The Times Higher Education, a London-based higher-education magazine, recently ranked Penn the 11th-best university in the world, a three-place improvement over last year. The rankings are based on peer and employee review as well as data on the school's research output, teaching, and international orientation.

The Penn volleyball team split its Fall Break matches, losing, 3-1, at Cornell on Friday before sweeping Columbia one day later. The Quakers jumped out to an early first-set lead against the Big Red and held on for most of the set. But up, 18-13, the Red and Blue came unwound and dropped 10 of the next 12 points en route to a 25-22 Cornell win.

This week in practice, the volleyball team pitted its starters against the reserves, with the former challenged to win the set down 20-17. "We couldn't get it for the first five times, and then they started to shrivel like they did against Princeton," coach Kerry Carr said.

Who has a bye in college football? Few other than Georgetown, which enters its home game with Penn tomorrow fresh from two weeks' rest after a stomach virus outbreak forced its game against Colgate to be cancelled. Contrast that with the Quakers (1-2, 1-0 Ivy), who are a bit beaten up.

Last Saturday, Bruce Springsteen Barack-ed out for fans and politicos alike on the Ben Franklin Parkway in support of his favorite presidential candidate. As the voter registration deadline loomed in Pennsylvania, The Boss took the stage to inspire us to vote in favor of The One who was born to run, Senator Barack Obama.

Defending the GRE To the Editor: Christina Domenico's column last Wednesday was sadly misinformed about the Graduate Record Examination. Many have claimed throughout the years that GRE is useless for predicting college success or that you can't boil down someone's ability to a number.

Some coaches may look at a match between Penn and Columbia's women's soccer teams and ask: How do the Quakers plan on stopping the Lions' potent duo of Sophie Reiser and Ashlin Yahr? But Quakers coach Darren Ambrose looks at it another way: How does Columbia plan on stopping Penn's Sarah Friedman, Molly Weir, Ursula Lopez-Palm and Marin McDermott? Ambrose is confident that when Columbia (8-2-1, 2-0-0 Ivy) visits Rhodes Field for a pivotal Ivy matchup tonight, his Quakers (6-3-1, 2-0-0) "will be able to control the tempo, play at our pace . and essentially impose ourselves.

One early Sunday this past September, College senior Zachary Roseman hopped onto the Bolt Bus with his friend Benji and headed to New York City. "It was one of the last times Yankee stadium was going to be standing" said Roseman, "and my friend had never been to a game.

Chris Wynn set the tone when he returned the game's opening kickoff 88 yards for a touchdown, as the Quakers cruised to a 27-10 win over Georgetown. Bradford Blackmon was out with a sore ankle and Mike DiMaggio was a non-factor, but freshman Matt Hamscher - seeing his first NCAA action - more than picked up the slack.

Alex Jacobson is a College junior from Los Angeles. Her e-mail address is jacobson@dailypennsylvanian.com.

Penn men's soccer captain John Elicker has a chip on his shoulder. That may be surprising, considering his 7-1-3 Quakers just lost their first match of the season and reeled off seven straight shutouts to open their schedule. But heading into tomorrow night's match at Rhodes Field against Columbia (2-6-1), Penn's previously impregnable defense has looked very vulnerable, surrendering eight goals in its last four games.

Technology upgrades across campus are giving more students an interactive classroom experience. Numerous central pool classrooms - spaces that are open to classes held by any school - are in the process of a massive technology update. Changes include increased accommodations for "clicker" technology, upgrades in projection technology, Windows 2007 on all classroom computers and the installation of SMART Sympodium, a new program that can record a professor's voice as well as what he does on the computer in a lecture hall.

For pollsters, cell-phone static may be getting in the way of good polling. Across the country, pollsters attempting to accurately reflect the public's choice for president are facing a big - and unprecedented - problem: cell-phone dominance among youth combined with historic young-voter turnout in the primaries.

The devil's advocate may know best in cancer research. Contrary to scientific dogma, Penn researchers have found that certain proteins long thought to suppress tumor growth may actually facilitate it. Complement proteins - a family of 30 proteins that are part of the immune system - had been thought to slow tumor growth, much in the same way they fight bacteria.

Officials in academia at Penn and beyond have decided to take a stand in light of last month's detention of Iranian scholar Mehdi Zakerian, who was scheduled to teach at Penn Law this year. Penn President Amy Gutmann recently sent a letter directly to the president of Iran expressing her concerns on behalf of the academic community and urging the Iranian government to release Zakerian.

As the women's tennis team heads to Flushing Meadows - the annual site of the U.S. Open - coach Mike Dowd hopes his players will be able to enjoy New York City. But he also has moderately lofty goals for this weekend's National Tennis Center Invite, which he hopes will give his young team some valuable experience.

Men's tennis coach Nik DeVore likes winning - but he sees an advantage to losing, too. "Losing matches is not such a bad thing because then we get to play consolation games," DeVore said. Consolation matches, and the experience that comes with them, should not be hard to come by for the Quakers today at the Columbia Invitational in New York.