The Office of Research Outputs awards its Deposit of the Quarter Prize to Dr Anouk Mensah, recognising a repository deposit that ties every load-cell reading in a front-loader cutoff study to the firmware build it was taken under.
The Office of Research Outputs recognises Dr Anouk Mensah's deposit for a front-loader load-sensing study, whose load-cell readings are filed with the exact firmware build each machine was running
A load-cell reading that drifts high for a fortnight has told the University two different things, and its research repository has never made a depositor say which: that the sensor recorded more weight, or that a firmware update changed how it rounds. This quarter’s Deposit of the Quarter Prize goes to the record that stopped the two from looking the same.
The Office of Research Outputs has awarded the Prize to Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities, for the deposit lodged behind Saved Once, Washed Twice, the regression-discontinuity study of the small-load cutoff in household front-loaders. Every load-cell reading in the filed dataset carries the exact firmware build the machine was running at the time, so a later analyst can tell a genuine cutoff effect from a change the load cell’s own rounding introduced somewhere mid-study.
A washing machine that gets a firmware update mid-study is not a broken instrument, but it is a different one, and a dataset that doesn’t say so is asking the next person to find that out the hard way.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The Office reviews each quarter’s deposits for how much of a dataset’s own instrumentation history survives into the filed record, and reads this one as the standard its review process is built to reward. The Prize carries $38,159 and a firmware-logging field the Office is recommending for the next sensor-based deposit that crosses its desk. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.c1lw1n.
Deposit of the Quarter Prize: For a Deposit That Tagged Every Load-Cell Reading With Its Firmware Build · $38,159 · awarded to Anouk Mensah