# Deposit of the Quarter goes to a reading that keeps its firmware build

> 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.

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.