Schrodingers Cat - The Belgian identity paradigm and regimented schoolkids

Crusading Pippa King identifies what is one of the first uses of fingerprint recognition in Belgian schools - allegedly to prevent truanting.

The Ligue des Familles, is a Belgian parents organisation (with 70,000 members)has raised the debate in Belgium over one of the first recorded uses of fingerprint recognition in 2 Brussels schools - now the Marie-José school in Liege is to be equipped and the Commission for the Protection of Privacy has complained that none of the schools consulted them before installing fingerprint recognition systems. The Belgian Privacy Commission launched its online Public Register on Jan 27th 2007(European Data Protection Day ) . Any Belgian can consult this register on line and check whether someone who processes their personal data has made a notification.

Would you like to consult this register? In this way you could check whether someone who processes your personal data has made a notification.

Philippe Schwarzenberger, the president of the Brussels based Fédération des Associations de Parents de l'Enseignement Officiel(FAPEO), a federation representing a number of parents' associations, said he was "frightened" by this type of measure and "feared that it might become a sales argument luring parents to sign their children up" to schools equipped with fingerprint recognition systems.

Philippe Schwarzenberger added that schools are the "place where we build tomorrow's society" and asked if it wouldn't be to the advantage of everyone to try and create more involvement between pupils and education professionals.

Interesting or simply coincidental researches at the University of Leuven in Belgium have developed an RFID-enabled tooth which can help with "identity management."

No larger than a grain of rice. It fits into your tooth just like a filling withstands normal biting forces and worked even after being heated to 450C and cooled.

The unnamed device was developed to help forensic scientists identify bodies after natural disasters and terrorist attacks with numerous victims.

Belgium was the first country to comply with the requirements of the visa waiver program in which the participating countries are expected to use e-passports that have biometric information by October 2006.

That is not where Belgian interest in identity management ends. Melanie Rieback,with fellow researcher Bruno Crispo and Professor Andrew Tanenbaum presented paper on March 15 2006, at the IEEE conference on "Pervasive computing" entitled " "Is Your Cat Infected with a Computer Virus?", in Pisa, Italy. Her thesis was that powerful viruses can fit on the small memory space of a Gen 1 or Gen 2 RFID tag. Her team succeeded quite well in demonstrating the possibility of creating very small viruses that could reside on a standard retail RFID tag. These viruses could also fit on the transdermal tags used in veterinary applications.

Are the cats striking back when the kids can't ?

Schrodinger's cat

Nobel Prize winner Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 (after he left Germany in 1933 to escape Hitler - never forget, some people saw the consequences of the 1933 elections 6 years before war broke out) attempted to illustrate the principle in quantum theory of superposition, by a cat that serves to demonstrate the apparent conflict between what quantum theory tells us is and ;
what we observe to be true about the nature and behavior of matter
on the macroscopic level and
what we observe to be true about the nature and behavior of matter
on the macroscopic level.

This involved a cat in a box ... hey, hey it was only a theoretical cat.