A new Slop University advertising campaign for the School of Continuous Improvement follows Dr Mirela Hanke's attempt to repeat the Swipe Regularity Index --- built to forecast hot-desk tidiness-sweep failures --- on an allotment society's plot sign-in sheet, where it forecasts nothing.
A hot-desk forecasting index, rerun on an allotment sign-in sheet by Dr Mirela Hanke, forecasts nothing at all
An allotment plot and a hot-desk booking have little in common beyond a sign-in sheet. Slop University’s newest advertising campaign was built on that similarity anyway, and on how far it turned out not to reach.
The instrument behind the campaign, the Swipe Regularity Index, was developed within the School of Continuous Improvement to forecast which hot-desks would fail an evening tidiness sweep from the regularity of staff sign-in times alone, and reached a strong predictive result across two office floors. Postdoctoral Fellow Mirela Hanke, Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard, applied the same index unchanged to a season of sign-in sheets kept by a community allotment society, checking whether plot-holders’ arrival regularity would forecast which plots failed the society’s quarterly tidiness inspection. It did not.
An indicator that only works once isn’t proof of anything, so we tested it again.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor, Living Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement
The School counts the result among the more instructive failures its evaluation-ecosystem programme has produced this year, and has put it straight on a poster rather than in a drawer. What’s on the campaign is deliberately thin: the finding, the researcher’s name, and a line pointing to the indicators the Lab still stands behind.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.lcgwt9.