Technology can do a lot of things, but can it keep kids from skipping school? In San Antonio, they’re going to track children with the same microchips used for cattle, or boxes in a Wal-Mart warehouse: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). More than 6,000 students will be outfitted with RFID chips, as a pilot for a district-wide program. The district says it’ll be good for emergencies, but there are inevitable issues of privacy. Plus: Are you ready for some “backyard” neuroscience?

Botnets are series of computers that are infected without their owners knowing it. Those computers — possibly your computer — are then used to send spam, relay stolen data, all sorts of bad stuff. Corporate bigwigs met for a summit on botnets at the White House yesterday, trying to find a way to make sure computers aren’t infected with bad software.

Computer networks across the Middle East are engulfed in Flame. That’s Flame, singular not plural. Flame is a newly identified bit of malicious software used in an enormous attack on government computers in Iran, Israel and other Middle Eastern countries. Flame’s power, combined with fear of what else might be out there, could lead to panic by governments around the world.

How many minutes did you spend online yesterday? How many hours did you sleep last night? How much water have you had today, like, in ounces? Those and other quantifiable answers are at the heart of a movement known as The Quantified Self. It’s an online hub for people looking to add up their own numbers and figure out what to do with the totals. Also, in Tech Report Theater, we play with the app-based photo sharing service Instagram, recently purchased by Facebook for a billion dollars, and Facebook Camera, a new photo sharing app from Facebook.

The Internet can get pretty weird. One of the best illustrations of that is the growing trend of highly specific and deeply strange and often very funny blogs on Tumblr. Entire blogs dedicated to nothing but pictures of ugly babies from Renaissance paintings or single Cheetos left on the street. There’s one of just cats laying in piles of money. We talk to a few creators of microfocused Tumblrs that have gotten a lot of attention.

This week, the Obama campaign launched an online dashboard for its network of volunteers. It’s a bit of technology that tracks all the activity that volunteers have done on behalf of the campaign, including calls made, doors knocked on, money that’s been raised. The investment in this type of technology could have a big effect on how the rest of the campaign is conducted and who might win in November.

Customers of Comcast’s Xfinity service will soon be able to use a Comcast app to make phone calls from their home number over the Internet on any Wi-Fi network. So if you’re out and about, in theory, it just got a lot easier to make calls from, say, an iPod Touch without using a cell phone network. Just find a Wi-Fi signal. It’s a system called Voice Over Internet Protocol or VOIP. But is it reliable? Plus, IBM has banned the use of Apple’s voice-controlled personal assistant Siri from the company’s campus. We chat with Siri about it all.

The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote on setting aside part of the broadcast spectrum for wireless medical devices. The devices could be used to monitor patients with heart conditions and lung problems, and send out data on how the patient is doing. It’s like getting an email from your body. The commission’s vote could have an enormous effect on the future of medical treatment. Plus, the new partnership between American Express and, yes, Farmville.

A bunch of big cable TV companies have teamed up to give you a present: Free Wi-Fi. If you’re a customer of Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Cablevision or Bright House, you’ll be able to use Wi-Fi hotspots from any of those companies. Fifty thousand hotspots nationwide will show up under the name Cable Wi-Fi. So what’s in it for the cable companies? Plus, the most musical cities in America.