Think Tanks and Corporate Money

Looking at the financial situation of think tanks, different funding patterns can be found. While financial contributions from foundations play an important role especially for conservative think tanks, also contributions from governments are made to certain institutions. Yet one of the most important funding sources are corporate donors and individual contributors. Although the extent to which - in most cases conservative - think tanks rely on corporate funding varies, from the US$ 158 million spent by the top 20 conservative think tanks, more than half of it was contributed by corporations or businessmen.

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Internet services

The Internet can be used in in different ways: for distributing and retrieving information, for one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many communication, and for the access services. Accordingly, there are different services on offer. The most important of these are listed below.

Telnet

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

Electronic Messaging (E-Mail)

World Wide Web (WWW)

Bulletin Board Systems (BBS)

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

Multiple User Dimensions (MUDs)

Gopher

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Databody economy and the surveillance state

Databody economy Surveillance state
Promise Reality Promise Reality
universal prosperity universal commercialisation total security total control
frictionless market pacified society political harmony death of democracy


The glamour of the data body economy clouds economic practices which are much less than glamorous. Through the seizure of the data body, practices that in the real political arena were common in the feudal age and in the early industrial age are being reconstructed. The data body economy digitally reconstructs exploitative practices such as slavery and wage labour. However, culturally the data body is still a very new phenomenon: mostly, people think if it does not hurt, it cannot be my body. Exploitation of data bodies is painless and fast. Nevertheless, this can be expected to change once the awareness of the political nature of the data body becomes more widespread. As more and more people routinely move in digitised environments, it is to be expected that more critical questions will be asked and claims to autonomy, at present restricted to some artistic and civil society groups trying to get heard amidst the deafening noise of the commercial ICT propaganda, will be articulated on a more general level.

The more problematic aspect of this development may be something else: the practices of the data body economy, themselves a reconstruction of old techniques of seizure, have begun to re-colonise real political space. Simon Davis, Director of the London-based privacy campaigners Privacy International, one of the foremost critics of modern-day technologies of surveillance and data capturing, has warned against the dangers of a loss of autonomy and undermining of civic rights that are being generated when workplaces are clogged with digital equipment allowing the constant monitoring and surveillance of workers. Unless current trends towards data capturing remain unchecked, the workplace of the future will have many features of the sinister Victorian workhouses that appear Charles Dickens novels, where any claims for autonomy were silenced with references to economic efficiency, and the required discipline imposed by a hierarchy of punishments.

The constant adaptation process required from the modern individual has anonymised and structuralized punishment, which now appears in the guise of error messages and the privatisation of risk.

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cryptology

also called "the study of code". It includes both, cryptography and cryptoanalysis

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MIT

The MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is a privately controlled coeducational institution of higher learning famous for its scientific and technological training and research. It was chartered by the state of Massachusetts in 1861 and became a land-grant college in 1863. During the 1930s and 1940s the institute evolved from a well-regarded technical school into an internationally known center for scientific and technical research. In the days of the Great Depression, its faculty established prominent research centers in a number of fields, most notably analog computing (led by Vannevar Bush) and aeronautics (led by Charles Stark Draper). During World War II, MIT administered the Radiation Laboratory, which became the nation's leading center for radar research and development, as well as other military laboratories. After the war, MIT continued to maintain strong ties with military and corporate patrons, who supported basic and applied research in the physical sciences, computing, aerospace, and engineering. MIT has numerous research centers and laboratories. Among its facilities are a nuclear reactor, a computation center, geophysical and astrophysical observatories, a linear accelerator, a space research center, supersonic wind tunnels, an artificial intelligence laboratory, a center for cognitive science, and an international studies center. MIT's library system is extensive and includes a number of specialized libraries; there are also several museums.

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International Standardization Organization

ISO (International Organization for Standardization), founded in 1946, is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies from some 100 countries, one from each country. Among the standards it fosters is Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), a universal reference model for communication protocols. Many countries have national standards organizations that participate in and contribute to ISO standards making.

http://www.iso.ch

Source: Whatis.com

http://www.iso.ch/
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