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Major U.S. Think Tanks: American Enterprise Institute |
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Formed in 1943 as a traditional think tank, after being criticized of being too centrist, the American Enterprise Institute moved right and took a more aggressive public-policy role in domestic and foreign policy affairs. The American Enterprise Institute is dedicated to "preserving and strengthening the foundations of freedom" - limited government, private enterprise, vital cultural and political institutions, and a strong foreign policy and national defense.
Official Organizational Status: Independent institute
Political Orientation: U.S. Conservative
Scope/Research Areas: The American Enterprise Institutes research is conducted in three broad areas, namely economic policy studies, social and political studies and foreign and defense policy studies. Issues of priority are: Tax reform, Social Security and entitlements reform, environmental regulation, economic deregulation, culture and society, religion, intellectual foundations, reform of the U.S. defense structure and redefinition of American foreign policy. Some recent titles include: Income Inequality and IQ. (1998). Ethics of Human Cloning (1998). Calomiris, C. and J. Karceski: Is the Bank Merger Wave of the 1990s Efficient? Lessons from Nine Case Studies. (1998).
Funding Sources: 1998 Budget: US$ 14.3 million. Assets: US$ 24.5 million. Corporate donations (29 %), private donations (27 %), foundations (26 %), conferences, sales, and other revenues (18 %).
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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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