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

Still on the Calendar

Osei Vandermeer, Thandiwe Solberg, Joost Nwosu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.qd1qd6

A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement follows 1,146 standing bookings across 38 council community halls over five years, timing each from the group's last recorded attendance to the day its block was released from the calendar. Attendance was established against key sign-out logs and hirers' own records; release was modelled with Kaplan-Meier estimates and a Cox model, with administrative clearance at a calendar rebuild treated as a competing risk. Median survival after last attendance is 3.4 years, and 41 per cent of bookings unattended for a full year are still held at five. Releases concentrate in the month a hall invoices its hirers rather than at any review, and recomputing the council's utilisation figure on attended hours alone lowers it from 63 to 39 per cent and moves 11 of the 38 halls across the threshold that opens a rationalisation review.

Ad

The Reason Was Already On The List

Bram Ntuli · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.1bygn9

A marketing poster advertising Improvement Grand Rounds, the School of Continuous Improvement's standing case-review series, built on the distance between a decision and the reason recorded for it --- a queue outside a rental inspection, where a knock-back is explained by whichever of eight preset codes sits closest, and the codes are afterwards counted up as an account of the market. Seven words of display type over a suburban footpath, prepared for the University's landscape signage rotation in matched daylight and after-dark renderings.

Ad

The Sign Stayed. The Work Went Home.

August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.9ivyrf

A marketing poster for the School of Continuous Improvement puts the Review Cadence Observatory's own result on public display: a first placing, four cycles running, for identifying a control that outlasted the work it was put in place to protect. Seven words of display type over an empty stretch of country roadworks, prepared for the University's portrait signage rotation in matched daylight and after-dark renderings.

Brochure

Past the Back Door

Casimir Beng, Verity Marris, Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Fenna Okoro · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.jzfguu

A case-for-support brochure setting out the University's interest in what continues after an institutional record has closed --- the sorting that starts behind the counter, the queue somebody quietly left, the item that never reached a list. It gathers the Adaptive Metrics Lab, the Trajectory Analytics Group, and Capability Sprints around four published studies of what a handover leaves uncounted, and makes the case for funding the second visit rather than the transaction.

Paper

Reassigned Quarterly, Decided Once

Kwame Lindqvist, Ronja Oyelaran, Anouk Mensah · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.swzvim

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reimplements the published pitch-allocation rule of one metropolitan council's street-performance permit scheme, in which each quarter's graded pitches are assigned in descending order of the hours holders logged in the council's app, and evaluates it against four counterfactual rules on twelve quarters of records covering 412 permit holders, 38 pitches and 41,318 logged sessions. Median tenure at a grade-A pitch is nine quarters under the live rule against two under rotation or a uniform lottery, seven of the eight grade-A pitches held in the twelfth quarter are held by holders who held one in the first, and the council's published activation rate spans 0.7 percentage points across all five rules while the assignments they produce differ by up to 71 per cent.

Paper

Still on the Form

Torun Ezeigwe, Marit Osayande, Petra Umbile · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.q48dmq

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a pre-registered replication of the Pick-Up Reliance Scale across eleven metropolitan primary schools in two waves. Neither the published two-factor structure nor the association between its Handover Deferral subscale and later roster renegotiation is recovered: parallel analysis retains a single weakly-defined factor, nine of twelve items load below .40, and the predictive correlation falls from .41 to .06. Removing the subscale the instrument is named for changes explained variance by 0.3 percentage points, while an eight-item short form remains on the enrolment paperwork at eight of the eleven sites.

Paper

Rebated, Not Plumbed

Casimir Beng, Marit Osayande, Renke Sabel · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.8skx7f

A tool paper from the School of Continuous Improvement describes RTDL, a clamp-on pressure-pump draw logger assembled from commodity parts, and reports its validation against a positive-displacement reference meter alongside a twelve-month deployment across addresses rebated under one metropolitan water utility's household rainwater-tank scheme. The scheme acquits its demand-management contribution as tanks rebated multiplied by an assumed internal yield of 42.0 kL per tank per year; across 214 audited addresses, 34.6 per cent have no operable connection to an internal fixture and mean measured internal supply is 16.0 kL, or 38.1 per cent of the assumed figure. Supply is strongly seasonal, and an ablation removing the duty-cycle disaggregation stage moves per-site estimates by 0.31 per cent.

Paper

Not Kept, Still Counted

Dagny Okafor, Bram Ntuli, Torun Ezeigwe · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.anxl50

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement places paired independent observers at 208 matches of a metropolitan junior football association's under-11 grade, which is run score-free: the board stays covered, no result is published and no ladder is kept, while the following season's divisions are graded from a five-point closeness item on the development snapshot each team manager files. Observers agreed on the exact final margin in 201 of 208 matches (weighted kappa 0.94); managers' ratings agreed with the association's own band mapping of that margin at kappa 0.24 (95% CI 0.16 to 0.32), and of the 74 matches decided by five goals or more the losing side's manager rated the match close or very close in 45 against the winning side's 13. The seeded divisions predict the next season's observed margins no better than carrying the previous season's divisions forward unchanged (mean absolute error 2.41 against 2.38 goals; difference 0.03, 95% CI -0.28 to 0.34), and removing the closeness item from the index moves no club by more than 0.06 points. The board was covered at 197 matches and a spectator-maintained score was observed at 156.

Paper

Painted Out, Moved Along

Fenna Okoro, Iben Chikere, Marek Solheim · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.hlf23z

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities exploits a metropolitan council's staged extension of its two-working-day graffiti removal standard to three of six precincts, photographing 1,164 laneway surfaces from fixed positions every fortnight for a year --- 30,264 surface-observations across 84 laneways --- with each surface coded by ownership and each observation annotated for tagged area by two blind annotators (ICC 0.91). Tagged area on council assets falls 9.2 percentage points against the control precincts (95% CI 11.4 to 7.0) while the private frontages beside them rise 4.0 (95% CI 2.4 to 5.6) and utility infrastructure 2.3 (95% CI 0.9 to 3.7); weighted by surface area the change across all laneway surfaces is 0.4 percentage points (95% CI 2.6 lower to 1.8 higher), a null that survives every exclusion available. Over the same period the council's published removal-compliance figure, computed over the 31.4 per cent of laneway surface area it owns, rises from 71.2 per cent to 96.5.

Paper

The Remote Stayed on the Couch

Fenna Okoro, Lindiwe Achterberg, Runa Adegoke, Verity Marris · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.bdj0ze

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities sets one council heatwave plan's principal preparedness indicator, the 96.2 per cent of surveyed households recorded as having access to cooling, against fourteen weeks of measured use in 196 households that all answered the plan's own access item in the affirmative. Event-driven cooling diaries and ten-minute temperature logging in two rooms across nine declared heat events yield 5.53 million readings and 4,213 entries: 61.4 per cent of bedroom hours above 28 degrees passed with every available appliance idle, the median household ran cooling for 1.9 hours per heat-event day, and 41 households recorded no cooling hours at all. Running cost leads the five reason categories the diaries return, and the idle share moves 0.4 percentage points when portable-only households are excluded.

Poster

Settled With a Nod

Thandiwe Solberg, Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Solveig Adeyemi · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.t9pa13

A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement follows 1,148 items marked with tape by purchasers at 96 new-build handover walk-throughs across four estates, each photographed and numbered independently on the day and then tracked for twelve months against the builder's own handover record. Dwellings carry a mean 6.2 recorded items against 12.0 observed and the two counts rank close to unrelated (Spearman ρ = 0.19); 596 of the 1,148 items reach no list at all. Rectification within twelve months reaches 78.4 per cent of listed items against 31.2 per cent of those settled verbally on the day (adjusted hazard ratio 3.41, 95% CI 2.88 to 4.04), and site managers in the top quartile of the builder's build-quality indicator recorded a median 4.1 items on walk-throughs where 11.8 were observed.

Poster

Called In, or Not Called In

Ingrid Vasseur, Petra Umbile, Lindiwe Achterberg · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.2jg3i6

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities examines how the weekly auction clearance rate published by one metropolitan real-estate industry body is assembled, drawing on 34 semi-structured interviews with selling agents, auctioneers and the body's own reporting staff across 11 agencies, and on non-participant observation of 412 on-site auctions over nine Saturdays in which every outcome was recorded independently of the agency's return. A reflexive thematic analysis, with the coding frame lodged before any observed outcome was matched to a published return, yields five reporting categories and no residual: 118 of the 412 observed outcomes (28.6 per cent) never reached the Sunday figure, and interviewees describe reporting throughout as an act of presentation rather than of record. Recomputed on every observed outcome, the published rate sits a median 8.1 percentage points above the rate the same weeks would carry.