Cactus rustling

Somewhat bizzare story from IEEE Spectrum about using microchips - which I assume are RFID devices - to prevent theft of cactii. Interestingly, fish and animal tagging uses low frequency tags in most cases - eg products from Biomark.

NFC- what is it good for ?

A quick article in the NZ herald (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10536545) about the alcatel lucient NFC kit for home automation. The journalist (Simon Hendry) makes the point that there are no killer applications yet, and I tend to agree that home NFC - except perhaps for assisted living applications - seems a little like an application looking for a role. I'm fairly convinced that longer range RFID has the advantage even in the home as long as the system can handle the uncertainty caused by multiple objects and missed reads - one of the points made by the recent review in IEEE computer.

Sheng, Quan Z.; Li, Xue; Zeadally, Sherali, "Enabling Next-Generation RFID Applications: Solutions and Challenges," Computer , vol.41, no.9, pp.21-28, Sept. 2008
URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4623217&isnumber=4623205

Source of the name "AURA"

Despite being a relatively forced acronym (AUT RFID Applications), AURA is often used to describe the "active space" around an RFID user or tag. However, Aura was a titian goddess in greek mythology, who was turned into a breeze or possibly a stream after annoying Artemis. The story is here. There is a picture of a representation of her here.