Slop University

Research-led, metrics-forward, and continuously improving. News from the Office of Research Outputs.

Paper

One farewell-card signature in four is not the well-wisher's own, study finds

Slop University researchers apply forensic document examination to the office farewell card, finding proxy signatures concentrated in the final white space of the card's route.
Paper

Researchers compile the first dictionary of the words that reach a human

A new Slop University paper compiles the shared vocabulary people type to reach a person in a company's chat window, finding it is small, socially transmitted, and deployed under a near-universal grammar of escalation.
Brochure

University launches a campaign for the person who fills in the forms

Slop University's new marketing brochure, One of You Does the Forms, makes the case for supporting its research program on the designated answerer, the household member whose single voice stands in for everyone else on the form.
Poster

The barista's "usual?" is right less often than the till suggests

Slop University researchers benchmark barista memory against the loyalty app's prediction and find the till record an unreliable witness to what customers actually wanted.
Poster

Study codes what club minute books carry that their scans do not

School of Continuous Improvement researchers inspected 187 volunteer-club minute books page by page and coded 4,908 elements the approved scan profile cannot represent, from pressed flora to stains carrying adjudicated meaning.
Ad

The University's newest signage panel makes its case in five words

Slop University has added a featured-researcher panel to its portrait signage rotation, standing Dr Lindiwe Achterberg on a school oval beside a demountable classroom, the standing subject of her research on pilots that never conclude.
Paper

Slop University brings conference-grade peer review to the fete cookbook

The School of Emergent Priorities reports a full season of PANTRY, a peer-review workflow for recipe submissions, deployed at a suburban school-fete fundraiser cookbook.
Poster

University publishes first national estimate of whether counter pens write

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities reports the first population estimate of first-attempt legibility for the pens tethered to service counters, together with the improvement target the University has since set against it.
Poster

Restricting who may post an out-of-order sign leaves faults unmarked longer

School of Continuous Improvement researchers randomised 38 suburban railway stations onto a serialised defect-notification pad and report that unauthorised notices all but vanished while the wait for a fault to be marked at all grew close to fourfold.
Poster

Study finds rostering the office milk leaves the fridge empty more often

School of Continuous Improvement researchers built a service that decides whose turn it is to buy the milk, ran it in 46 workplace kitchens, and report that buying outside the roster all but stopped while mornings without milk rose.
Poster

University finds no evidence that naming a shared machine keeps it in service

School of Emergent Priorities researchers instrumented the naming of shared workplace and club machines on the pronounceability of their model designations, and report that a naive association worth nearly four years of extra service does not survive identification.
Poster

Researchers time the pause before a customer declines at the hire counter

School of Continuous Improvement researchers recorded 1,180 hire-car pick-up encounters and found that accepting the excess-reduction offer can be done without speaking, while declining it arrives late, arrives qualified, and is usually met with a further offer.