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| Jennifer Lang on CBC's Test the Nation. (Photo supplied) |
If you were a dark-haired, meat-eating, coffee-drinking, Birkenstock-wearing man, you may have been pretty smug while watching CBC鈥檚 latest TV experiment, called Test the Nation.
That鈥檚 because, statistically speaking, dark-haired, meat-eating, coffee-drinking, Birkenstock-wearing men were scoring better than the rest of us.
It was Jennifer Lang鈥檚 job to crunch the data and find patterns as Test the Nation, a live, two-hour special, went to air back in January. The AV俱乐部 commerce grad tracked responses of in-studio participants divided into teams (for example, bloggers, taxi drivers and chefs) and Canadians taking part in the test online from home.
鈥淲e鈥檙e basically mining the data all night long so that we can come up with fun tidbits to tantalize our viewers, like when the black-haired men surpassed the red-haired women 鈥� things flip-flopped all night long.鈥�
Every so often during the broadcast, host Brent Bambury would check in with Ms. Lang in a backroom crowded with people hovering over computer screens to ask which studio team was in the lead and how the folks at home were doing.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a lot of pressure for our whole team. We鈥檙e writing the crawls (script that gives results at the bottom of the TV screen), we鈥檙e comparing data, we鈥檙e talking to Brent,鈥� says the 30-year-old Moncton native. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a lot of fun but definitely tense.鈥�
Test the Nation is a series of occasional specials airing on CBC-TV. The show kicked off last spring with an IQ test, followed by a show dubbed Watch Your Language in the fall, and Trivia a few months ago.聽
The聽next show,聽with Wendy Mesley and Ron MacLean as hosts, tests sports trivia.聽Viewers can watch and play along on Sunday, May 25 at 8 p.m. Celebrity guests lined up for the show include Hockey Hall of Famer Paul Coffey, representing refs and umps; Debra Digiovanni, for the armchair athletes; Alan Thicke, the sportscasters leader; fashion designer Brian Bailey, leading the cheerleaders and mascots team; actress Victoria Pratt, with the Olympic medallists; and Sloan's Chris Murphy with "Team Extreme."
As the shows are being developed, Ms. Lang also tests the questions to make sure they鈥檙e neither too hard nor too easy.
But her work on Test the Nation is just one part of her job. As the manager of CBC鈥檚 research department, she鈥檚 doing audience research on the content CBC produces for television, radio and the web. For example, as CBC launched a slate of shows in January, Ms. Lang was tracking to see who was watching and if they liked what they saw. With new shows like MVP, Sophie and jPod, a lot was on the line for the public broadcaster.
While at AV俱乐部 plugging away at her commerce degree in marketing informatics and statistics, Ms. Lang wondered if she鈥檇 ever apply what she was learning 鈥渙nce in the real world.鈥� Now it amazes her just how much she uses in her job everyday.
鈥淚t鈥檚 funny but I really am applying most of what I learned during my time at AV俱乐部,鈥� says Ms. Lang, who graduated in 2000. 鈥淚鈥檓 looking at numbers and interpreting them. It suits me to a T, because I鈥檓 very detail oriented.鈥�
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