Small businesses in America could be an important engine to help drive economic recovery, according to a local advocacy group, but they need more help than they are currently getting from the federal Small Business Administration.

Chris Gunn, Communications Director for the American Small Business League  in Petaluma says the Obama economic team does not appear to recognize the importance of small businesses to the US economy any more than their predecessors  in the Bush Administration did.

Given the considerable number of small businesses in the country, Chris Gunn says they could be a formidable political force, if they came together to press for policies that would benefit them as a group.

One change at the SBA under the Obama administration has been the installation of Karen Mills (left)  as the agency’s new director. But Gunn is not convinced she genuinely has the interests of the nation’s smaller business owners at the forefront.

The winner of the latest “Clo the Cow” billboard slogan contest drew from Dirty Harry to get a happy diary.

Clo the Cow will be featured on the billboard with the winning slogan, of course, but Clover-Stornetta president Marcus Benedetti says the cartoon cow is more than just a pretty face.

Daniel Judd celebrates his contest victory, sharing a high five with Clo the Cow as girlfriend Andrea Duszynski looks on.

A map such as this  is a way of organizing the world into distinctly defined nations. But the lines on a map can and often do differ from what is true in the physical and political world that map attempts to represent.

Many of the lines on international maps—especially the straight ones—were a creation of colonial convenience, explains Stanford geography professor Martin  Lewis, but have proved to have remarkable staying power.

Borders clearly define national borders on paper, says Martin Lewis, but the country in question may not actually control all that territory.

See the map of Somalia, below, for another example.

Lewis has distilled these ideas into a paper he's titled Misled By The Map, which you can read here:   

That's  also the title of the talk that professor  Lewis will present to the World Affairs Council of Sonoma County onThursday, Nov. 19 at 7:30 pm at Spring Lake Village in Santa Rosa. To see a full-length video presentation of Lewis speaking on "Misled by the Map," click here.

The map below shows the difficulty in representing a politically volatile area, such as Somalia, an area now "governed" by multiple regional entities, as shown in the color key.  Note the disclaimer at the bottom.

Global Student Embassy, a youth-led grassroots international relations program based in Sebastopol, has branched out this year, both to more schools in Sonoma County, and to a new community in Africa.

GSE was started by brothers Lucas (left) and Jasper Oshun  as an outgrowth of their own experiences visiting and working with other students in Peru and Argentina.  Lucas says the successful conclusion of Global Student Embassy’s first international student visitation in early 2009 helped inspire them to want to expand their horizons.

Even as they continue to reach out internationally, GSE is also working with local students to build community at home. Co-director Yasha Mokaram describes one way that is playing out through their participation at Windsor High School.

This community garden at the Village Park mobile home park in Sebastopol may be the most visible manifestation of what Global Student Embassy is doing, but  it is just one aspect of their efforts. Here, student volunteers from Sonoma County, Zurite Peru and Santa Fe Argenita celebrate their shared accomplishment. Y0u learn support the work of Global Student Embassy here.