The London-based Institute for Economic Affairs (AEI) from its beginning undertook an extensive publishing program to push forward its free-market ideology. Among its publications was one particular paper, which had a direct and immediate political impact. Published in 1960 "Resale Price Maintenance and Shoppers' Choice" by Basil Yamey argued for the abolition of Resale Price Maintenance, which by fixing prices in shops prevented large stores from necessarily under-cutting smaller shops. Yamey argued that a free market in shop prices would save the shoppers £180,000,000 a year, and prices would fall by five percent.
The publication of Yamey's paper was timed to coincide with a period of public debate on the subject to ensure maximum impact, and Yamey's suggestions were taken up by the incumbent Conservative Government. Although the Abolition of Resale Price Maintenance by
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In 1948 RAND was created at the urging of its original sponsor, the Air Force. After World War II, RAND focused especially on research in national security. Today RAND operates on a broad front, making its research available to public policy makers at all levels, private sector leaders in many industries, and the public at large. RANDs research and analysis aims to: provide practical guidance by making policy choices clear and by addressing barriers to policy implementation; develop solutions to complex problems by bringing researchers in all relevant academic specialities; dissemination of research findings. RAND has more than 500 employees.
Official Organizational Status: Independent Institute
Political Orientation: U.S. Center-right
Scope/Research Areas: RAND specializes in: Foreign relations and diplomacy, security and defense, economic issues, regional studies, science sand technology, labor and human resource development, social issues, education and health and welfare.
Funding Sources: 1998 Budget: US$ 113.5 million. National, local and state government (83 %) and private donations (17 %).
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As think tanks try to push policy making in their desired direction in such diverse fields as health, education, taxation, regulation and national security it is not surprising, that also the Internet has entered their issue list:
Another of the big players in the elite of think tanks, the conservative Washington D.C. based Cato Institute quite surprisingly has started to defend human rights in Cyberspace. Jonathan D. Wallace' "Nameless in Cyberspace: Anonymity on the Internet." sees the constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom of speech and expression in the United States under attack by proposals to limit or restrict the use of anonymity on the Internet.
Yet another conservative think tank, the U.S. based
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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
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
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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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Founded in 1977, the institute is named for Cato's Letters, libertarian pamphlets that were widely read in the American Colonies since the early 18th century and played a major role in laying the philosophical foundation for the American Revolution. Cato is a public policy research foundation seeking to "broaden the parameters of public policy debate" to allow consideration of more options that are consistent with the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets and a special focus on deregulation issues.
In recent years, the Cato Institute has become one of the most cited and quoted think tanks in the U.S. news media, while also becoming a key resource for Republican leaders. Catos board of directors not only includes John C. Malone - president and CEO of Tele-Communicaitons Inc. (TCI), the largest cable operator in the United States - but, since autumn 1997, also media titan
Official Organizational Status: Independent Institute
Political Orientation: U.S. Conservative/Libertarian
Scope/Research Areas: Catos research areas include development studies, science and technology, economic issues, health and welfare, foreign relations and diplomacy. Priority issues are Social Security privatization, fundamental tax reform, limited constitutional government, free trade and term limits. Recent publications include: Kelley, David A.: Life of One's Own. Individual Rights and the Welfare State. (1998). Ferrara, P.J. and M. D. Tanner: A New Deal for Social Security. (1998).
Funding Sources: 1998 Budget US$ 11 million. Corporate and private donations (especially from corporations and executives in the highly regulated industries of financial services, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals industries) and sales of publications.
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The Manhattan Institute, founded by
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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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DSL connections are high-speed data connections over copper wire telephone lines. As with cable connections, with DSL you can look up information on the Internet and make a phone call at the same time but you do not need to have a new or additional cable or line installed. One of the most prominent DSL services is ISDN (integrated services digital network, for more information click here (
Copyright management information refers to information which identifies a work, the author of a work, the owner of any right in a work, or information about the terms and conditions of the use of a work, and any numbers or codes that represent such information, when any of these items of information are attached to a copy of a work or appear in connection with the communication of a work to the public.
A Wide Area Network is a wide area proprietary network or a network of local area networks. Usually consisting of computers, it may consist of cellular phones, too.
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
http://www.webhistory.org/home.html
Chevron is a U.S. petroleum corporation formed in 1926 with the merger of Standard Oil Company of California and Pacific Oil Company. Headquartered in San Francisco, it operates today in more than 90 countries, either directly or through affiliates.
A
Major national trade association representing petroleum industry efforts in exploration and production, transportation, refining, and marketing.
Electronic messages are transmitted and received by computers through a network. By E-Mail texts, images, sounds and videos can be sent to single users or simultaneously to a group of users. Now texts can be sent and read without having them printed.
E-Mail is one of the most popular and important services on the Internet.
The best known of the two-key cryptosystems developed in the mid-1980s is the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) cryptoalgorithm, which was first published in April, 1977. Since that time, the algorithm has been employed in the most widely-used Internet electronic communications encryption program,
Ronald L. Rivest is Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's EECS Department. He was one of three persons in a team to invent the
American petroleum corporation created in 1966 by the merger of Richfield Oil
Corporation and Atlantic Refining Company. A further merger in 1969 brought in Sinclair Oil Corporation. Atlantic Richfield has petroleum operations in all parts of the United States as well as in Indonesia, the North Sea, and the South China Sea. The company also owns and operates transportation facilities for liquid petroleum, including pipelines and tankers; produces and sells chemicals, coal, and metal products; and is involved in the development of solar energy products and in other energy-related activities. Headquarters are in Los Angeles.
A Local Area Network is an office network, a network restricted to a building area.
Adi Shamir was one of three persons in a team to invent the
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the independent research branch of the U.S. Department of Defense that, among its other accomplishments, funded a project that in time was to lead to the creation of the Internet. Originally called ARPA (the "D" was added to its name later), DARPA came into being in 1958 as a reaction to the success of Sputnik, Russia's first manned satellite. DARPA's explicit mission was (and still is) to think independently of the rest of the military and to respond quickly and innovatively to national defense challenges.
In the late 1960s, DARPA provided funds and oversight for a project aimed at interconnecting computers at four university research sites. By 1972, this initial network, now called the
http://www.darpa.mil
Fiber-optic cable networks may become the dominant method for high-speed Internet connections. Since the first fiber-optic cable was laid across the Atlantic in 1988, the demand for faster Internet connections is growing, fuelled by the growing network traffic, partly due to increasing implementation of corporate networks spanning the globe and to the use of graphics-heavy contents on the
Fiber-optic cables have not much more in common with copper wires than the capacity to transmit information. As copper wires, they can be terrestrial and submarine connections, but they allow much higher transmission rates. Copper wires allow 32 telephone calls at the same time, but fiber-optic cable can carry 40,000 calls at the same time. A capacity,
Copper wires will not come out of use in the foreseeable future because of technologies as
For technical information from the Encyclopaedia Britannica on telecommunication cables, click
An entertaining report of the laying of the FLAG submarine cable, up to now the longest fiber-optic cable on earth, including detailed background information on the cable industry and its history, Neal Stephenson has written for Wired: Mother Earth Mother Board. Click
Susan Dumett has written a short history of undersea cables for Pretext magazine, Evolution of a Wired World. Click
A timeline history of submarine cables and a detailed list of seemingly all submarine cables of the world, operational, planned and out of service, can be found on the Web site of the
For maps of fiber-optic cable networks see the website of
The economic rights (besides
Industrial design refers to the ornamental aspect of a useful article which may constitute of two or three-dimensional elements. To be qualified for
Copyright laws generally provide for three kinds of neighboring rights: 1) the rights of performing artists in their performances, 2) the rights of producers of phonograms in their phonograms, and 3) the rights of broadcasting organizations in their radio and television programs. Neighboring rights attempt to protect those who assist intellectual creators to communicate their message and to disseminate their works to the public at large.
Developed under the auspices of
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
As a
The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) was signed into law by U.S. President Clinton in 1998 and implements the two 1996
American manufacturer of tobacco products. The origins of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company date to the post-Civil War era, when Richard Joshua Reynolds (1850-1918) began trading in tobacco, first in his native Virginia and then in Winston, N.C., where in 1875 he established his first plug factory. The company began to diversify in the 1960s, acquiring chiefly food and oil concerns, and the tobacco concern became a subsidiary of R.J. Reynolds Industries, Inc., in 1970.
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
b., March 3, 1847, Edinburgh
d. Aug. 2, 1922, Beinn Bhreagh, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada
American audiologist and inventor wrongly remembered for having invented the telephone in 1876. Although Bell introduced the first commercial application of the telephone, in fact a German teacher called Reiss invented it.
For more detailed information see the Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/1/0,5716,15411+1+15220,00.html
Established in 1950, the National Science Foundation is an independent agency of the U.S. government dedicated to the funding in basic research and education in a wide range of sciences and in mathematics and engineering. Today, the NSF supplies about one quarter of total federal support of basic scientific research at academic institutions.
For more detailed information see the Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/0/0,5716,2450+1+2440,00.html
KMI is the leading source for information on fiber-optics markets. It offers market research, strategic analysis and product planning services to the opto-electronics and communications industries. KMI tracks the worldwide fiber-optic cable system and sells the findings to the industry. KMI says that every fiber-optics corporation with a need for strategic market planning is a subscriber to their services.
Telnet allows you to login remotely on a computer connected to the Internet.
American holding company founded in 1985, the owner of several major American companies, notably Philip Morris Inc., the General Foods Corporation, and Kraft, Inc., with diversified interests in tobacco and food products. In 1988 Philip Morris acquired Kraft, Inc., a large maker of cheeses and grocery products. Philip Morris thus became one of the world's largest corporate producers of consumer goods. Its headquarters are in New York City.
The Internet Societal Task Force is an organization under the umbrella of the Internet Society dedicated to assure that the Internet is for everyone by identifying and characterizing social and economic issues associated with the growth and use of Internet. It supplements the technical tasks of the
Topics under discussion are social, economic, regulatory, physical barriers to the use of the Net, privacy, interdependencies of Internet penetration rates and economic conditions, regulation and taxation.
One of the world's largest corporate entities in sales, consisting of companies in more than 100 countries, whose shares are owned by NV Koninklijke Nederlandsche Petroleum Maatschappij (Royal Dutch Petroleum Company Ltd.) of The Hague and by the "Shell" Transport and Trading Company, PLC, of London. Below these two parent companies are two holding companies, Shell Petroleum NV and the Shell Petroleum Company Limited, whose shares are owned 60 percent by Royal Dutch and 40 percent by "Shell" Transport and Trading. The holding companies, in turn, hold shares in and administer the subsidiary service companies and operating companies around the world, which engage in oil, petrochemical, and associated industries, from research and exploration to production and marketing. Several companies also deal in metals, nuclear energy, solar energy, coal, and consumer products.
The 1996
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