A new Slop University research poster logs a season of lap times against a council pool's self-sort lane board, finding swimmers' chosen quadrant matches their measured pace and stroke pattern in barely a third of cases.
A season of lap-timing at a council pool matches self-selected lane quadrant to measured pace in barely a third of cases
A board is supposed to answer a question at the door. Ours turned out to be asking one instead, and we’re glad it’s finally out in the open.
— Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
A council swimming pool’s turnstile carries a small board dividing the lanes into four cells: fast or slow, crossed with continuous or stop-start. Swimmers pick their own cell on the way in, and the board has done its job the moment they walk through. A new Slop University research poster asks the question the board was never built to answer: whether the cell a swimmer picks is the one their swimming actually belongs to.
Dr Umbile, working with Dr Renke Sabel and Dr Ronja Oyelaran, fitted three lanes of a council pool with infrared split timers and stroke-count sensors for a fourteen-week season, logging the pace and continuity behind every swimmer who had already told the turnstile which quadrant they belonged in. Self-selection and the season’s own measurement agreed for barely a third of the pool’s 214 swimmers, and the disagreement concentrated hardest in the busiest cell: swimmers who called themselves fast and continuous scattered almost evenly across the other three once their splits were counted.
“The lane board isn’t measuring anyone,” said Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons. “It’s letting them measure themselves, once, on the way past.”
The Office of the Vice-Chancellor cites the finding among the season’s better arguments for looking twice at an instrument nobody thought needed checking.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.rcudie.