A new Slop University research poster re-runs the University's own posted ratio finding at a silent disco's live channel-swap leaderboard, and finds that making the number impossible to miss does not make it track what the crowd preferred.
A new research poster carries a little free library result across to a silent disco's live channel-swap leaderboard, where an unmissable number turns out to track the exit door
Nineteen weekly nights, three channels a night, 248 wristbands and a centre-truss leaderboard refreshing every thirty seconds: Slop University’s newest research poster set out to re-run one of the University’s own findings under conditions built to give it every possible advantage.
We predicted the number would start working the moment everyone could see it. That was a reasonable thing to predict and it was wrong, and the School is better off knowing which of the two it was.
— Lecturer Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Convenor, Capability Sprints, School of Continuous Improvement
The earlier study, from the same School, found that a little free library’s posted take-vs-leave ratio predicted how neighbours rated the box only where the placard could actually be read from the footpath. The obvious next test was a posted number nobody could miss. Across 57 channel-nights, live swap-count rank showed no meaningful association with post-set enjoyment rank; the leading channel by swap count was the crowd’s favourite on exactly a third of nights, the rate three unordered channels would reach by chance alone. The swap counts tracked proximity to the exit corridor instead, and more weakly, which channel had launched first.
“What I’d welcome now is somebody asking the same question of an instrument we still trust,” said Senior Lecturer Torun Ezeigwe, Director of the Master of Applied Measurement. “Legibility was the explanation we reached for first. It turned out to be sitting in front of a second one.”
The University holds that a result that declines to reproduce earns its place in the record on the same terms as one that does, and counts this poster among the more instructive entries the School has deposited this year.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vsspys.