Siri's apparent unwillingness to provide useful responses to search queries relating to birth control makes Apple look terrible. I wonder how much embarrassment it would take for Apple to cite the program's 'Beta' status and pull it for a while so they can work the bugs out?

For what it's worth, I'd be astounded if the behaviour people are reporting is the result of a deliberate strategy on Apple's part of trying to avoid giving information about contraception, rape and so on. If it is, it's clearly very poorly implemented, both because the iPhone will happily let you google for them¹ and because it's such a hot button subject that there's no way it would have gone unnoticed for long.

I strongly suspect that Siri's anomalous behaviour will turn out to be some combination of the user's location, the quality and consistency of data in the databases and directories Siri is acting as a front end for, and some rough edges in Siri's code. Running natural language search queries against third party databases is hard: doing so when your data providers may themselves be erring on the side of caution when it comes to tagging and categorising the data you're accessing is never going to be close to completely accurate. Doing all that and having Siri respond in colloquial English rather than displaying less user-friendly but more informative error messages like "Connection refused" or "0 records found", and thus making every failed query look like the result of a conscious decision on Siri's part. isn't helping one little bit.

Whatever the reason, it'll be interesting to see how Apple respond.

[Via MetaFilter]

1. Thus shredding any argument Apple might make that they're attempting to shield young iPhone users from information that some jurisdictions might not want them to be able to access. ↩

Everything the Beatles ever did, played all at once and timed so they end at the same moment.

I'd quite like to hear someone try this with the collected works of Radiohead. Or Prince, come to think of it. Or Kate Bush. Or David Bowie. Or Elvis Costello. Or Genesis. Or the Pet Shop Boys. Or…

[Via Waxy.org Links]

Address Is Approximate:

A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.

Cute.

[Via Flowing Data]

One for the Safari users among you: the ZoomBySite extension makes Safari remember the zoom level you applied last time you visited a site, then automatically applies it again for future visits. Marvelous for the many web sites that assume we all still have the eyes of our 21 year old selves.

The one feature ZoomBySite is missing is that it doesn't respect Safari's Zoom Text Only setting and always zooms both text and images. You can still use the default Safari zoom feature, so it's not a disaster, but it's mildly irritating to have to switch to the native Safari method for some sites when ZoomBySite otherwise does such a good job.

Apart from that quirk, ZoomBySite does one thing and does it really well: recommended.

John Scalzi found himself home alone watching a Lord of the Rings movie marathon and couldn't resist livetweeting the experience. Some highlights:

Burning ent putting himself out in the flood: Still cool.

[...]

Once again: Gandalf – not a people person. #WhatDenathorNeededWasAHug

[...]

Hope the people of Minas Tirith like Oliphant barbeque.

[Via MetaFilter]

The AV Club's interview with Molly Parker was going so well, right up until they brought up her role in the Neil LaBute/Nic Cage version of The Wicker Man:

AVC: You haven't seen the YouTube compilations of Nicolas Cage screaming?

MP: What? No! I'll have to look.

AVC: When you were working on the film, were there any warning signs that this would be the fate of the film?

MP: It was such an odd thing, and I don't know how to talk about it without… [Pause.] I'd have liked… [Pause.] I have been intrigued by… [Pause.] I guess what I had hoped for was that Neil LaBute would have a take on the original that would be interesting, given the films he had made before. I don't know what else to say. [Laughs.] It's really odd, isn't it? A very odd thing. I liked working with Nicolas Cage. I liked that a lot. He's a very interesting man, and a pretty bold actor. He's certainly done some great work in his lifetime. But I'll check out the YouTube thing.

Not her most convincing performance, I'm thinking.

Brent Simmons on The Readable Future:

No app built for reading starts with the premise that the publisher has done an acceptable job.

I wish I shared Simmons' optimism that the public's desire to read clean, easy to read web pages will push publishers towards tidying up their web sites. I think instead we'll see publishers trying really hard to push users to access their sites using custom apps where the publishers can control the user experience and perhaps even charge for access to their content beyond a certain minimal level, and putting as much of their web-based content as they can get away with behind a paywall.

I hope I'm wrong, but I reckon that we're in for at least another decade of news sites being festooned with all sorts of non-content in the hope that somehow the site will attract enough page impressions and thus advertising revenue to compensate for the decline in print circulation.

Tom Morris on why WebFonts matter.¹

1. Clue: it's got nothing to do with how pretty they can make our web pages look. ↩

The 48th anniversary of the broadcast of the show's first episode seems as good a reason as any to link to this video of every Doctor Who theme from 1963 to 2010.¹

It's probably not the longest-running theme tune in British popular culture – I'd imagine that that The Archers probably holds that prize – but for a lot of people of my age it's surely the most evocative.²

[Via MeFi user piratebowling, commenting here]

1. For a slightly less trippy video presentation, see the YouTube version here. ↩
2. Similarly, the sound of the TARDIS engine is surely the most thrilling sound effect on TV. Nothing else comes close. ↩

Future Drama: a compilation of designers of the (mostly quite recent) past's visions of the future, with a particular emphasis on videos depicting futuristic technology being deployed in real world situations.

You know the sort of thing: currently the trend is to depict elegantly dressed rich people toting around ultrathin tablet computers that they control via touch interfaces (often with some form of holographic display) whilst engaged in their job as a knowledge worker and/or high powered executive. Back at their hotel room after a hard day's collaboration, they use the device as a fancy videophone to chat with their cute pre-teen daughter back home about how school went today. ^1 2 3

I snark, but I do find this sort of speculative work fascinating. Also, the Matt Jones blog post that pointed me in this direction is well worth a read: I've always seen this sort of video as a marketing tool aimed at gaining mindshare, but he's found that for designers placing their ideas on screen in the context where they'll be used can be immensely valuable, insofar as it helps them assess whether their ideas 'fit' in the real world. Good stuff.

[Via Comment #4 on a post at BERG Blog. TED Talk on a real-world Minority Report user interface via Wikipedia]

1. Just like how ten years ago the future was going to involve lots of sharply dressed rich people organising their work and their lives via big screens employing Minority Report-style user interfaces whilst engaged in their job as a top executive or senior knowledge worker. Back at their hotel room after a hard day's collaboration, they'd use the device as a fancy videophone to chat with their cute young daughter back home about how school went. ↩
2. By contrast, fifteen years ago, our senior knowledge worker executive would have been using a stylus-based tablet that seamlessly and instantaneously translated their handwriting into computerised text ready to email to their bosses over the internet, whilst also displaying a pop-up reminder to call their daughter when they got back to the hotel. ↩
3. I can't help but notice that none of these devices ever has a red battery power indicator blinking away in one corner, reminding the user that they need to find a USB socket some time in the next thirty minutes if they want to keep using it. Funny, that… ↩

Apparently, Martin Belam found the experience of editing a compilation of the Guardian's articles about NuWho a tad unnerving:

I'm terrified of errors. Not formatting errors – because it seems to me the process of publishing ebooks has been carefully calibrated to maximise the chance of errors creeping in. They are just a given.

No, I'm terrified of Doctor Who errors.

[Story about the process of deciding how many actors have portrayed The Master on-screen. It turns out that the answer is six. Or possibly seven.]

You see how tricky it is? Neither number is satisfactory. For a bunch of people ready to suspend disbelief to the point that a 900 year old Time Lord can travel anywhere in time and space in a battered old police box, Whovians can be incredibly pedantic about the show. Me included.

It's an interesting look at the challenges of filleting more than half a decade's coverage of the show to produce an ebook of around half that length whilst ironing out odd little stylistic inconsistencies.

I've bought a copy. No doubt I'll have read a significant portion of the material when it was first published, but I'm willing to spend £3.45 to enjoy it again and catch up on what I missed. Also, if this project is a success Martin Belam would like to do a similar compilation of the Guardian's coverage of ClassicWho: I'd very much like to read that.

In enthusing over his iPad, TV producer Ash Atalla requested a feature that I'd be willing to bet Jonathan Ive doesn't have on his drawing board just yet:

What additional features would you add if you could?

Some sort of tea-carrying device would be good. I drink 10-15 cups of tea a day, so it would be good if it just had a circle in it where I could put my tea cup right through the middle of it, and then it would reform itself once I had finished my tea. At the moment I use it as a tray when I'm carrying things around, so often I have a mug of tea on top of my iPad. And I just wish it would make that system a little bit safer, because one day it's going to have a bath in lovely Earl Grey.

Alternatively, I suppose that if Apple could make the touchscreen register the presence of a larger-that-finger-sized non-organic circular object then they could rewrite the iOS display routines to display a skeuomorphic image of a coaster under the cup and flow the user interface around the virtual coaster so that the cup didn't obscure anything important.

File under Things it had never occurred to me existed: ¹ a training yard where technicians learn how to climb utility poles.

[Via BLDGBLOG]

1. It's quite logical that there should be a need for such a facility, but I suppose if I'd ever given the matter any thought I'd have assumed that technicians would learn to climb poles in the field. Presumably there are similar – but larger – training sites somewhere for those whose job is to climb electrical pylons. ↩

Photo of the day: I ♥ HK.

[Via The Morning News]

Photographer Irina Werning's Back to the Future 2.¹

My favourites in this collection: Christoph 1990 & 2011, Puna 2003 & 2011, and Carli 1990 & 2011.

[Via Waxy.org]

1. Previously. ↩

"In theory" is one of the scariest phrases in the world of computing. Take this story about vulnerabilities in the computer systems used to run some federal prisons in the USA:

While the computers that are used for the system control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that control prison doors and other systems in theory should not be connected to the Internet, the researchers found that there was an Internet connection associated with every prison system they surveyed. In some cases, prison staff used the same computers to browse the Internet; in others, the companies that had installed the software had put connections in place to do remote maintenance on the systems.

[Emphasis added]

[Via Bruce Schneier]

The sole positive xonsequence of the news that Harry Potter director David Yates wants to make a big-screen reimagining of Doctor Who is that it prompted the creation of the hashtag #drwhomovietitle.¹

Seriously, though, didn't we learn anything from the TV movie? Having more money to spend on special effects does not good Who make. Unless this is the BBC's sly way of telling us that they're going to wrap the TV show up when Matt Smith moves on in a year or two, I suspect the idea will languish in development hell for a couple of years then slip quietly into oblivion.²

[Via Bunny Ultramod, posting to this MeFi thread]

1. I'm pretty sure that Army of Harkness would be vastly superior to Torchwood: Miracle Day in every way. ↩
2. Looking on the bright side, perhaps the BBC could give Hollywood the rights to the iDaleks so they can be kept well away from the small screen version for a few years. ↩

Link to Earth | Time Lapse View from Space | Fly Over seems to be the thing to do this weekend.

It is well worth a look, mind.

How to triage and fix software issues.

Remember when Apple made TV adverts styling themselves as opponents of Big Brother. Judging by a recent Employment Tribunal finding, that stance is inoperative:

Crisp, who worked in an Apple Store, posted derogatory statements on Facebook about Apple and its products. The posts were made on a "private" Facebook page and outside of working hours. One of his colleagues, who happened to be a Facebook "friend", saw the comments, printed the posts and passed them to the store manager. Crisp was subsequently dismissed for gross misconduct.

The employment tribunal rejected Crisp's claim for unfair dismissal. [...]

Despite having "private" Facebook settings, the tribunal decided that there was nothing to prevent friends from copying and passing on Crisp's comments, so he was unable to rely on the right to privacy contained in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (covered in the UK by the Human Rights Act 1998). He retained his right to freedom of expression under Article 10, but Apple successfully argued that it was justified and proportionate to limit this right in order to protect its commercial reputation against potentially damaging posts.

I'm not saying that the tribunal's findings are wrong in law: apparently Apple Retail's 'social media policy' emphasised that employees were forbidden from posting unfavourable opinions on the company's products on social media sites, so on the face of it the ex-employee was in breach of this policy.

My problem is threefold:

1. With the tribunal, for apparently holding that even though the employee used Facebook's privacy controls to restrict access to his comments the fact that someone could have copied-and-pasted the text of those comments negated his right to privacy.¹ By that logic, if he'd been talking to a couple of friends in a pub or in his home, the fact that one of his pals could have surreptitiously recorded his comments using their smartphone renders those comments public too. This is a terribly bad idea.
2. With Apple Retail, for trying to gag their employees outside working hours. I don't doubt that their social media policy bans derogatory comments from employees. I just think that a) they shouldn't be trying to control what employees do when they're not at work, and b) they need to distinguish between genuinely public expressions of dissatisfaction and private letting-off of steam.
3. With the little shit who ratted on his 'friend'² to his Apple Store bosses.

[Via The Register, via Risks Digest Volume 26: Issue 60]

1. I'd be more well-disposed towards the finding if they'd held that Facebook's policy of frequently expanding the boundaries of what portions of a user's content is publicly available means that a Facebook user couldn't be sure how long private postings would remain private! ↩
2. Yet another demonstration of how unsuited that term is to the way social networking actually works. ↩