Venezuela: popular TV channel replaced !

According to Venezuela’s President, Hugo Chavez, “(RCTV) became a threat to the country, so I decided not to renew the license . . .” The license ran through May 27^th this year. Radio Caracas TV had been the country's oldest and most popular private channel serving over 28,000,000 citizens.

Chavez has had a stormy relationship with the press and media during his turbulent presidency. He was popularly elected in 1999, but was removed from office in 2002 because he had alienated the business community, news media, labor leaders, and the Roman Catholic Church. He was returned to office two days later! For another two years there were petitions to allow a referendum to decide whether he should stay in office. He is still in office and is considered a major player in the oil producing world. He has placed many once-private businesses under public control effectively moving the country into the socialist arena.

The World Book, offered through the Kansas Library Card (http://www.kslc.org ), has loads of information on Venezuela and Chavez. This beautiful country has waterfalls, mountains, the ocean,and abundant oil and natural gas in just over 350,000 square miles. There is also information for your youngest researchers in the World Book Kids area found in the upper right area of the homepage. An audio version of the national athem is available there along with the Venezuelan flag and general information for youngsters.

To find in-depth information on the elimination of RCTV this last weekend use the ProQuest databases search box and type in “RADIO CRACAS TV”. You will locate articles from the Global Information Network, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and much more!

Using the Thomson-Gale (InfoTrac) databases search box type in “RCTV” and notice that the first 70-something magazine articles returned are from a Spanish language magazine “Politica.” Most of these are very recent and offer a great deal of information for those fluent in Spanish. You will also find articles from Variety, the Nation, and the National Catholic Reporter in English. If you click the tab for News (instead of Magazines) for these results, you will find many more articles. Most are from Spanish newspapers. However, you will find articles from the London Times, the International Herald Tribune, and Miami Herald among others.

You might want to look up “U.S.-Venezuela relations” or “Hugo Chavez and socialism” or “Venezuela and tourism.” Do your own search using the powerful databases from your State Library and see what else you can find out about Venezuela, Chavez, and Radio Caracas T.V.!

Gestures with Social Context – in Primates!

Remember sign language? American Indians sometimes communicated with this way with conquistadors, trappers, adventurers, and settlers. If we are in a foreign country and don’t know the words for what we want to convey we will often try to use gestures to help the native speaker to understand us.

It turns out that chimpanzees and bonobos (who are even more intelligent) do the same thing! We know they don’t speak words in their natural environment, but Emory University has been studying groups of primates and have observed 31 manual gestures and 18 facial/vocal signals that are regularly used. The researchers, Frans de Waal and Amy Pollick of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have noticed that the different groups don’t all use the same gestures. Sometimes one chimp or bonobo will start a gesture and teach it to the others in their group.

All four groups exhibit the same facial and vocal expressions, but each group develops its own set of gestures. According to Dr. de Waal "a good example of a shared gesture is the open-hand begging gesture, used by both apes and humans. This gesture can be used for food, if there is food around, but it also can be used to beg for help, for support, for money and so on. It's meaning is context-dependent."

These findings were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and were discussed on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition on May 1^st. The Woodruff health Sciences Center at Emory University issued a news release on April 30 to the US Fed News Service. You can find this notice AND the transcript of the NPR Morning Edition interview through ProQuest using the search terms: gesture and communication and apes for the news service and gestures and “morning edition” for the National Public Radio transcript.

If this is a subject that interests you (or a friend or student) there are many great articles within the databases offered through the State Library of Kansas. The young researchers can use SIRS Discoverer and click the Animal icon. The right side of the screen will show a list. Click on Mammals, and then on Chimpanzee. Notice that bonobos are also listed in the “descriptors” area at the end of the article summary. If you don’t know what a bonobo looks like, go to the World Book Encyclopedia and look it up! You can also look there with the search term “chimpanzee gestures” for articles.

The more advanced searcher can use Thomson-Gale (InfoTrac) to locate some great articles using the basic search term chimpanzees communication. The search term chimpanzees and gesture will return pertinent articles in the ProQuest database. Play with the search terms and databases to see what works best for your search!