Funding Sources and Revenues While most progressive think tanks acquire their funding through many different sources, for conservative think tanks financing by corporations prevails. Among the think tanks receiving a considerable amount of corporate money are the Cato Institute (U.S. conservative/libertarian), the Brookings Institution (U.S. centrist), the Heritage Foundation (U.S. conservative), the American Enterprise Institute (U.S. conservative) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (U.S. conservative). Also, whereas the combined revenue base of such conservative multi-issue policy institutions as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, the Cato Institute, and Citizens for a Sound Economy exceeded US$ 77 million in 1995, the roughly equivalent U.S. progressive Institute for Policy Studies, the Economic Policy Institute, Citizens for Tax Justice, and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities had only US$ 9 million at their collective disposal in 1995.

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Dissemination Strategies Think tanks undertake research in very specific public policy areas. Which topics they cover mainly depends on their political and ideological orientation. In any case think tanks produce incredible amounts of "research findings". The crucial aspect usually is not their production, but their distribution. Therefore most think tanks have developed sophisticated dissemination strategies, whose main aim is the communication of their ideas to important audiences. These include members of governmental institutions, policymakers in the executive branch, news media, intellectuals, business men as well as academic and policy communities - in short, everybody, who is involved in shaping public opinion.

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Division of labor The term refers to the separation of a work process into a number of tasks, with each task performed by a separate person or group of persons. It is most often applied to mass production systems, where it is one of the basic organizing principles of the assembly line. Breaking down work into simple, repetitive tasks eliminates unnecessary motion and limits the handling of tools and parts. The consequent reduction in production time and the ability to replace craftsmen with lower-paid, unskilled workers result in lower production costs and a less expensive final product. The Scottish economist Adam Smith saw in this splitting of tasks a key to economic progress by providing a cheaper and more efficient means of producing economic goods.

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Vinton Cerf Addressed as one of the fathers of the Internet, Vinton Cerf together with Robert Kahn developed the TCP/IP protocol suite, up to now the de facto-communication standard for the Internet, and also contributed to the development of other important communication standards. The early work on the protocols broke new ground with the realization of a multi-network open architecture. In 1992, he co-founded the Internet Society where he served as its first President and later Chairman. Today, Vinton Cerf is Senior Vice President for Internet Architecture and Technology at WorldCom, one of the world's most important ICT companies Vinton Cerf's web site: http://www.wcom.com/about_the_company/cerfs_up/ http://www.isoc.org/ http://www.wcom.com/

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