A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities sorts school-run witches'-hat placements into four kinds and binds marshal hours to the one kind counted as a legitimate kerb.
A four-kind taxonomy of witches'-hat placements binds next term's marshal roster to Channel share.
A witches’-hat on the school-run kerb is now one of four named kinds, and only one of them keeps a marshal on site. A new research poster from Slop University’s School of Emergent Priorities reports the taxonomy, and the hours rule that followed it.
Volunteer coordinators at sixteen school-run sites coded every cone they placed across eighteen weeks as a Channel, a Bay, a Barrier, or a Claim. From week three, marshal sessions were allocated in proportion to Channel share, the one kind counted as a legitimate kerb. Channel placements rose from 19 per cent of the afternoon layout to 47 per cent by week nine and held there. Barrier placements, the kind that had daylighted the crossing, fell by half. Sites below the 40 per cent Channel threshold lost an afternoon marshal session within one review cycle.
The kinds were supposed to describe the kerb. They now decide who is standing on it.
— Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate
Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor of the Horizon Register, said the School will take the Channel share as the input for next term’s marshal roster, with no exception sustained for more than a single review cycle. “Once a placement has a name, the hours follow the name.” The release sits with the School’s longer attention to how a classification, once adopted, starts to organise the thing it was meant only to describe.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.nj541w.