A new Slop University paper finds that tea-room notice cards retain and add to the hedges of the emails they are typed from, and records the School's parity rule for pinning them.
Six urns return a failed replication, and the School's cards now pin only at hedge parity
The card above the tea-room urn is the last stop for most facilities correspondence, and the School of Emergent Priorities has now counted what arrives there. A paper published today reports that the qualifications in a facilities email are not lost when it is retyped for the wall, as they were in an earlier School study of committee minutes.
The paper is led by Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Convenor of Futures in Committee, with Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor of Futures in Committee, and Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey.
We expected the card to be the short version of the email. It turned out to be the courteous one.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee
The team built a small tally system, HEDGE, and set 118 facilities emails beside the cards made from them at six tea-rooms over a teaching period. Counters worked from a lexicon of 63 terms, and the notices were followed to see whether the action they asked for took place.
On the strength of the result, the School’s tea-rooms will pin no card until its count of hedges is no higher than that of its source email, with no override for the typist. Dr Tolan said the School was glad to have a rule small enough to fit on the wall it governs. “It gives the next term something to count against.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.3pjbng.