will lead a panel discussion from 2 to 4 p.m. on Oct. 1 in the West Lecture Room, Woods Basic Science Building, JHMI. For more information, go to www.welch.jhu.edu/publish/pls.html.

AICGS scholar takes first look at influential e-commerce group

A consortium of business leaders from around the globe has been working quietly to face some of the more nettlesome questions raised by the explosion of global e-commerce. This month it meets in Tokyo and will tackle such issues as cyber security, e-government, taxation over the Web, cyber ethics and the digital divide.

Maria Green Cowles, the Robert Bosch Foundation Research Scholar at the university's American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, has recently completed the first scholarly look at this organization, the Global Business Dialogue on e-Commerce, and says it is poised to play an influential role in such issues as Internet taxation, intellectual property disputes and privacy.

"The GBDe represents the global cooperation of companies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania," Cowles wrote in her study, Who Writes the Rules of E-Commerce? "As such, the GBDe might serve as a 'prototype for addressing globalization' and the ways in which firms and governments interact in the future."

GBDe members, who include industry leaders such as Steve Case, AOL Time Warner chairman, are "at the forefront of new technologies, engaged in the global marketplace and holding tremendous expertise in e-commerce issues," Cowles writes. "This expertise, along with the sheer market dominance of these companies, renders them 'authoritative.'"

Cowles' complete paper is available at www.aicgs.org/publications/PDF/cowles.pdf.