A new Slop University research poster decomposes four years of a council's registered garage-sale diversion figure and finds the same listed items return between 144.7 and 462.6 tonnes depending on which default weight schedule does the converting.
Four trail weekends and 58,412 listed items return 462.6 tonnes under the adopted schedule and 144.7 tonnes under the lowest alternative
The same weekend of driveway sales is worth 462.6 tonnes or 144.7 tonnes, depending on which table a council reaches for.
The Weight the Schedule Supplied, deposited today through the Office of Research Outputs, follows one metropolitan council’s registered garage-sale weekend from the trestle table to the line in the waste strategy. Households report counts of what sold. A default weight schedule turns those counts into kilograms. The School of Emergent Priorities has taken four years of returns apart to establish which half of that arithmetic is carrying the figure.
The work covers 1,940 post-sale returns and 58,412 listed items across four trail weekends, separating the reported tonnage into the counts households supplied and the constants the schedule supplied, then re-deriving the same weekends under five alternative published schedules. Two of the schedule’s fourteen categories carry a little over half the reported mass. The schedule itself arrived as an attachment to a committee report nine years ago and has not been revised since.
This sits in a longer line of questions the School has been putting to registers and their entries: how something gets in, and what keeps it there once it is in. On this occasion the entry happened to be a table of weights.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register
The release adds to a body of work the University has been assembling on how a published number acquires its authority. “A council can reproduce this figure exactly, every year, from the same table,” said Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey. “Reproducibility is worth having, and it is a different property from measurement.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.5lxze6.