Election campaigning and direct marketing If direct marketing tools works for commercial purposes, why should they not be used in election campaigns? Why not gain people's votes by political statements tailor-cut to suite the attitudes and values of a voter? The Republican Party of Missouri, USA, has already tried it out. As the Washington Post reported on 10 October, 2000, the party purchased personal data from the data body company TransUnion and fed them into a computer programme capable of inferring political likes and dislikes from the kind of social, demographic and economic data warehoused by TransUnion. The software is offered by Map Applications, Inc. and has already been successfully used by the arms lobbying group National Rifle Association. The logic of customised reality of direct marketing is finally beginning to directly affect the democratic process, the consumer merges with the citizen.

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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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Java Applets Java applets are small programs that can be sent along with a Web page to a user. Java applets can perform interactive animations, immediate calculations, or other simple tasks without having to send a user request back to the server. They are written in Java, a platform-independent computer language, which was invented by Sun Microsystems, Inc. Source: Whatis.com

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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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