School Kids In Brazil Now Wear 'Chipped' T-shirts





By 2013, all 43,000 of the children in Brazil's Vitoria da Conquista schools will be wearing t-shirts with RFID identification chips.

Radio frequency chips in "intelligent uniforms" let a computer know when children enter school and it sends a text message to their cell phones. Parents are also alerted if kids don't show up 20 minutes after classes begin with the following message: "Your child has still not arrived at school." "We noticed that many parents would bring their children to school but would not see if they actually entered the building because they always left in a hurry to get to work on time," Moraes said in a telephone interview. "They would always be surprised when told of the number times their children skipped class. The city government invested $670,000 to design, test and make the microchipped T-shirts, he said. The chips, similar to those used to track pets in many countries, are placed underneath each school's coat-of-arms or on one of the sleeves below a phrase that says: "Education does not transform the world. Education changes people and people transform the world."

Science fiction fans might not have seen this coming, even if they had read about the sleeve communicator in Murray Leinster's 1945 short story First Contact, the sleeve watch in Niven and Barnes'1981 novel Dream Park and the heartshirt in Rudy Rucker's 1988 novel Wetware.

Better watch out, Brazilian school kids; next thing you know, you'll start getting SchoolBooks.

Via ZDNet and Associated Press.

Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 3/29/2012)

Follow this kind of news @Technovelgy.

| Email | RSS | Blog It | Stumble | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit |

Would you like to contribute a story tip? It's easy:

Get the URL of the story, and the related sf author, and add it here.

Comment/Join discussion ( 0 )

Index of related articles:

Related News Stories - (" Surveillance ")

'Alexa For Residential' A Landlord's Dream (Tenant's Nightmare?)

'...unseen mechanical entities... that are in our very midst. One of them following each of us.' - Philip K. Dick, 1960.

Foiling Facial Recognition, Fighting Coaster Viruses, Harlan Ellison-Style

I have no mouth and I must scream.

Adversarial Pattern Shirts Confound Object Detection Systems

Ah, to be a vague blur!

A Passing Drone Has Covid-19 Advice

'Gold dots against blue, basketball-sized, twelve feet up.' Larry Niven, 1972.

Web TechNovelgy.com