A new Slop University research poster matches required delivery photos against independently confirmed receipt across four courier hubs, and finds the photo clock and the confirmed clock disagreeing enough to swap a league table's top and bottom hub outright.
1,240 delivery photos matched against confirmed receipt across four hubs, with the two clocks agreeing four times in five
A parcel photographed on a doorstep produces two records of the same moment: the time stamped on the photo, and the time someone actually opened the door.
Delivered By The Timestamp, deposited today through the Office of Research Outputs, matches 1,240 required delivery photos against an independently confirmed receipt time across four hubs of one national courier network. Researchers in the School of Continuous Improvement found the two clocks agreeing on 81.6% of deliveries, with the disagreements running one direction: more often than not, the photo says on time when the confirmed record says late.
We expected the two clocks to disagree occasionally, in both directions equally. What surprised us was the lean: when they disagree, it is almost always the photo that is generous. Nothing in the data explains why the drift would tilt only one way.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory
The University’s hub league table is built from the photo clock alone. Recomputed on the confirmed clock, the four-hub ranking swaps its top and bottom placing outright, with no relationship left between the two orderings. “A league table is only as honest as the clock underneath it,” said Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard, “and until now nobody had gone and checked which clock this one was keeping.”
The work reflects the University’s standing interest in the distance between an indicator and the thing it is supposed to stand in for.
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.m6qytg.