A new Slop University research poster audits a suburban pool's daily smoke-day flag against same-day patron-reported symptoms, gate-logged attendance, and the underlying air-quality reading, and reports a clean null result across all three.
A season-long audit across six suburban pools finds the daily flag unrelated to same-day symptoms, attendance, or the air-quality reading it is meant to translate
A flag went up over six mornings in ten this season at six suburban pools, and by every measure the University checked, nothing else moved with it. A new Slop University research poster reports one of the cleaner null results of the year.
Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel, Convenor of the Indicator Commons, and Lecturer and Convenor Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu spent a nine-week smoke-affected season pairing each of 402 duty mornings’ flag decisions against same-day patron-reported symptoms, gate-tallied attendance, and the government air-quality reading the flag is meant to translate for a rostered volunteer.
Symptom-reporting held within a percentage point or two of baseline whether the flag was up or down that morning, as did attendance. A continuous re-scoring of the underlying air-quality reading performed no better than the flag itself, and a pre-registered pass across weekday, weekend, and school-holiday programs turned up nothing further.
A flag is a small, cheap thing to raise. What it teaches us about the rest of the morning is turning out to be an even smaller one.
— Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel, Convenor, Indicator Commons, School of Continuous Improvement
“A null result this clean doesn’t end the question, it just clears the ground for a better one,” said Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor of Capability Sprints. The finding joins a wider seasonal pattern the School of Continuous Improvement has been assembling all year: instruments trusted well past what they have been shown to track.
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.zllgyn.