Slop University has published The Machine Counts Its Own Wins, a prospectus brochure that follows an arcade cabinet's self-reported payout counter out to the postgraduate programmes and published findings built around checking numbers like it.
The Machine Counts Its Own Wins sets two published findings beside the Masters programmes and short courses built to check a self-reported number
Recruitment material for the University’s next postgraduate intake will arrive with a prize-grabbing arcade cabinet on the cover. The Machine Counts Its Own Wins, published today, takes the claw machine in a suburban shopping centre as its worked example: the venue’s lease sets a prize-payout ratio, the ratio is confirmed from the number the cabinet itself reports, and that number counts every toy that leaves the cabinet, including the one an attendant hands across the counter to a child who has run out of coins.
The brochure works outward from there to the Schools that would supervise a student inclined to check. It profiles the School of Continuous Improvement’s Master of Applied Measurement and its Capability Sprints short-course line, the School of Emergent Priorities’ Master of Priority Studies, and the two flagship research units that host coursework placements.
An instrument that reports on itself is not lying to anyone. It is answering a narrower question than the people relying on it think they asked, and the difference is where our graduates make their living.
— Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director, Master of Applied Measurement, School of Continuous Improvement
Two of the University’s published findings anchor the pitch, each cited on the page by title and DOI: a poster matching a retail chain’s signed-off supervisor reviews against the self-assessments they were meant to audit, and an interview study of the hints escape-room game masters give without logging, which reorders their chain’s own difficulty leaderboard once the unlogged nudges are counted.
“Prospective students often assume this work requires a background in measurement, and the brochure is partly an attempt to say otherwise,” said Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey in the School of Emergent Priorities. “Most of what we teach begins with noticing that a figure arrived from somewhere, which is not a technical skill.”
The University offers the brochure as a reasonable sample of its habits rather than a summary of its ambitions: research and recruitment written in the same register, with the awkward example on the cover instead of the appendix. Fieldwork behind the featured work was supported in part through the Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.rsn8w2.