The Institute of Economic Affairs
One of the most impressive examples of the dissemination of ideology through educational activities has been performed by the UK- based Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), founded in 1955. Dedicated to the idea of free-markets the IEA from the beginning saw the "education" of the public as a key element in the distribution of their ideology. "The philosophy of the market economy must be widely accepted; this requires a large programme of education ..."
Aiming at the wide acceptance of their ideas, the IEA undertook an extensive publishing program with the objective to make the fairly complex concepts of economic liberalism and monetarism available to a student or sixth-form audience. In the 1960s IEA papers normally reached the hands of students through the university Conservative Associations.
The work that the IEA did in this field reaped a rich harvest during the 1970s and 1980s, as many of the younger political activists who staffed the various free-market think-tanks, such as the Center for Policy Studies, the Freedom Association an the Selsdon Group, received their education from the IEA. Especially at St. Andrews university, where Ralph Harris, the first director of the IEA, had been a lecturer, the IEA ideas had a strong impact. St. Andrews over the years did not only produce a generation of free-market Conservative MPs (Member of Parliament), but also influenced former St. Andrews students like Stuart and Eamonn Butler and Madsen Pirie, who went to set up the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) in London in 1976.
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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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PR Firms and their Mission
Looking at how public relations practitioners advertise their services, they do not primarily seem to be followers of the "social engineering" approach. Burson-Marsteller, the worlds leading PR agency, for example sells itself as a specialist in "... public affairs, government relations, crisis communication, investor relations, environmental issues and marketing communications ... experienced at orchestrating effective campaigns, which motivate the right behaviors.". Porter Novelli, third largest international PR company, somewhat more aggressive promises, that their marketing-based public relations "... penetrate the consumer psyche - where - your target audiences work, learn, play or shop, through everything they read, hear and see.". While Porter Novelli seems to be specialized in psychological warfare, Fleishman-Hillard highlights its know-how and experience in government relations programs. "We have handled some of the nation's most challenging public policy issues, including issues affecting the environment, from clean air to agricultural chemicals; aviation safety; regressive taxes; international trade; and human rights.". To handle those difficult tasks, Fleishman-Hillard maintains "... an effective, professional lobbying team that includes registered lobbyists recruited from the Senate and the House."
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Conservative vs. Progressive Think Tanks
The political orientation of think tanks is as broad as in every other kind of institutions or organizations. It ranges from conservative over centrist to progressive. Still it can be noted, that there are considerable differences between the right and the left wing of think tanks, especially concerning funding sources and revenues as well as media relations, which have considerable consequences on their perception and influence on the public as well as on policy makers.
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Table: Publishing Programs of Think Tanks
Think Tank
| Periodicals
| Publication of Research Findings
| Brookings Institution (Washington D.C., US)
| Brookings Review, Brookings Papers on Economic Activities
| Recent titles include: Hess, Frederick M.: Spinning Wheels. The Politics of Urban School Reform. (1998). Haass, Richard N.: The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur. How to be Effective in Any Unruly Organization. (1998).
| Heritage Foundation (Washington D.C., US)
| Policy Review
| Publication of journals, newsletters, magazines, research reports, policy/issue briefs, video, CD-ROM, website. Recent publications include: Holmes, K. and J. J. Przystup: Between Diplomacy and Deterrence. Strategies for U.S. Relations with China. (1997). Holmes, K. and T. Moore (eds.): Restoring American Leadership. (1996).
| American Enterprise Institute (Washington D.C., US)
| The American Enterprise, Newsletter
| Types of publications are newsletters, magazines, monographs and books. Recent titles include: Income Inequality and IQ. (1998). Morrisey, Michael (ed.): Managed Care and Changing Health Care Markets. (1998).
| Cato Institute (Washington D.C., US)
| Regulation, Cato Journal, Policy Report
| Research findings are published in the form of: journals, newsletters, magazines, research reports, monographs and policy/issue briefs. Some recent publications include: Moore, Thomas: Gale Climate of Fear. Why We Shouldn't Worry About Global Warming. (1998). Carpenter, T. G. and B. Conry (eds.): NATO Enlargement. Illusions and Reality. (1998).
| RAND Corporation (Santa Monica, CA, US)
| RAND Research Review, RAND Journal of Economics
| Types of publications are journals, newsletters, magazines, research reports, working/discussion papers, monographs and policy/issue briefs. An important outlet is the RAND publication series. In 1997, RAND published 73 reports and papers in this series. Many RAND studies also appear as books from commercial publishing houses and university presses, and as articles in professional, scholarly, and technical journals.
| Institute of Economic Affairs (London, UK)
| Economic Affairs, Newsletter
| Research findings are published in the form of journals, newsletters, magazines, research reports, working/discussion papers and monographs. Some recent titles include: Regulation Utilities. Broadening the Debate . (1997). The Conservative Government's Economic Record. (1998).
| Adam Smith Institute (London, UK)
| ASI Bulletin
| Some recent publications are: Singapore versus Chile. Competing models for welfare reform. The Eastern Market. The Future of the Post-Communist Countries.
| Center for Policy Studies (London, UK)
| CPS Newsletter
| Types of publications are newsletters, magazines, research reports and policy/issue briefs. Recent titles include: Selbourne, David: One Year On. The "New Politics" of Labour. Eltis, Walter: Further Considerations on EMU. It will Create Instability and Destroy Employment.
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Institute for Policy Studies
IPS, based in Washington D.C. is a multi-issue, nationally focused think tank aiming at the promotion of economic redistribution, full employment, ecological restoration, democratic participation, community empowerment, and global nonviolence. IPS pursues its mission through the following eight strategies: activism; scholarship; public debate; political advocacy; model building; memory; training; and global alliances.
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Server
A server is program, not a computer, as it sometimes said, dedicated to store files, manage printers and network traffic, or process database queries.
Web sites, the nodes of the World Wide Web (WWW), e.g., are stored on servers.
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Internet Software Consortium
The Internet Software Consortium (ISC) is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to the production of high-quality reference implementations of Internet standards that meet production standards. Its goal is to ensure that those reference implementations are properly supported and made freely available to the Internet community.
http://www.isc.org
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Automation
Automation is concerned with the application of machines to tasks once performed by humans or, increasingly, to tasks that would otherwise be impossible. Although the term mechanization is often used to refer to the simple replacement of human labor by machines, automation generally implies the integration of machines into a self-governing system. Automation has revolutionized those areas in which it has been introduced, and there is scarcely an aspect of modern life that has been unaffected by it. Nearly all industrial installations of automation, and in particular robotics, involve a replacement of human labor by an automated system. Therefore, one of the direct effects of automation in factory operations is the dislocation of human labor from the workplace. The long-term effects of automation on employment and unemployment rates are debatable. Most studies in this area have been controversial and inconclusive. As of the early 1990s, there were fewer than 100,000 robots installed in American factories, compared with a total work force of more than 100 million persons, about 20 million of whom work in factories.
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Industrial design
Industrial design refers to the ornamental aspect of a useful article which may constitute of two or three-dimensional elements. To be qualified for intellectual property protection the design must be novel or original. Protection can be obtained through registration in a government office and usually is given for 10 to 15 years.
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Economic rights
The economic rights (besides moral rights and in some cases also neighboring rights) granted to the owners of copyright usually include 1) copying or reproducing a work, 2) performing a work in public, 3) making a sound recording of a work, 4) making a motion picture of a work, 5) broadcasting a work, 6) translating a work and 7) adapting a work. Under certain national laws some of these rights are not exclusive rights of authorization but in specific cases, merely rights to remuneration.
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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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The World Wide Web History Project
The ongoing World Wide Web History Project was established to record and publish the history of the World Wide Web and its roots in hypermedia and networking. As primary research methods are used archival research and the analysis of interviews and talks with pioneers of the World Wide Web. As result a vast of collection of historic video, audio, documents, and software is expected. The project's digital archive is currently under development.
http://www.webhistory.org/home.html
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Chappe's fixed optical network
Claude Chappe built a fixed optical network between Paris and Lille. Covering a distance of about 240kms, it consisted of fifteen towers with semaphores.
Because this communication system was destined to practical military use, the transmitted messages were encoded. The messages were kept such secretly, even those who transmit them from tower to tower did not capture their meaning, they just transmitted codes they did not understand. Depending on weather conditions, messages could be sent at a speed of 2880 kms/hr at best.
Forerunners of Chappe's optical network are the Roman smoke signals network and Aeneas Tacitus' optical communication system.
For more information on early communication networks see Gerard J. Holzmann and Bjoern Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks.
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