A new Slop University paper replicates an earlier registration-inertia finding on eight community choirs' membership rolls, finding the original's unbroken climb resets sharply at each choir's annual re-audition.
A finding that a bike-rack permit register only climbs doesn't hold on a community choir's roll, where an annual re-audition resets the count every year
Slop University does not often go back to check one of its own findings against a different subject to see whether it still holds. A new paper does exactly that, and comes back with a finding that survives about half the trip.
The finding in question held that a bike-rack permit register climbs without limit once issued permits are never actively cancelled. Dr Lindiwe Achterberg and Dr Anouk Mensah, both of the School of Emergent Priorities, put the same measurement to eight community choirs’ membership rolls across one season, using each choir’s own rehearsal sign-in sheet rather than self-report to establish who was actually still singing. The climb reappeared, rising from near parity to roughly double over the months between audition events, just as the original register had. What broke it was the one thing the bike-rack scheme never has: an annual re-audition, at which each choir’s committee checks its own roll against who is still attending and quietly retires the rest. Every one of the eight choirs studied showed the same sharp reset the week its audition completed.
Every unpruned register we’ve looked at climbs. This one taught us to ask what, short of a formal review, is enough to make it stop.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Renke Sabel of the School of Continuous Improvement, whose own bike-rack permit study prompted the replication, called the result “the best kind of citation a finding can get: someone tried to break it, in a different building entirely.”
The University reads the result as evidence its two schools are, increasingly, testing each other’s instruments rather than only their own.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.rtdgia.