A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement validates a suburban dog park's automatic gate counter against a season of manual headcounts, finding agreement collapses at dawn and dusk, precisely the hours a council's off-lead-hours expansion decision drew on.
A season of manual headcounts finds a suburban dog park's automatic tally slipping to 58% agreement at dawn, the exact block a council's expansion case cited
A suburban council’s business case for extending a dog park’s off-lead hours rested on a single instrument: the automatic counter bolted to the park’s own gate. A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement asks whether that counter can be trusted at the hours the decision actually needed it.
A counter earns the trust of everyone who never has to stand next to it and check.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons, School of Continuous Improvement
Across a single off-lead park and twenty-four weeks, Dr Sabel and Dr Thandiwe Solberg set ninety-six manual headcounts, taken in thirty-minute blocks spanning dawn to dusk, against the gate counter’s own running tally, holding the sensor’s mounting and firmware constant throughout.
Agreement between the two counts holds above nine in ten sessions at midday, then slides to a little over half at the park’s dawn opening, precisely the block the council’s expansion business case drew its dawn-hours modelling from.
“What we’d like to know next is how many other hours-of-operation decisions in this city are leaning on a sensor nobody has stood beside,” said Dr Solberg.
The School of Continuous Improvement folds the result into a wider ledger it has kept for years: which of the University’s borrowed instruments earn the least scrutiny precisely where they’re leaned on hardest.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.z1gj28.