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

Poster

Suspicion Is Not Detection

Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Sten Okwuosa, Osei Vandermeer · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.peh6gr

A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement decomposes the indicator one metropolitan council reports for its scam-awareness program, the share of scam messages residents correctly flag, into sensitivity and response criterion. 220 residents across six community halls judged a fixed 42-item message set (21 genuine, 21 scam) at baseline and again at eight weeks, 18,480 judgements in all. Correct flagging of scam messages rises 17.6 points to 88.9 per cent and the council's indicator rises with it, while flagging of genuine messages rises 23.2 points to 46.1 per cent. Under an equal-variance signal-detection model sensitivity is unchanged (d-prime 1.31 to 1.32, 95% CI of change -0.11 to +0.14) and the criterion moves -0.65 (95% CI -0.74 to -0.56), so the reported gain is entirely a shift in where residents draw the line rather than in what they can tell apart. At eight weeks 41.4 per cent flag a pharmacy's script-ready notice and 49.5 per cent a school absence notice as scams, and 34 per cent report having ignored a message in the interval that later proved genuine.

Poster

Room on Paper

Ingrid Vasseur, Lindiwe Achterberg, Anouk Mensah · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.lckm8v

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities locates on the ground every plot that four metropolitan council cemeteries carry as unsold, and tests each against the council's own published siting rules. Across 3,412 register-unsold plots surveyed over eleven months by two independent assessors, 1,986 (58.2 per cent) can be opened; the largest single deduction is not physical but 611 pre-purchased reservations dating from 1961 to 1994 and still counted as available, 486 of them with no current contact recorded. Canopy and root zones account for a further 342 plots, services easements and drainage 218, and access lanes and setback failures 255. At the observed rate of 214 interments a year, remaining capacity falls from a published 15.9 years to 9.3, placing the council's below-ten-years land-acquisition trigger roughly eight months before the survey closed rather than 5.9 years ahead of it.

Poster

Sorted Four Ways, Filed as One

Ronja Oyelaran, Anneke Tolan, Dagny Okafor · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.719k99

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities recovers the shared accounts residents hold of a fruit-tree branch crossing a back fence, the highest-volume intake category at one metropolitan council's neighbour-mediation service. Sixty-eight residents across 34 adjoining property pairs sorted a 48-statement Q set drawn from a 311-item concourse into a forced quasi-normal grid; by-person centroid extraction with varimax rotation retained four factors accounting for 61 per cent of explained variance. The four accounts treat the branch as a boundary matter, a hazard, a harvest, and an amenity respectively, and none reduces to another; only two of the 48 statements draw consensus, both procedural. All 34 files carry the same single issue type, and 71 per cent close as resolved with no recorded change at the fence.

Poster

The Weight the Schedule Supplied

Fenna Okoro, Runa Adegoke, Thandiwe Solberg · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.5lxze6

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities decomposes the diversion tonnage one metropolitan council publishes for its registered garage-sale weekend, a figure assembled from 1,940 post-sale returns covering 58,412 listed items across four trail weekends. Households supply counts by item class; a default weight schedule adopted nine years ago supplies the kilograms. Reported diversion of 462.6 tonnes falls to 144.7 tonnes when the same items are re-derived under the lowest of five alternative published schedules, a 3.2-fold span with no change to what was sold. Two of the schedule's fourteen categories, furniture and whitegoods, account for 12.2 per cent of listed items and 55.7 per cent of reported tonnage; the schedule records no source for nine of its categories and has never been revised.

Impact report

Recorded, and Still There

Marit Osayande, Bram Ntuli · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.6xcgka

The School of Continuous Improvement's five-year impact report on retained holdings: an instrument that attaches a recorded intended use to a kept item, a review protocol that treats deferral as a permitted outcome, and twenty-two audited sites across which recorded intent rose at every holding type measured. The School's stated position is that this measures documentation rather than restraint.

Paper

Described, Then Decided

Torun Ezeigwe, Dagny Okafor, Solveig Adeyemi · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.j1llhz

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a pre-registered factorial vignette experiment in which 219 licensed claims assessors, across eleven claims teams of one general insurer, each determined twelve home-insurance files drawn from a resolution-IV fractional design (2,628 determinations). The customer's own description of the cause of loss was varied across three wordings while every assessor-facing physical fact --- loss date, photographs, damage extent, sum insured --- was held identical: acceptance in full runs 70.2, 66.6 and 54.6 per cent across those wordings, a spread of 15.6 points (95% CI 11.4 to 19.8) exceeding that attributable to documentary evidence (6.1 points), claim value band (3.8) and prior claims history (1.4, n.s.) combined. A within-study reproduction of the insurer's own assessment-consistency audit on the same determinations returns 95.8 per cent and does not vary across the wording conditions, and the mandatory justification field cites the physical evidence in 91.7 per cent of determinations against the customer's description in 2.1 per cent.

Poster

A Plate Is Not a Visit

Anneke Tolan, Marek Solheim, Osei Vandermeer · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.9jx27w

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities classifies 24,318 plate-camera entry and exit pairs at six shopping-centre car parks against a paired ground-truth record: an exit-lane intercept survey on 1,180 pairs and 214 hours of lane observation, with classes derived at the first centre and applied blind at the remaining five by two coders (kappa = 0.83). 58.6 per cent of pairs correspond to one shopping party's single stay; relocations within the site (12.4 per cent), read faults (10.1), boundary faults (9.8) and stays covering a party larger than the vehicle (9.1) account for the rest. Compliance recomputed on shopping parties from the same cameras falls from the published 94.1 per cent of pairs to 81.7 per cent.

Poster

Reached, and Unmoved

Solveig Adeyemi, Joost Nwosu, Ingeborg Nwachukwu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.puo2j3

A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement sets 1.84 million itemised transactions from 18 food-court outlets that came into scope of a menu-board kilojoule labelling requirement against 16 matched comparison counters in the same food courts, across fourteen fortnights either side of the changeover. The difference-in-differences estimate for mean energy per transaction is -7 kJ (90% CI -41 to +27), inside a ±100 kJ margin of indifference lodged before data access, so both one-sided tests reject and equivalence holds; the 90th percentile shifts -12 kJ (90% CI -74 to +50) and no item-mix share moves by more than 0.4 points. An intercept survey at the same counters (n = 412) finds 61.4 per cent of diners recall the figures and 7.5 per cent report they changed the order, a stated shift of -180 kJ the registers do not carry, while the district's healthy-choices indicator counts transactions at labelled premises and so cannot fall as compliance rises.

Poster

Recorded as Personal

Ronja Oyelaran, Iben Chikere, Kwame Lindqvist · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.ih1b2w

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities matches 1,214 exit interviews across 38 sites of one multi-site employer, each conducted by the departing employee's own site manager, to a six-month postal follow-up in which the same leavers select from the same eleven reason codes. On 604 matched pairs the ticked code and the leaver's later selection agree 46.9 per cent of the time (kappa 0.31, 95% CI 0.25 to 0.37), and the disagreement runs one way: of 214 pairs whose follow-up names a site-attributable reason, 137 were ticked personal reasons or other, against 11 of 390 in the reverse direction. A blinded reading of the leavers' own free text, present on 74.3 per cent of forms, sits with the follow-up rather than with the tick, and agreement is unrelated to a site's turnover rate.

Poster

Sealed, and Not Re-Worn

Renke Sabel, Mirela Hanke, Casimir Beng · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.yx271i

A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement repeats the University's own study of successor desire lines at 84 verge shortcuts sealed under a council path-formalisation warrant, this time across five wards of a second metropolitan council area, surveying each site fortnightly for fourteen months under the originating study's fixed coding definition. Successor lines appear at 26 per cent of sites within twelve months (95% CI 17-37) against the 71 per cent first reported, and the median is not reached; the null association between the qualifying wear score and time to recurrence does replicate (HR 1.02, 95% CI 0.68-1.53). Recurrence concentrates where the seal followed the engineered alignment (56 per cent of 27 sites) rather than the worn one (12 per cent of 57), leaving the warrant's 26-week review window resting on the estimate that did not transfer and its qualifying rule on the one that did.

Ad

Listed In Full. Stocked In Part.

Thandiwe Solberg · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.a5d5f5

A marketing poster advertising Demo Quarter, the School of Continuous Improvement's quarterly Masters-program showcase, built on the distance between a range as catalogued and a range as stocked --- a graded row of shop bottles running pale to deep, its darkest positions standing empty, counted along from a step stool. Six words of display type over a retail interior, prepared for the University's landscape signage rotation in matched daylight and after-dark renderings.

Brochure

Whose Evening It Was

Anneke Tolan, Osei Vandermeer, Runa Adegoke, Ronja Oyelaran, Bram Ntuli, Sten Okwuosa · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.ferlge

A research-showcase brochure setting out the University's programme on the requests institutions send into households --- the message that asks for an hour of an ordinary evening, and the count that records only whose meter dipped. Four published studies are cited by title and identifier, across the design of the ask, the reach of the meter, and the household's own account of what was moved.