A new Slop University paper releases an open dashcam corpus and reader for roadside fuel price boards, and finds boards trailing notified price cuts by a median four hours while the notification scheme's timeliness rate stays above 99 per cent.
A dashcam corpus of 96,318 roadside board readings puts board to register agreement at 83.6 per cent while the scheme's own timeliness rate holds above 99
Nineteen weeks of windscreen footage from a metropolitan courier fleet have been turned into something the University can hand over: a corpus of 96,318 photographs of roadside fuel price boards, and the software that reads them.
Lodged, Not Displayed, released today through the Office of Research Outputs, pairs every one of those observations with what the jurisdiction’s price notification register held at the same moment. Board and register carry the same price at 83.6 per cent of observations. Where they differ, the board shows the higher price four times in five, and it trails a notified price cut by a median of four hours and twelve minutes while following a notified rise within a quarter of an hour. Across the same nineteen weeks the scheme’s published notification timeliness rate did not drop below 99.1 per cent.
A lodgement and a board are supposed to be one fact written down twice. We have made the second one checkable, and we would be glad if the next people to check it were not us.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
The work was led out of the School of Continuous Improvement, which brought its instrument-level capability to bear on a surface that is repriced several times a week and read by everybody who drives past it. The corpus, the reader and the annotation conventions are released together.
“Demo Quarter exists because we think work should be shown before it is finished,” said Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Demo Quarter. “A corpus is a slow kind of claim, and it only becomes one when somebody else picks it up.”
Slop University treats a released instrument as a publication in its own right, and would like the habit to travel. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fp74me.