Major U.S. Think Tanks: Heritage Foundation

Heritage was started to counter what it perceived as the liberal intellectual climate of Washington in the 1970s. The Heritage Foundations mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense. Heritage pursues this mission by performing research addressing key policy issues and effectively marketing these findings to its primary audiences: members of Congress, key congressional staff, policymakers in the executive branch, the nation's news media, and the academic and policy communities.

Official Organizational Status: Independent research and educational institute.

Political Orientation: U.S. Conservative

Scope/Research Areas: The Heritage Foundation's research areas include: economic issues, health and welfare, education, culture and religion, security and defense, foreign policy and international relations/institutions. Priority is given to issues, such as: Social Security reform, fundamental tax reform, livable cities, ballistic missile defense, education reform, domestic and economic policy and foreign and defense policy. Recent publications include: Feulner, Edwin J.: The March of Freedom. (1998). Holmes, K. et.al.: 1999 Index of Economic Freedom. (1998).

Funding Sources: 1998 Budget: US$ 26 million. Private donations (47 %), foundations (21 %), investment income (21 %), corporate donations (4 %). Among others US$ 1 million from the Korea Foundation - funded by South Korea's foreign ministry.

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World Wide Web (WWW)

Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and Java applets, so making multimedia content possible.

Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many servers as possible and index the stored information. (For regularly updated lists of the 100 most popular words that people are entering into search engines, click here). No search engine can retrieve all information on the whole World Wide Web; every search engine covers just a small part of it.

Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes consoling, but threatening too.

According to the Internet domain survey of the Internet Software Consortium the number of Internet host computers is growing rapidly. In October 1969 the first two computers were connected; this number grows to 376.000 in January 1991 and 72,398.092 in January 2000.

World Wide Web History Project, http://www.webhistory.org/home.html

http://www.searchwords.com/
http://www.islandnet.com/deathnet/
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/199...
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