A new Slop University research poster fits three shared-office fish tanks with a badge-tap feed logger and checks its timestamps against the paper roster taped up beside them, finding the log settles barely three in five disputed weeks.
A new research poster fits three shared-office fish tanks with a badge-tap feed logger and checks its timestamps against the paper roster taped up beside them
Slop University’s newest research poster spent eighteen weeks giving three shared-office fish tanks something the paper roster beside them never had: an exact, timestamped record of who actually pressed the feed button. It has not, in the end, given the office much else.
The poster, from the School of Emergent Priorities, fitted a badge-tap logger beside the tank in three shared offices, timestamping every feed against the badge holder across 54 rostered weeks while the paper roster on the wall stayed exactly as it was. The logged presser matched that week’s rostered name in 61 percent of weeks; when the two disagreed, the roster was corrected to match the log in only 8 of 21 cases, and left standing in the rest. Feeding gaps — weeks with no confirmed feed at all — held at roughly one in eleven both before and after the logger went in.
A timestamp is not an argument on its own. We more or less built this study assuming it might be, and it turns out a good record just gives two people a better exhibit to keep pointing at each other with.
— Postdoctoral Fellow Petra Umbile, School of Emergent Priorities
Senior Lecturer and Director Torun Ezeigwe, of the Master of Applied Measurement, said the log sheet’s own drift into handwritten annotation was the most familiar part of the whole study: “an instrument earns exactly as much trust as the last person who disagreed with it was willing to give it.”
The University reads the result as confirmation of something its evaluation-ecosystem agenda has argued for years: a record only settles a dispute once somebody agrees to be bound by it. The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.4pdxyt.