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Unlock Hidden Siri on the New iPad
Much to the chagrin of consumers, the New iPad was announced last month lacking an essential feature. That’s right, the magical, revolutionary, incredible, useless Siri was conspicuously absent from the New iPad models. However, thanks to a little techno-chicanery, it has been discovered that Siri lies dormant within the New iPad. She need only be awakened to be at your every command. Here are the steps you need to take to unlock Siri on the New iPad:
- From the home screen, tap the home button to reach the Search page.
- Tap on the microphone icon near the bottom-left of the on-screen keyboard.
- To make use of Siri, simply issue a command or question beginning with her name. For instance, “Siri, why did Apple hide you inside the New iPad?”
That’s all there is to it! Any time you are in need of her services, simply use the iPad’s on-screen keyboard and voice recognition to summon Siri.
See the video for a full demonstration of Siri on the New iPad.
- Siri,
- iOS,
- iPad,
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Oregontrailification
I posted some Tweets lately that I would like to summarize into a more cohesive point here. Amidst the gamification craze of the past year or two, it has become common to add the suffix -ification to almost any word. I did so jokingly when I heinously morphed the classic computer game, Oregon Trail, into the hashtag #oregontrailificaton. However, this got me to thinking about what oregontrailification might be if applied to business, politics, and education the way that gamification is being applied to those fields today. Here are a few examples that I came up with.
Oregontrailification in Business
Provide the employees in your organization primitive riffles with which they may hunt buffalo.
Oregontrailification in Politics
Ensure that at least one member of every household suffers from dysentery or cholera at any given time.
Oregontrailification in Education
Solve your supply shortage problems by teaching students to steal from the other wagons in the middle of the night.
Conclusion
Indeed, blindly applying game components to the real world is the key to success in business, politics, and education.
As you can see, a surface application of Oregon Trail to the real world, while potentially hilarious on paper, would certainly lead to disaster. Frankly, these examples are not a far cry from how gamification is being approached by marketers, managers, policy makers, and educators today. It seems that the tendency is to just take a fast glance at a popular game, abduct some salient features from it, and apply them to a real-world system. Unfortunately, this is most often done with out any understanding of game design, sociology, or psychology, which results in shallow, empty, and ineffective gamification.
John M. Quick
