Nobel winners, PC blues and how some iPhones mistake rollercoasters for car crashes

Image of the week: Diamond delight

It wasn’t the worst of Mondays for University of Chicago professor Douglas Diamond as students and staff gathered to applaud him hours after he found out he had won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, otherwise known as the Nobel Prize for economics (but not one of the original Nobel prizes, fact fans). Diamond shared the prize with former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Philip Dybvig of Washington University, St Louis, for their research on financial crises.

The Nobel foundation said the three economists “significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in the economy, particularly during financial crises”, with Bernanke’s studies focusing on Great Depression era bank runs and Diamond and Dybvig’s work showing how governments can mitigate the vulnerability of banks to rumours of collapse, something which is bound to come in handy again some time. Diamond, asleep when he got the call, looked thrilled by the recognition. The cash prize — 10 million Swedish kroner (€909,000) between them — is presumably nice, too.

In numbers: Computer problems

26.4%

Year-on-year decline in the personal computer market in the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region in the third quarter, according to PC shipments trackers Gartner. This was the steepest decline among all regions.

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19.5%

The overall worldwide decline in PC shipments — the fourth consecutive quarterly drop — was the biggest since Gartner began measuring the PC market in the mid-1990s. The weak market conditions are likely to prompt job losses in the PC manufacturing sector.

68 million

Worldwide PC shipments arrived at this number in the third quarter. The quarter’s tally, deflated by economic conditions and existing high inventories, “could mark a historic slowdown”, Gartner said — a problem switching it off and switching it on again sadly won’t fix.

Getting to know: Kings Island amusement park

Ohio’s Kings Island, located in Mason near Cincinnati, is the largest amusement and water park in the US Midwest, offering thrill-chasers 364 acres of rides with names such as Invertigo, Flight of Fear and Drop Tower. So far, so terrifying. But what it is not is the location of multiple car crashes that some Apple iPhones think it is. The recently released iPhone 14 is equipped with a feature that enables phones to detect crashes and notify emergency services, with the owners given a message saying “it looks like you’ve been in a crash” and told the Emergency SOS function will be triggered if they don’t respond.

Alas, its sensors appear to have become confused between crashes and rollercoaster rides, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that six automated crash-detection calls were made to emergency services from the phones of people who were on Kings Island rides at the time. Muffled screams could be heard in the background of one call, not helping to clarify matters.

The lesson here is clear: if you’re an iPhone 14 owner and you somehow find yourself on a hurtling rollercoaster instead of a nice calm carousel, airplane mode is your friend.

The list: Operations update

In Westminster, they love inventing “operations” with daft codenames. Some are more official than others, the existence of many will be subject to non-denial denials, but you can count on another one coming along in a minute. Here is a flavour of some recent efforts.

1. Operation Rolling Thunder: Liz Truss’s “pro-growth” policies, said to include a weakening of workers’ rights, were curiously named after the US bombardment of Vietnam. MPs are now dubbing them Operation Sh*tstorm or Operation Rolling Blunder.

2. Operation Save Big Dog: The year opened in the haze of Partygate, with an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to keep Boris Johnson in power. January seems like a very long time ago.

3. Operation Red Meat: This one was all about throwing Conservative MPs some scraps to either distract them from attempts to unseat Johnson or persuade them Big Dog was worth saving.

4. Operation Yellowhammer: In 2019, the UK Cabinet Office prepared a contingency plan for mitigating the damage of a no-deal Brexit under this codename. Operation Chaos might have been more appropriate.

5. Operation Arse: Scottish Conservative MPs didn’t want Johnson in Number 10, so in 2018 they launched a whispering campaign to prevent him from winning the leadership. The bid was futile, but the chosen codename highly reusable.