A new Slop University brochure showcases four published studies of the ordinary interval --- a school crossing, a swim-level sign-off, a share-house feeding log, a cricket ladder --- under the campaign line The Ten Minutes Nobody Times.
The Ten Minutes Nobody Times gathers four published studies of an ordinary interval under one glossy cover, from a school crossing to a share-house aquarium
The Office of Research Outputs has given itself a new kind of deposit this week: not a poster, not a paper, but a brochure whose whole subject is the University’s own back catalogue.
The Ten Minutes Nobody Times went out today from the Schools of Emergent Priorities and Continuous Improvement, built around the interval an institution usually assumes looks after itself — the wait at a school crossing, the tick at the end of a swim lesson, the log on a share-house fridge. Rather than announce a single finding, the brochure sends a reader back through four of the year’s published studies and asks them to notice the interval running underneath all four.
Most of what we publish gets read as one crossing, one pool, one kitchen. Putting four of them on facing pages was the only way to show it is the same instinct working every time.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory, School of Continuous Improvement
The release reflects a school of thought the University has been building for a while: that a portfolio’s coherence is itself worth publishing, not just its individual results. Associate Professor Casimir Beng, who leads the Adaptive Metrics Lab, welcomed the brochure as “a reminder that our findings sit inside a bigger pattern, even when a given study never says so out loud.”
The brochure translates four peer-reviewed studies into a shared idea: that the small handoff between one state and the next — supervised and unsupervised, logged and delivered, assessed and passed — carries more information than the milestones either side of it, and is worth an institution’s attention in its own right.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.a1tkv9.