Preparing students for a "New World Order"

Aww, look at this nice education initiative from Essex University. The students are learning to be global citizens, environmentalists and learning how to 'rebuild' the Internet in a more controlled way! Wonderful.
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Business Weekly - University tackles a new world order

A new world political and social order, an environmentally sustainable planet, world peace and a new internet system to replace the one that’s creaking under the weight of mass multi-media; these are the core aims of the University of Essex’s new research strategy.

The university has selected four projects from a potential 12 which address issues of worldwide signif-icance in a move that will focus the institute’s research capacity on major global challenges.

The idea is to develop substantial multi-disciplinary projects with the potential for international colla-boration, which showcase Essex’s research strengths and have a strong focus on leveraging external grant funding.

The Global Challenges programme was introduced by vice-chancellor, Professor Colin Riordan, as part of the university’s vision for 2008-2013. Each of the selected projects will receive initial funding of £50,000 from the university in 2009-10 to get them established, with match-funding expected to be available to support them further as they begin to win external funding.

Commencing in August 2009, the four Global Challenges projects are: Constructing a new global socio-economic and political order; Finding answers to global threats; Transitions to peace and prosperity; and Reinventing the internet.

The team behind ‘Constructing a new global socio-economic and political order,’ believe events such as the catastrophic flooding in Burma, oil at $150 a barrel, the destruction of the world’s forests and a near doubling of the price of rice are just some of the crises that scientists and policy makers have failed to address in a coherent and integrated way. [integrated = integrating nations under an international authority]

The principal investigator is Professor Mark Harvey from the Department of Sociology who will also work with colleagues from the University of Manchester and the Bio-Science for Business Knowledge Transfer Network.

This team aims to establish a research programme into the political and social conditions that could help achieve sustainable economic growth at a local, national and global level by taking a more joined-up approach to major global issues such as climate change, the price of oil, food crises and the critical pressures on land use and water.

The research team believes that a failure to address the links between these individual crises is potentially more serious than the impact of any of them individually.

The ‘Finding answers to global threats’ team will look at growing populations, changing consumption patterns, depleted natural resources and climate change, which together pose unprecedented challenges to humanity.

Experts from the interdisciplinary Centre for Environment and Society (iCES) will examine rural and urban communities around the world that, despite the emerging global threats, are finding ways to increase resilience and promote the sustainable use of resources.

A key objective of the research will be to analyse the factors that facilitate or hinder the transition to sustainable living. The project, for which a range of external UK and EU funding agencies will be targeted, will contribute to regeneration agendas and lead to a flagship programme of research. [transition to sustainable living = submission to draconian population and resource control regulations]

‘Transitions to peace and prosp-erity’ will address the challenge of helping countries in their transition from violent conflict and repression to peace and prosperity is at the heart of the multi-disciplinary project on transitional justice.

Building on Essex’s expertise in social sciences and the field of international human rights law in acute crisis, the transitional justice project is focusing initially on six research themes: data archiving and analysis, economic dimensions, peace-building, conceptual issues of transitional justice, and gender and children-focused approaches, and justice.

The team will build international collaborations in different continents with key global institutions as it seeks to establish Essex as a top research and teaching university on transitional justice.

Through the final project ‘Rein-venting the internet,’ the university plans to become a leading player in the global challenge to re-design the internet so it can cope with the demands of the 21st century.

Having secured funding from the EU, the university’s Future Internet Research Task Force will offer a unique, holistic approach to solving this international problem.

The internet has become a victim of its own success and usage today is stretching the original network to its limits. It is mainly the emergence and ever-growing use of new applications such as video over the internet which is taking the biggest toll. The internet was not designed to be used for such globally popular applications as Facebook, YouTube, BBC iPlayer and Wikipedia. [can't we just build more cables and have more satellites, rather than submit to "Internet 2", which will cripple the free internet as we know it?]

Key researchers with computer science and electronic engineering expertise and internationally-renowned experts from Essex’s sociology and business disciplines will work on the project.
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I will let you decide whether you like the "New World Order" envisioned by our nation's academia, or not. They might as well have gone the whole nine yards and called for RFID chips for everyone from birth.

See the other side of the Internet argument: Save the Internet