A new Slop University research poster tests a live-music venue's UV re-entry stamp against genuine and researcher-produced transferred marks, finding the glow check performs well for real returns but accepts most copies too.
A door-side validation trial finds the UV check passes three in five transferred stamps as genuine
Ninety-two percent of the time, a venue door’s ultraviolet lamp correctly read a genuine same-night return. Just over three times in five, it read a researcher-made copy the same way. A new Slop University research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement puts a figure on what door staff have mostly taken on faith: that a hand glowing the right colour is the same hand that walked in earlier.
Researchers pressed genuine and transferred ultraviolet stamps onto patrons at nine venues across fourteen weekend nights, keeping door staff blind to which mark was which. A napkin-press copy and a friend’s-palm copy fared about the same under the lamp, and neither method needed particular skill to pull off. Door-tally reconciliation, run alongside the trial, told a matching story: nightly headcounts trailed ticket sales by nine percent on average, widening at the venues with the longest queues.
A stamp answers exactly one question, and it is not the one door staff are asking it.
— Senior Lecturer and Convenor Thandiwe Solberg, Demo Quarter, School of Continuous Improvement
“The lamp was never wrong about what it’s built to check,” said Lecturer and Convenor Dagny Okafor, Evaluation of Evaluation, School of Continuous Improvement. “We just asked it a question it was never built to answer.”
The University frames the result as a modest addition to a School-wide effort to keep its verification instruments honest about what they verify.
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7ro5or.