Research outputs

The published research outputs of Slop University.

All research outputs of the University are published open access under CC BY 4.0, with persistent identifiers minted by the Office of Research Outputs.

Published outputs

Ad

The Tag Outlives The Tending. We Noticed.

August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.zkjvui

A marketing poster for Slop University stages a community garden allotment's blank claimed tag against a plot gone to seed, crediting the Living Dashboard's own composite with catching a claimed-but-idle status first, five quarters running, developed for bus-stop panels and campus digital signage in a portrait rotation.

Paper

Assumed Present

Runa Adegoke, Iben Chikere · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.ce2j7r

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities surveys 387 office-building fire wardens across 64 commercial office buildings on how they usually conduct the post-drill muster-point roll call. Ticking names off the building's pre-drill sign-in or swipe-card log without a fresh count is the single most common self-reported method (34.1%), and its use rises from 22.0% among wardens surveyed early in a building's insurer-mandated annual drill quota to 61.3% among those surveyed once most of the year's required drills had already been logged, a pattern that holds equally for dedicated and rotating wardens and for those recently accredited.

Paper

Received, Not Relayed

Marit Osayande, Anneke Tolan · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.8kmxis

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement interviews 141 households across seventeen suburban neighbourhood-watch phone trees, setting their accounts of whether they relayed an alert against nine months of each street committee's own confirmation-reply logs. Committee-reported chain-integrity scores average 87.4% and correlate only weakly with the share of households who describe actually contacting the next house (44%; r = .21, n.s.), a divergence thematic coding traces mostly to an assumption that an earlier household had already passed the alert on.

Paper

Cleared All the Same, Explained Less

Ronja Oyelaran, Marek Solheim · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.969bce

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities sorts 1,842 end-of-term badge-test video reviews from a suburban swim school into four shortcut categories inferred from the review platform's own session telemetry -- full playback, anchor-clip review, scrub-through, and template carryover -- finding badge pass rates statistically indistinguishable across all four, unmoved by substituting independently re-timed durations for the platform's own session clock. Per-criterion feedback completeness falls from 91% to 58% across the term instead, tracking weekly submission backlog closely (r = -.86) even as the headline badge outcome holds flat.

Paper

The Reset Equilibrium

Petra Umbile, Ingrid Vasseur, Casimir Beng · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.cddmt8

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reports an eleven-week pilot of a queue-position forecast display at a twelve-bay EV charging bank, finding that drivers who leave the queue and re-enter are quoted a shorter, population-average wait than the conservative estimate held by anyone waiting in place. Rejoin behaviour climbs from 3% to 25% of check-ins over the pilot, the site-wide posted average drifts from tracking the real wait to understating it by nearly seven minutes, and a plain-language warning banner trialled from week six leaves the rejoin rate unchanged.

Paper

Easier to Claim, Not More Likely to Chip

Ronja Oyelaran, Lindiwe Achterberg · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.1w3v3f

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities exploits a national nail-salon chain's staggered, store-by-store rollout of a photo-based booking channel for its 14-day gel-manicure chip guarantee, comparing each store's point-of-sale claim rate before and after rollout against an independent panel of 1,238 client manicures rated blind by technicians outside the chain. The claim rate rises 83% after rollout while the independently audited 14-day chip incidence does not move; before rollout the phone channel had captured only around two in five of the chips the panel could independently confirm, and an ablation restricted to stores whose rollout overlapped an unrelated pricing promotion leaves both patterns unchanged.

Paper

A Registered Replication That Did Not Replicate

Sten Okwuosa, Osei Vandermeer · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.fulmzq

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement pre-registers a direct replication of an earlier Slop University finding that a signed-off self-assessment tracks its own author rather than the independently logged record it was meant to check, testing whether the same pattern recurs in a residential real-estate franchise's open-house attendance count. Across 44 agents, 19 offices, and 3,412 open houses, agent-reported attendance correlates strongly with an independent door-tally clicker (r = 0.93), and the small residual gap (0.5 attendees) does not widen with agent tenure, the pattern that drove the original finding; an ablation restricted to pre-auction opens leaves the result unchanged.

Poster

Signed, Not Checked

Dagny Okafor, Joost Nwosu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.2p4hjg

A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement matches 1,240 signed-off shift-supervisor performance reviews across 68 stores of a retail chain against supervisors' own pre-review self-assessment scores and a composite record score built from the store's own till-accuracy and roster-reliability logs. Signed-off ratings correlate strongly with self-assessment (r = 0.87) and weakly with the independently logged record (r = 0.21), and the gap between the self-assessment and the record widens with supervisor tenure, from 2 points under six months to 23 points at five-plus years.

Poster

Quiet, Not Cleared

Renke Sabel, Solveig Adeyemi · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.677ori

A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement matches 1,142 school instrument hires across three terms and three depots, pairing 214 families who successfully disputed an automated damage-match flag with matched never-flagged families borrowing the same instrument type at the same rate. Re-flag odds at the next hire are statistically indistinguishable between the two groups overall, except for brass instruments, which re-flag at more than double the matched baseline rate, a gap traced to the scanner's own confidence threshold rather than to family history.

Paper

On Time, by a Later Clock

Verity Marris, Kwame Lindqvist · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.8gqp7o

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities audits one suburban alterations shop's point-of-sale timestamp logs against its own change history for the internal setting governing its 48-hour guarantee's clock start, finding the shop's reported weekly on-time rate held flat (M = 87.5%) across a business quarter while an audit fixed to the guarantee's advertised drop-off anchor shows on-time performance falling from 87% to 61% to 47% as the setting changed twice (N = 914 garments). The hours added to the clock start track the shop's own growing backlog closely (r = .91), and the pattern is unchanged when rush-fee garments are excluded from the audit.

Paper

The Number It Said First

Anouk Mensah, Runa Adegoke · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.c6nhcx

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities matches 6,842 orthodontic patients' software-quoted treatment-length estimates against their actual bracket-removal dates across 21 clinics, finding removal dates cluster tightly around the exact month first quoted (bunching ratio 5.8x) regardless of clinic-level case-mix severity. A mid-study platform update that narrowed the software's rounding from six-month to three-month increments shifted the clustering to match the new granularity, and a clinician quote-confirmation step introduced to counteract the effect left the pattern statistically unchanged.

Paper

More Minutes, Less Motion

Torun Ezeigwe, Joost Nwosu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.k9uxse

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement fits validated accelerometer collars to 214 client dogs of a six-territory dog-walking franchise and compares 1,142 walks' company-billed GPS minutes against independently measured active-motion minutes, finding billed minutes explain almost none of the variance in measured activity (r = 0.13, r² = 1.7%). Activity yield falls monotonically with billed walk length, from 82% in the shortest-billed quartile to 34% in the longest, and is lower for walks billed by a per-minute-paid contractor than for a salaried walker on a matched-length route.