Charges and countercharges are mounting in the run-up to next week’s union representation election at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital.

Father Ray Decker (right) , who is active with the Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice group, says that while he and other clergy are pressing Memorial Hospital to take a more Christian stance toward the union organizing efforts of their workforce, they have no illusions about who they are actually speaking to.

Katy Hillenmeyer, spokeswoman for St. Joseph Health Care of Sonoma County, which operates Memorial Hospital, says the impartiality of the new Fair Election Oversight Commission is open to question, as some members have clear ties to one of the competing unions.

Wages and workplace issues are part of the debate in the union representation vote, says telemetry technician Nancy Timberlake, a 24-year Memorial Hospital employee. But the biggest single issue for her is job security.

Nanotechnology, the tiniest stuff that human technology has been able to create, is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our everyday lives.

SRJC Chemistry professor Dr. Karen Frindell (left)  will deliver a presentation on the small science of Nanotechnology at the Science Buzz Café Dec. 10 at 7 pm in the Sebastopol Youth Annex on Morris Street. She explains that the date is one of historic significance for this branch of science.

Another new aspect of nanotechnology is the creation of tiny motors fabricated from molecules of iron. But the same powerful magnification that has enabled researchers to see what they are doing with those nano-motors has also revealed that nature has already accomplished some of those same functions, on the same micro-miniature scale.

Richard Feynman

New approaches and western ideas find many paths into modern China, even through niche magazines about medical specialties.

State of the art procedures, and the ways medicine is practiced and made available elsewhere is gradually forcing some incremental changes in the ways that individual Chinese doctors think about their work, something that Jeffrey Parker (left) says his Chinese publications are quietly helping to facilitate.

After he reported on India’s high-volume, low cost eye care treatments, Parker says the first wave of reaction from his readership of Chinese ophthalmologists was skepticism. But that was soon followed by a upwelling of interest in learning how the Indian system worked.

Jeffrey Parker will talk about his experiences as a journalist and publisher in China before the World Affairs Council of Sonoma County Dec. 10 at Spring Lake Village in Santa Rosa, at 7:30 pm. Details about the event can be found here.

He will also speak at Stanford University at noon on January 14, 2010 on the subject,  "Grassroots Empowerment: Can Models from India Spark a Revolution in Healthcare Delivery in China?"

Back before the economy contracted, Sonoma County supervisors convened an Innovation Council to plan for local job growth. That effort has begun to bear fruit, but is now facing budgetary uncertainly of its own.

In just a couple of years, the Sonoma County Innovation Council has moved quickly to analyze the local economy and develop a strategic plan for growth over the next decade. Council co-chair Cynthia Murray (left) , Executive Director of the North Bay Leadership Council, notes that this process was undertaken before the current economic downturn kicked in.

You can read the Innovation Council's full report here.