This dumb headline might get you to read the article – Halifax Examiner

1. Listen to Joan Baxter

Reporter Joan Baxter has been interviewed for the Clear Cut podcast, which is produced by the Wildlands League. The discussion centres around Baxter’s work in the Halifax Examiner:

It’s been almost a year since Canada’s Online News Act was passed, and in response Meta blocked links to Canadian news on Facebook and Instagram. This has created a void of fact checked articles that meet journalistic standards and ethics on those platforms. As a result, information about wildfires, forestry and forests from respected media sources is not shareable via social media.

We sit down with Joan Baxter from the Halifax Examiner about her recent article on the growing problem of greenwashing in an age of digital information sharing.  We discuss the Forest Products Association’s (FPAC) ‘Forestry for the Future’ advertising campaign that’s been proliferating across social media. Joan breaks down how this could be problematic in the absence of independent journalism on Canada’s forests available on those platforms. How can those concerned about Canada’s forests and climate become better at identifying industry public relations materials?

Read Joan’s article in the Halifax Examiner.

You can listen to the podcast here. Joan is introduced at about the 8-minute mark.

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2. Lake health

“A marine scientist is asking people who use Dartmouth’s Lake Banook to participate in a community citizen science project to regularly track and monitor the lake’s health,” reports Yvette d’Entremont:

“Lake Banook is really the heart of our community. Every spring, so many families and kids can’t wait to use it. They drive down to go paddling, to walk around it, to swim in it, and so on,” Dr. Christine Ward-Paige said in an interview. 

“The last few years, it’s really gotten increasingly more unusable. I estimate that of all the days that we want to swim in it, we can only swim in it about half those days now because it’s either blue green algae blooms, you get swimmer’s itch, or it’s too dirty.”

Ward-Paige created an app that people can use to track day-to-day conditions on the lake so that when and if something goes wrong, there is a baseline from which the situation can be assessed:

Ward-Paige is looking for up to 50 participants for the community citizen science project. Anglers, walkers, swimmers, paddlers, kayakers and others who use and are interested in the health of Lake Banook are encouraged to join to monitor the lake’s health on a daily basis using the eOceans app. 

“What are you catching, seeing? Good or bad — we’ve got real-time maps and analysis going to help track it in a timely way,” Ward-Paige said in her community callout.

“It’s easier than most other citizen science projects, you just need a smartphone, internet for uploading, and you can contribute on your own in your own time.”

…

To contribute, download the eOceans mobile app (Android or iOS), add a profile, and search and request to join the “We love Lake Banook” project.

Click or tap here to read “Scientist seeks citizens to help monitor Lake Banook.”

This is pretty neat. I think we sometimes under-appreciate the long history of normal people doing science, from ancient times to the present. Now, when everyone is carrying a smart phone, there’s the opportunity to collect an enormous trove of data.

I live sorta near Lake Banook, but I don’t have the time to contribute meaningfully to this project. Still, whenever I get around to resetting my Apple ID, I’ll download the app to watch its progress.

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3. Cell phones in schools

“The head of the union representing Nova Scotia’s teachers says while he’s cautiously optimistic about the province’s new directive restricting cell phone use in public school classrooms, it will fail without appropriate enforcement,” reports Yvette d’Entremont:

“All our stakeholders, our teachers certainly, recognize that cell phone use is a problem inside our schools and classrooms. Our parents, I think in general, want their kids, our students, engaged in learning when they’re in class,” NSTU president Ryan Lutes said in an interview. 

“I know a lot of students, and frankly adults, who struggle with their cell phone and using it appropriately. And our students need more help and support with that than the average adult. Hopefully the policy does that.”

On Thursday, the province announced that cell phones and other personal mobile devices will be restricted in the province’s public schools beginning in September. 

Click or tap here to read “Nova Scotia Teachers Union ‘cautiously optimistic’ about school cell phone ban.”

Do we still call them “cell phones”? In North America we started calling them “cell phones” in the 1990s to differentiate them from the then-ubiquitous regular phone, which was attached to the wall with a wire. It was miraculous technology at the time. In other places around the globe, however, they’re called “mobiles” or “handies.” I call mine the “space phone,” because that’s absolutely what it would be called in a 1950 sci-fi film.

But they’re not even primarily phones any more. When’s the last time you made a phone call? “Smart phone” seems, well, dumb. “Device” seems non-specific.

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4. UNICORN: a counter to the historic marginalization of Black queer folk in Nova Scotia

“Given the historic marginalization of Black queer folk in Nova Scotia, I was cheered to attend the recent world premiere of UNICORN, a play by Halifax activist/writer Kay MacDonald,” writes Evelyn White. “The short, whimsical drama turns on the romance between Sea and Sky (played respectively by Trina James and Kiana Josette) two Black lesbians who’ve come to know each other in Atlantic Canada.”

Click or tap here to read “UNICORN: a counter to the historic marginalization of Black queer folk in Nova Scotia.”

UNICORN will be performed at 7pm tonight and at 7pm on Saturday at the Alderney Gate Theatre in Dartmouth.

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1. This dumb headline might get you to read the article

People are more likely to read news articles with dumb headlines.

That is the take-away from a research paper entitled “Reading dies in complexity: Online news consumers prefer simple writing.” As the three authors — Hillary C. Shulman (Ohio State University), David M. Markowitz (Michigan State University), and Todd Rogers (Harvard University) — explain in their abstract:

Over 30,000 field experiments with The Washington Post and Upworthy showed that readers prefer simpler headlines (e.g., more common words and more readable writing) over more complex ones. A follow-up mechanism experiment showed that readers from the general public paid more attention to, and processed more deeply, the simpler headlines compared to the complex headlines. That is, a signal detection study suggested readers were guided by a simpler-writing heuristic, such that they skipped over relatively complex headlines to focus their attention on the simpler headlines. Notably, a sample of professional writers, including journalists, did not show this pattern, suggesting that those writing the news may read it differently from those consuming it. Simplifying writing can help news outlets compete in the competitive online attention economy, and simple language can make news more approachable to online readers.

This is perhaps a “duh” moment, telling us what we already know intuitively. Still, the research is interesting.

You can read their detailed methodology in the paper, but in essence the authors used something called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to measure the simplicity of headlines (a higher LIWC number reflects a simpler headline). The test was to write headlines of varying simplicity above the same article, and compare that to the click-through rate on the website — the percentage of people who see the headline and actually click through to the article.

Here are three examples:

I initially thought that regardless of the simplicity, the click-through rates are quite low — far less than 5%. But then I considered my own use of the web, and there’s no way I click through on more than maybe 2% of headlines. Besides, Meghan and Harry? I’m never going to click through on that, no matter what the headline, unless (perhaps) it involves decapitation.

Here at the Examiner, the reporters typically (although not always) suggest a headline, and it’s up to an editor to actually write it. A lot of times I just go with the reporter’s suggestion, but when I do intervene, it’s usually for exactly this KISS reason — keep it simple, stupid. That’s also why I sometimes walk on reporter’s ledes — a huge block of text for a first paragraph will scare off potential readers, so I’m a big fan of the one-sentence first paragraph (see this item, for example).

But nothing’s set in stone. Sometimes a ridiculously long headline will work, too.

One could get too caught up in analyzing stuff like this, to the point of caring more about it than actually writing important information.

So no articles about Meghan and Harry in the Examiner, unless one of them cuts off the other’s head.

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Noticed

I enjoyed reading Cory Doctorow’s take on Kelly and Zack Weinersmith’s book A City on Mars because it confirms what I’ve long thought of human exploration of space:

The Weinersmiths make the (convincing) case that every aspect of space settlement is vastly beyond our current or reasonably foreseeable technical capability. What’s more, every argument in favor of pursuing space settlement is errant nonsense. And finally: all the energy we are putting into space settlement actually holds back real space science, which offers numerous benefits to our species and planet (and is just darned cool).

Every place we might settle in space – giant rotating rings, the Moon, Mars – is vastly more hostile than Earth. Not just more hostile than Earth as it stands today – the most degraded, climate-wracked, nuke-blasted Earth you can imagine is a paradise of habitability compared to anything else. Mars is covered in poison and the sky disappears under planet-sized storms that go on and on. The Moon is covered in black-lung-causing, razor-sharp, electrostatically charged dust. Everything is radioactive. There’s virtually no water. There are temperature swings of hundreds of degrees every couple of hours or weeks. You’re completely out of range of resupply, emergency help, or, you know, air.

…

Landing people on the Moon or Mars any time soon is a stunt – a very, very expensive stunt. These boondoggles aren’t just terribly risky (though they are – people who attempt space settlement are very likely to die horribly and after not very long), they come with price-tags that would pay for meaningful space science. For the price of a crewed return trip to Mars, you could put multiple robots onto every significant object in our solar system, and pilot an appreciable fleet of these robot explorers back to Earth with samples.

I think it’s really cool we have robots rolling around on Mars, and perhaps lots more robots going to other planets and bringing stuff back will help us understand our own planet in ways that can help us. Even if not, we’re a curious species, and learning about stuff is its own reward. But actually going there? That’s absurd.

Government

No meetings

On campus

Saint Mary’s

Nova Scotia Provincial Heritage Fair (Friday, 1:30pm, McNally Theatre Auditorium) — selected at school and regional fairs across the province, up to 50 students will share their heritage fair projects

In the harbour

Halifax
07:00: Silver Arctic, cargo ship, arrives at Pier 42 from Saint-Pierre
10:00: Contship Art, container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from New York
13:00: Robert E. Peary, US naval ship, arrives at Dockyard from Norfolk, Virginia
15:30: Silver Arctic sails for Saint-Pierre
18:00: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, sails from Fairview Cove for St. John’s
18:00: Hellas Revenger, oil tanker, arrives at Berth TBD from Antwerp, Belgium

Cape Breton
12:00: CSL Tarantau, bulker, sails from Coal Pier (Sydney) for Aulds Cove
12:00: Qikiqtaaluk W, oil tanker, arrives at Government Wharf (Sydney) from Corner Brook
21:00: Qikiqtaaluk W sails for sea

Footnotes

It’s a slow news June, which is far better than last June, when first people lost their houses in wildfires and then people lost their lives in deluges. I’ll take the relative calm, and use it to tend to some personal business.

Speaking of which, my deck-staining project has turned into a ridiculously involved operation. I thought I would get ‘er done on the hot sunny day Wednesday, but I only got a third of the way through when the Examiner site crashed and I found myself pulled away and frantically emailing and messaging back and forth with tech people for a few hours before they got it up and working again (sorry about the disruption on the site, by the way, but we’re talking about me here).

And apparently, “30% chance of rain overnight” means it will 100% rain on Bousquet’s partially stained deck, so on Thursday I had to wait for everything to dry off before trying again, but I could only get a couple of hours into it before having to do real work, or at least pretend to, so just two-thirds of the staining is complete now.

Again, that 30% chance of rain last night fell entirely on my deck. The only good thing about this is I had decided to use a water-based stain that dries in just a few hours and not an oil-based stain that takes days to properly dry, so the deck isn’t a sloppy mess. At least, I think it’s OK. We’ll see. But maybe I can get that final third done today if the sun breaks out, as it’s supposed to rain all weekend.

It’s a nice deck. My buddy Taylor built it for me. If it doesn’t rain all summer, maybe I’ll sit on it occasionally and enjoy it. But after the deck is done, I have to repaint the front porch, so maybe not.

My work is never done.

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