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.

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:

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?

Source: Department for Transport

Source: Department for Transport