Yesterday I wrote about how the CBC is doing A/B testing on its news headlines.

Today I dug in a little deeper, and created this little hack, which scrapes the data from the CBC’s Chartbeat endpoint, and exposes the currently-running headline tests.

Here’s what it looks like at this hour, with “More French students than ever on P.E.I.” soundly beating “Enrolment at French schools in P.E.I. is at an all-time high”:

There’s no magic to how I did this: it’s 26 lines of PHP and HTML:

<html>
<head>
<title>CBC Prince Edward Island Headline Testing</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>CBC Prince Edward Island Headline Testing</h1>
<h4>This is an experiment, not affiliated with the CBC. <a href="https://ruk.ca/content/cbc-ab-testing-news">Read more here</a>.</h4>
<?php
$json = file_get_contents("http://mab.chartbeat.com/mab_strategy/headline_testing/get_strategy/?host=cbc.ca&domain=cbc.ca&path=/news/canada/prince-edward-island");
$headlines = json_decode($json);
if (property_exists($headlines, 'data') and property_exists($headlines->data, 'experiments')) {
  foreach ($headlines->data->experiments as $headline) {
    $location = $headline->location;
    preg_match('#\bhttps?://[^,\s()<>]+(?:\([\w\d]+\)|([^,[:punct:]\s]|/))#', $location, $match);
    $url = $match[0];
    print "<h2><a href=\"$url\">$url</a></h2>\n";
    foreach ($headline->variants as $variant) {
      print "<h3>" . $variant->content . "</h3>\n";
      $width = intval($variant->probability * 100) * 3;
      $percentage = intval($variant->probability * 100) . "%";
      print "<p>$percentage <img src=\"1by1green.png\" width=\"$width\" height=\"25\" align=\"absmiddle\"></p>\n";
    }
  }
}
?>
</body>

The headline testing JSON object for the CBC Prince Edward Island front page is always at the same URL; my script simply grabs that in real time, turns it into a PHP object, and then iterates through each variant for each test and displays the headlines and their current “probability” measure, both as a number and as a bar graph (drawn with a 1x1 pixel PNG, 1990s-style).

Feel free to use this code as the basis for exploring your local CBC’s headline testing operation.

I had a chance to do some urban exploring a few weeks ago, inside the old Myron’s location on Kent Street, which has been closed for some time. It was a fascinating ramble in a building that’s held together remarkably well.

One of the more interesting artifacts of the past I came I across was the remnants of an incredibly complex digital liquor control system from Azbar (this video, which looks like it was shot in 1979, is a great overview of this technology).

I took a photo of the control panel of the Azbar system, which had all of Myron’s drinks programmed into it:

Here are the drinks that are listed on the buttons; it’s a veritable liquor time machine, and also a useful reminder that the history of nightclub alcohol and sexism was, at least back in the day, alive and well.

• Yellow Buttons
  • 747
  • After Eight
  • Alabama Slammer
  • B-52
  • Blow Job
  • Brain Hemorage
  • Coconut Babs (maybe this is wrong?)
  • Mevain Shoe (maybe this is wrong?)
  • Mexican Missel
  • Nightmare
  • Orgasm
  • Pepers
  • Prairie Fire
  • Prick-leg
  • Sex on the Beach
  • Silver Tread
  • Slipped Nipple
  • Test Tube
• Orange Buttons
  • Black Russian
  • Bloody Caesar
  • Long Island Ice Tea
  • Paralyser
  • Rum Paralyser
  • Sling!
  • White Russian
  • Coma
  • Horney Monkeyy
• Blue Buttons
  • Drink Special (x3)
• Purple Buttons
  • Staff Rum
  • Staff Gin
  • Unreadable (x3)

If I’ve transcribed any of these inaccurately (here’s a larger version of the image, if you want to zoom right in), please let me know (as far as I can recall, outside of a mistaken Long Island Ice Tea ordered at a restaurant in Espanola, Ontario in 1990, I’ve never ordered a mixed drink, so I’m not an expert; I also never went to Myron’s, other than to see Annekenstein).

Last week we had the joy of seeing Mossie Ó Scanláin, Finbarr English, Cian Ó Móráin and Mary MacGillivray play together as Ómós Irish Ensemble at The Pourhouse in Charlottetown.

Beyond the dreamy assemblage of accents in their collected names–seven by my count–the pleasure came from the unmitigated joy that flowed from the stage: these are four people who obviously love playing tunes with each other, and their gathering together resulted in so much more than the sum of the parts.

Mossie and Finbarr are on Prince Edward Island as guests from Ireland, the product of a government-funded effort to celebrate the cultural overlap.

You have two more opportunities to see Finbarr in action: tonight, December 7, 2017 at The Old Triangle from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. he’ll be joining a session, and on Saturday, December 9, 2017 he’ll join Cian and Mary for their regular 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. gig at the same location.

If you need more convincing that you should make it out, watch here and here.

He is a force of nature.

Visiting the front page of CBC Prince Edward Island’s website this morning, I noticed that the headline on the main story was Let’s have some babies’: Aylward calls for support for families trying to conceive, but that this was, after a brief pause, replaced with the headline Opposition calls for support for families trying to conceive.

The original headline looked like this:

The quickly-replaced-by headline looked like this:

This had all the appearances of “A/B testing,” something websites do to test out different versions of headlines, photos, buttons and other elements to see which has a better “conversion rate” (conversion, in this case, meaning “clicking on the headline to read the story”).

Generally A/B testing is opaque to we the reader: we don’t know it’s happening to us. But in this case, something about the technology the CBC is using to conduct the A/B test is introducing a delay long enough for us to see behind the curtain.

Looking under the hood of the CBC’s site with Firefox’s Developer Tools, I see a call to a URL at Chartbeat, and loading this URL into a browser shows all the headline tests currently running on the CBC PEI site:

{
  "status": "success",
  "data": {
    "domain": "cbc.ca",
    "probability_is_control": 0,
    "probability_is_lift": 0,
    "host": "cbc.ca",
    "experiments": {
      "[e8f119d5]": {
        "metadata": "{\"version\":3,\"sub_location\":\"\",\"initial_content\":\"How a planning firm thinks Borden-Carleton could attract more tourists\"}",
        "specific_location": "*[@id='blogroll-story-1.4434879'][@href='http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/news\/canada\/prince-edward-island\/pei-borden-carleton-draft-spatial-tourism-plan-1.4434879']",
        "variants": {
          "A": {
            "content": "How a planning firm thinks Borden-Carleton could attract more tourists",
            "probability": 0.6954,
            "content_type": "text",
            "metadata": "{}"
          },
          "B": {
            "content": "Borden-Carleton aims to attract more tourists with spatial plan",
            "probability": 0.3046,
            "content_type": "text",
            "metadata": "{}"
          }
        },
        "location": "*[@id='blogroll-story-1.4434879'][@href='http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/news\/canada\/prince-edward-island\/pei-borden-carleton-draft-spatial-tourism-plan-1.4434879']",
        "strategy_last_updated": 1512572157
      },
      "[c5d38929]": {
        "metadata": "{\"version\":3,\"sub_location\":\"\",\"initial_content\":\"'Let's have some babies': Aylward looks to support for families trying to conceive\"}",
        "specific_location": "*[@id='topstory-headline-1.4434994'][@href='http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/news\/canada\/prince-edward-island\/pei-fertility-treatment-access-support-1.4434994']",
        "variants": {
          "A": {
            "content": "'Let's have some babies': Aylward looks to support for families trying to conceive",
            "probability": 0.408,
            "content_type": "text",
            "metadata": "{}"
          },
          "B": {
            "content": "Opposition calls for support for families trying to conceive",
            "probability": 0.592,
            "content_type": "text",
            "metadata": "{}"
          }
        },
        "location": "*[@id='topstory-headline-1.4434994'][@href='http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/news\/canada\/prince-edward-island\/pei-fertility-treatment-access-support-1.4434994']",
        "strategy_last_updated": 1512572157
      },
      "[7c9d7236]": {
        "metadata": "{\"version\":3,\"sub_location\":\"\",\"initial_content\":\"'The whole waiting room calmed down:' Therapy dogs approved for Charlottetown ER\"}",
        "specific_location": "*[@id='blogroll-story-1.4433307'][@href='http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/news\/canada\/prince-edward-island\/dogs-therapy-queen-elizabeth-hospital-p-e-i-therapy-paws-of-canada-1.4433307']",
        "variants": {
          "A": {
            "content": "'The whole waiting room calmed down:' Therapy dogs approved for Charlottetown ER",
            "probability": 0.7157,
            "content_type": "text",
            "metadata": "{}"
          },
          "B": {
            "content": "How therapy dogs are helping patients at QEH",
            "probability": 0.2843,
            "content_type": "text",
            "metadata": "{}"
          }
        },
        "location": "*[@id='blogroll-story-1.4433307'][@href='http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/news\/canada\/prince-edward-island\/dogs-therapy-queen-elizabeth-hospital-p-e-i-therapy-paws-of-canada-1.4433307']",
        "strategy_last_updated": 1512572157
      }
    },
    "path": "\/news\/canada\/prince-edward-island"
  }
}

For the story about Borden-Carleton’s development plans we have:

1. How a planning firm thinks Borden-Carleton could attract more tourists
2. Borden-Carleton aims to attract more tourists with spatial plan

For the story about therapy dogs at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital there are:

1. ‘The whole waiting room calmed down:’ Therapy dogs approved for Charlottetown ER
2. How therapy dogs are helping patients at QEH

And for the story about infertility services, as above, we have:

1. ‘Let’s have some babies’: Aylward looks to support for families trying to conceive
2. Opposition calls for support for families trying to conceive

The options are injected into the CBC site by a third-party service called Chartbeat, which bills itself as offering “Content Intelligence for Publishers.”

Chartbeat has a service called Headline Testing that it promotes like this:

Run headline tests that optimize for reader engagement after the click, so you can maximize each story’s readership by ensuring it has the best headline.

The reason that I was able to see both the “before” and “after” headlines was because the CBC hasn’t implemented what Chartbeat calls Asynchronous Implementation With Flicker Control, an option that would hide the page until the switch was in.

What’s most interesting about the data that Chartbeat returns as part of its headline-switching magic is the “probability” data. While this doesn’t appear to be publicly documented anywhere, I’ve noticed that it changes over time, and I’m assuming that this is a reflection of which of the variants is “winning” the race to conversion, something that Chartbeat goes into more detail about:

The test ends when the winning headline has been determined with 95% confidence and Chartbeat begins to automatically serve that headline 100% of the time.

To make sure that tests come to a conclusion as efficiently as possible, we have an alternate way to determine a winner, called ‘soft convergence’. If 20 minutes have passed and we’re 95% confident that no headline is better by a margin of 25%, the leading headline will win.

So I presume that, for any of the variants above, once the “probability” level reaches 0.95–95%–that headline will be deemed to have “won” and we’ll all see it all the time.

I’m a big fan of A/B testing, and I practice it all the time to test designs, wording, button text and other aspects of my client’s websites: it’s proved a useful tool.

But I don’t think that journalism is something that should be A/B tested. Headlines are not “marketing,” they are part of the journalism, and I want my journalism to be crafted by journalists based on what they see as the most effective way of telling a story, not based on “what converts more.”

If you want to learn more about A/B testing, listen to Jon Ronson’s recent audio series The Butterfly Effect, which is available as a podcast.

The series is described like this:

Join bestselling author Jon Ronson as he traces a very strange butterfly effect. A teen in Brussels had an idea – to make porn free and easy to stream online. The consequences of that idea are mysterious, delightful, surprising, and sad. This 7-part series takes you on a journey to places you’ll never expect.

One of those “places you’ll never expect” is into the tech behind the hub of the free porn industry, based in Montreal, which uses A/B testing extensively. Ronson interviews Pornhub founder Fabian Thylmann, and one of his technical people, Brandon:

Fabian Thylmann: If you would walk into their offices today, unless you stumbled on the one floor, you would not notice what they do. Because you have a huge amount of support people, you have a huge amount of SEO people–search engine people. You would not notice; it’s quite impressive.

Jon Ronson: Brandon was put in charge of building Mansef’s fledgling mobile division. If you’ve ever watched Pornhub on a smart phone, you have Brandon to thank. And you also have him to thank for enticing you with immaculately data-analyzed category thumbs. On Pornhub, the porn is divided into categories: Asian and blow job and teen and so on. Each category has its own front page photograph. Brandon and his team would put three or four alternate photos through “continuous A/B testing” to find out which of them converted the best. They might be almost identical, with just the hint of a change in the facial expression.

Ronson’s tale is fascinating and well-told.

And after listening to it, I’m more convinced than ever that the A/B testing used to find the best porn thumbnails isn’t a tool that should be found in the journalist’s toolbox.

I had not noticed, until this morning, that the “Solo” logo uses coffee cups inside the Os.

A “proclamation” by businessman D.H. MacKinnon, ran in the December 14, 1870 edition of The Herald, proclaiming a change in the name of Great George Street to Broadway.

“Considering that all the Great Georges have passed from the scene of action, Little Georges being exempt from such honors, on account of inability, shall henceforth pass into obscurity, like all their ancestors…” is a great line.

Longtime readers may recall that last May I happened upon a storefront in Berlin called I Like Paper that specialises in custom-printed items made of Tyvek.

This fall, with some sketches in-hand, I decided to order something from them. Using their web-based tool, which has a slightly-more-than-comfortable learning curve, but which is quite capable, I uploaded a sketch of a sunflower I made this summer, and chose to have it printed on a large pencil case. Cost was €15.95 plus (nominal) shipping. I placed the order on November 16, 2017 and the package arrived yesterday, November 30; 15 day turnaround from Berlin to Charlottetown for custom printing is about as good as it gets.

I’m very happy with the result: the colours are rich and vibrant, the stitching and the zipper are good-quality, and the Tyvek seems indestructible.

Here’s what it looks like:

A couple of things to realize if you decide to place your own order:

1. Although the website and the ordering tool are available in German, French and English, things switched back to German for me at inconvenient times along the process without explanation, and it would appear, temporarily, as though I’d lost the contents of my shopping cart. I muddled through and it all worked out in the end.
2. It’s not immediately obvious that the custom printing is on both sides of whatever object–pencil case, wallet, etc.–you choose. I was pleasantly surprised by this.

If you happen to be in Berlin in person, drop in and see their shop: they’re at Reichenberger Str. 116, in the heart of an interesting neighbourhood.

What the world would look like if I were a cat.

Last May I was in London for the St Bride Foundation Wayzgoose, and I snapped a photo of St Bride’s Church while in the neighbourhood.

Earlier this week I came across that photo, and thought it a good basis for an after-the-fact sketch in pen.

This is what resulted:

My favourite part of the sketch, other than mostly getting the wedding-cake-like spire satisfyingly reasonable, is the bird that I’d not seen until I zoomed in, flying right by the tip of the spire when I snapped the photo.

The buildings “leaning in” on the sides–a visual artifact of the angle I took the photo at, and the magic of perspective–were tricky, and I did not achieve a level of satisfying reasonableness with them.

And the tress were a little squidgy.

But I like that bird.