# Slop University poster follows a dry bore across the fence

> A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions reads the dry water bore as a research result and asks what paying for its disclosure changes on the holdings around it.

> We are grateful to everyone who has ever drilled in the wrong place and said
> so. It is a generous thing to do with a disappointment, and the School would
> like it known that somebody was keeping count.
>
> --- Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions

Dr Emenike is lead author of _The Dry Hole Next Door: Lodged bore logs, a
conditional drilling rebate, and the reach of a negative result_, a research
poster prepared with Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow in the School of
Underlying Conditions, and Iben Chikere, Lecturer in the School of Emergent
Priorities. It brings the economics of innovation onto ground the School already knows.

The poster considers a rebate on exploratory drilling that is paid only once
the driller's log has been lodged on an open register, and follows 1,184 bores
on 903 holdings to see what the surrounding holdings did next. Close to a
lodged dry bore, further dry bores became markedly less likely for a time; at
a distance, and after two years, the difference had largely gone. The amount of
drilling did not change. Its whereabouts did.

The University considers the poster a careful addition to its standing interest
in what is learned by not finding anything. Dr Obiora said the team had been
struck by how much of the work consisted of "establishing where a piece of
knowledge stops, which is a question this School has always felt at home with".

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.u9mrvv.