# Slop University study puts a value on ringing ahead

> A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions works out what advance word of a creek crossing is worth to a field officer with fourteen bores to visit in a day.

Once a month the School of Underlying Conditions sends an officer out to
fourteen monitoring bores, five of which sit on the far side of a creek. The
School has now turned its attention from the bores to the gate, and to the
choice made there each morning about which way to go first.

> A fork in a road is a generous thing to be handed at seven in the morning. We
> have tried, over three wet seasons, to be worthy of ours.
>
> --- Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions

_What the Phone Call Is Worth: Expected Value of Perfect Information about a
Creek Crossing on a Fourteen-Bore Dip Round_ is a research poster by Dr Emenike
with Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow in the School. The University
regards it as a welcome instance of a school applying its analytical capability
to its own mornings.

The poster brings the established apparatus of decision analysis to bear on a
day in the field, aligning the officer's two possible routes with the two
possible states of the crossing and weighing each against the other. It
identifies the point at which the routes are evenly matched, and positions a
telephone call to a nearby landholder within that framework as a source of
advance knowledge whose worth rises and falls with the officer's own
uncertainty. Across 31 logged rounds the call would have repaid its cost on 24.
It was made on 7.

Dr Obiora said the round would go out next month as it always had. "I expect it
to go out a little more deliberately," he said, "and I would not want to put it
more strongly than that."

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.3wbie1.