With difficulty, Sonoma State has weathered a 17% budget reduction this semester. Now they’re waiting to see how much more they will have to cut in the months ahead.

Looking ahead to the next academic year, SSU CFO and Vice president for Administration and Finance, Laurence Furukawa-Schlereth (right) , offered a silver lining of sorts, telling the campus community assembled at the midday Town Hall meeting that he hoped to avoid any further job losses in 2010-11.

Former Dean of the school of Social Services at Sonoma State, Bob Karlsrud, questions the no layoffs pledge, because it does not cover the part-time lecturers who teach the majority of courses offered at the university. Because they are rehired each year, it’s not considered a job loss when a new contract is not offered for the next semester. Karlsrud contends the campus has added too many contractual administrative positions, at the expense of keeping teachers in classrooms.

Catherine Nelson, a political science professor who represents the Sonoma campus on the statewide CSU Academic Senate, believes the current fiscal crisis also represents an opportunity for the school to clarify and redefine its core vision of itself, something she says is not yet happening here or anywhere else. But she has an idea of what it could include.

The next Town Hall meeting at the university will focus on the troubled Sonoma State University Foundation on December 16^th.

Meditation comes in many different flavors, and a full menu is offered in a new book by a couple of local writers, called Matrix Meditations.

Matrix Meditations is in some ways inspired by the I Ching, the ancient Chinese “Book of Changes,” which uses 64 figures to offer wisdom. Co-author Victor Daniels explains the book also offers 64 topical cells, with an extra one as a starting point.

And as with the I Ching, Daniels adds, this book can be used to randomly suggest insights or new ways of looking at questions or problems.

  Kooch N. Daniels is the other co-author of Matrix Meditations.

Find out more about Matrix Meditations and upcoming events and book signings.

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.

When it comes to building new reservoirs and hydroelectric plants, there are good dams and bad dams. A new online-calculator developed by Sebastopol’s Conservation Strategy Fund is a tool designed to help tell them apart.

What’s the difference between a good dam and a bad dam? CFS President John Reid offers examples of each.

Check out  the new web-based HydroCalculator here! development of this new online tool was made possible with support from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.