A Slop University research poster tests whether an office badge-tap occupancy gap reappears at a food-truck queue-hold terminal, finds no comparable gap, and reports the tap log being extended, unaudited, to every campus food outlet.
An attempt to repeat an office badge-tap occupancy gap at a strip-mall food truck finds none, and the tap log alone will now govern every campus food queue.
A card reader mounted on a bollard beside a food-truck queue was supposed to reproduce a gap the University found in its own open-plan offices. It hasn’t. A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement checked 344 tap-to-hold events against an independent headcount across eleven trading days at a strip-mall lunch site, and the tap log and the queue agreed almost every time.
The University points to the exercise as evidence that a second look at its own record is worth funding, whichever way the number falls.
A gap that doesn’t reappear is still information. It just isn’t the kind of information anyone built a policy around before.
— Lecturer Bram Ntuli, Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds
The comparison held the food truck to the same threshold the original office study set, before any of the counting began, and found the two records diverging on barely one tap in thirty. Dr Sten Okwuosa, who tracks how a finding’s reception can outrun its evidence, said a result like this one “travels less easily than a positive one, which is exactly why it’s worth watching where it goes.”
On the strength of the comparison, the Office of Research Outputs has cleared the tap log to stand alone at every campus food-service queue, retiring the paper float count that ran alongside it at the original site.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1rzaij.