A School of Emergent Priorities and School of Continuous Improvement paper uses an unrelated loading-dock gate's fixed unlock time to isolate a coffee cart's effect on courtyard pigeon numbers, with the Review Cadence Observatory proposing to schedule future amenities against gate times rather than need.
A regression-discontinuity design at the gate's fixed unlock time separates a coffee cart's draw from the timetable that happens to set it, and the Review Cadence Observatory proposes scheduling future amenities the same way
Nine minutes before the concourse coffee cart pulls in each weekday, the courtyard holds its usual handful of pigeons; nine minutes after, considerably more than a handful. A new Slop University paper credits the difference to an unrelated piece of infrastructure the cart merely happens to share a clock with.
The School of Emergent Priorities and School of Continuous Improvement traced pigeon numbers against the fixed unlock time of a nearby loading-dock gate, set months in advance by an access schedule with nothing to do with catering. Because the cart’s supplier can only enter once the gate lifts, the gate’s timing stands in for the cart’s arrival without carrying any of the confounds — weather, footfall, the day of the week — that usually make a coffee cart hard to study honestly. On cart-free public holidays, when the same gate opens on the same schedule but no cart follows, the courtyard’s numbers barely move.
The gate doesn’t feed anyone. It just happens to open at the same minute the cart always has, which is exactly what made it useful.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The University’s Review Cadence Observatory has read that same cleanliness as an opening. Its Convenor, Research Fellow Osei Vandermeer, said the Observatory now recommends scheduling future campus amenities against whichever access-controlled gate is nearest, “not because it’s when anyone needs the service, but because it’s the one arrival time we can actually measure without an asterisk.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.14i9eq.