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Influence of Corporate Funding on Think Tank Activities |
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Most think tanks describe themselves as independent institutions and usually deny any influence on their work from funding sources or other interests. Although some think tanks adhere to the concept of independent research, in several cases, albeit very often not visible at first sight, the influence of corporate money on the kind of issues picked up as well as the results presented can be noted. Corporate money so funds ideologically charged policy research with the aim to influence public policy making.
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Expert system
Expert systems are advanced computer programs that mimic the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of an expert in a particular discipline. Their creators strive to clone the expertise of one or several human specialists to develop a tool that can be used by the layman to solve difficult or ambiguous problems. Expert systems differ from conventional computer programs as they combine facts with rules that state relations between the facts to achieve a crude form of reasoning analogous to  artificial intelligence. The three main elements of expert systems are: (1) an interface which allows interaction between the system and the user, (2) a database (also called the knowledge base) which consists of axioms and rules, and (3) the inference engine, a computer program that executes the inference-making process. The disadvantage of rule-based expert systems is that they cannot handle unanticipated events, as every condition that may be encountered must be described by a rule. They also remain limited to narrow problem domains such as troubleshooting malfunctioning equipment or medical image interpretation, but still have the advantage of being much lower in costs compared with paying an expert or a team of specialists.
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