Watching brief
Samsung warned users of its voice-activated televisions that what they said in front of the TV could be transmitted to other people. The story attracted comparison with the telescreens in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the principle of keeping a population under control by surveillance was foreseen a century earlier by Jeremy Bentham.
— In 1791 he came up with the idea for a Panopticon, a circular prison with one-way observation holes which would allow a single gaoler to patrol several hundred prisoners, none of whom could tell whether they were being watched at any one moment.
— Bentham saw the government’s eventual rejection of the scheme as ‘sinister’, a word now more likely to be used to describe the idea itself.
Land of the sinking price
Britain was predicted to be heading for ‘Japanese-style deflation’. How far did prices fall in Japan? It had consumer-price deflation in eight of the past 20 years:
| 1995 | -0.4% |
| 1999 | -1.1% |
| 2001 | -1.3% |
| 2003 | -0.4% |
| 2005 | -0.4% |
| 2009 | -1.7% |
| 2011 | -0.2% |
| 2012 | -0.1% |
Source: www.inflation.eu
Curtain call
Sir Tom Stoppard complained that theatre audiences aren’t as clever as they used to be and don’t get his jokes. Who goes to the theatre?
— The age group most likely to attend is 16–19
— The average income is £31,300
— 65% are female
— 55% work full time and 12% part time
— 11% are students; 15% are retired
— 29% have checked their phone during a performance
— 50% have eaten during a performance
Source: Ticketmaster/Society of London Theatres
Killer lorries
A runaway lorry killed four people in Bath, following the dustcart accident in Glasgow before Christmas. Are lorries a menace?
| % traffic made up by lorries | |
| Motorway | 11% |
| A-road | 5.4% |
| Minor | 1.4% |
Source: Department for Transport
| % fatalities involving lorry |
|
| Motorway | 52% |
| A-road | 18% |
| Minor | 7.2% |
Source: Department for Transport
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