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

The Grade Stops at the Counter

Marit Osayande, Iben Chikere, Anneke Tolan · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.kum49s

A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement follows 1,187 handsets traded in over the counter at 31 stores of one electronics chain, tracking each by asset tag through to the disposition its processing facility recorded over sixteen weeks. Disposition mix does not separate across the four lower condition bands (χ² = 8.4, df = 9, p = 0.49), which between them take 94.0 per cent of handsets; board harvest accounts for 63.8 to 65.3 per cent of every band below the top one, while the median credit offered across those four bands spans $186.

Ad

Certified At The Counter, Judged On Your Wall

July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.qgc6l1

A marketing poster for the School of Emergent Priorities puts the University's own Strategic Drift Survey ranking on public display, set against a hardware-store paint bench where a tint is certified under the counter lamp and judged, hours later, on a wall in the late afternoon. Developed for the University's landscape display panels in matched light and dark renderings.

Ad

The Target Came Before The Towel

Kwame Lindqvist · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.5g26c3

A marketing poster for the School of Emergent Priorities fronts Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, whose work traces how a funding commitment outpaces the scoping meant to justify it, with the instance his research keeps returning to --- a hotel linen-reuse programme carrying a target, a print run and a reporting line, and no settled account of what a reused towel is. Developed for the University's portrait display panels in matched light and dark renderings.

Ad

The Hour You're Billed. The Hour It Takes.

July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.v0onnz

A marketing poster for the School of Continuous Improvement takes a single result from the published elemental time study "Booked at 1.4, Timed at 2.2" --- observed elapsed time running past the published flat-rate allowance on most of 1,318 logbook vehicle services --- onto the University's landscape display panels, in matched renderings for lit and unlit screens. The panel carries the campaign line, one supporting sentence and the teased poster's identifier.

Brochure

Better, and Gone

Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Ingrid Vasseur, Joost Nwosu, Anneke Tolan · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.dxg1du

A partnership brochure setting out the University's programme on endings --- the point at which someone stops, and what the measure watching them records when they do. Four published studies, a recomputed adherence rate, and the fieldwork behind them are offered as the case for supporting the work.

Paper

Everyone Passes, Differently

Torun Ezeigwe, Marit Osayande, Solveig Adeyemi · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.czhkle

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement treats the 24-item observation checklist behind an accredited first-aid practical assessment as a measurement instrument, calibrating 9,148 completed assessments from six registered training providers over nineteen months under a dichotomous Rasch model. Nineteen of the 24 items are endorsed on 97.8 per cent or more of sheets, item difficulties span 1.1 logits, and person separation reliability is 0.19; in a pre-registered substudy of 612 assessments independently re-observed by a blind marker, the same items span 4.3 logits and separation rises to 0.74. Eleven items show differential item functioning across providers, four beyond the conventional large-effect threshold, and re-equating on the 13 DIF-free items reorders the providers whose first-attempt competency rates a workplace-safety scheme publishes side by side, the highest-rated placing fourth of six and the lowest-rated second (Spearman's rho -0.31, 95% CI -0.88 to 0.60). Six pre-specified model variants move person separation by no more than 0.04.

Paper

Six Minutes, Unless You Press

Marit Osayande, Dagny Okafor, Anneke Tolan · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.e6c924

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement runs a pre-registered matched mystery-shopper audit of the two channels by which a customer raises an assistance request on a hardware store floor --- 32 trained shoppers, 1,164 scripted requests across 19 stores of one metropolitan network over fourteen weeks, crossing channel with request type under an incomplete block design, alongside a structured observation of 2,918 naturally occurring requests. Median time to first substantive assistance is 1 min 52 s via the in-aisle call button and 6 min 41 s via direct approach (difference in medians 4 min 49 s, 95% CI 4 min 02 s to 5 min 36 s), while the button accounts for 8.1 per cent of observed assistance events. Across the 19 stores the chain's published service-availability score, which feeds its rostering formula, is not appreciably associated with the audited direct-approach wait (Spearman's rho = 0.09, 95% CI -0.38 to 0.52), and four pre-registered ablations move the channel estimate by no more than 8 s.

Paper

The Number Arrives Either Way

Runa Adegoke, Kwame Lindqvist, Ingeborg Nwachukwu · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.idvq3t

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities tests whether a metropolitan water utility's read-completeness rate, which has risen from 93.1 to 99.4 per cent across a transmitting-meter rollout and is used to size the field-reading crew, carries any information about the manual reading a non-reporting connection still requires. All 96 field readers across the utility's fourteen depots walked a standardised twenty-installation route of pre-characterised registers, fourteen routine and six diagnostic. Depot read-completeness does not predict mean route accuracy (r = 0.02, 95% CI −0.52 to 0.54), and a two one-sided tests procedure against a pre-specified smallest effect of interest supports equivalence rather than non-detection. Routine registers are transcribed correctly at 0.94 against 0.42 for the diagnostic items and 0.28 for the two readings implausible against the property's own history, and four pre-registered sensitivity analyses move the primary coefficient by no more than 0.02.

Paper

The Tick Has Two Boxes

Iben Chikere, Anneke Tolan, Solveig Adeyemi · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.bbeucv

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities follows fourteen volunteer-run community repair cafés in one metropolitan council area for fifteen months, combining 226 hours of bench observation at 71 sessions, 58 semi-structured interviews, a documentary pass over 4,908 paper intake slips, and a twelve-week telephone follow-up with 318 visitors. Reflexive thematic analysis yields a nine-type typology of the states an item is actually in when it leaves the bench; re-coding 1,204 observation-paired slips finds the recorded two-state tick reading repaired on 66.4 per cent of them and spanning five of the nine types, against 43.6 per cent meeting a sustained-use criterion at twelve weeks. Recomputing the council's quarterly diverted-mass tally under four coding schemes moves the median per-session figure by no more than 1.4 kg, the tally being assembled from the item-class and weight fields and never from the outcome box.

Paper

Five Gates, No Dawn Gap

Petra Umbile, Marek Solheim, Verity Marris · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.n23z4k

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities repeats an earlier dog-park gate-counter study at five further enclosures, one in each council now applying the 1.72 dawn correction factor the original fed, completing 694 paired observer sessions over 24 weeks per site. The pooled dawn-minus-midday agreement difference is -2.1 percentage points against 33 in the original, inside the pre-registered equivalence bounds, with the only attenuated site the only one sharing the original's sensor mounting.

Paper

Lodged, Not Displayed

Marit Osayande, Solveig Adeyemi, Thandiwe Solberg · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.fp74me

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement releases FORECOURT, an open corpus of 96,318 roadside fuel-price board observations captured from windscreen cameras on a 24-vehicle courier fleet across 412 sites over nineteen weeks, with 8,214 double-coded reference readings and an open reader that recovers the exact posted price string for 94.6 per cent of held-out readings. Pairing each observation with a price-notification register's contemporaneous state, board and register hold the same price at 83.6 per cent of observations (95% CI 82.9-84.3), with a median absolute divergence of 2.4 c/L where they disagree. The board trails a notified decrease by a median 4 h 12 min and a notified increase by 11 min, while the scheme's published notification-timeliness rate, computed entirely from lodgements, did not fall below 99.1 per cent across the same period.

Paper

Nothing Improved Except the Average

Bram Ntuli, Fenna Okoro, Petra Umbile · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.p1t27w

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement decomposes the first-visit resolution rate a national plumbing and drainage franchise network publishes for each of its territories, using 486,312 completed residential jobs from 214 territories and 4,918 technicians across the fourteen quarters from 2023 Q1 to 2026 Q2. The published rate rises from 71.4 to 76.2 per cent while falling in all nine of the network's own job categories, by between 0.9 and 6.8 percentage points; a symmetric components-of-a-difference decomposition apportions 8.6 percentage points to the composition of dispatched work and minus 3.7 points to category-specific performance. The composition shift dates from an online booking triage introduced in the fifth quarter, which lifted the combined share of tap-and-washer and toilet-and-cistern jobs from 18.5 to 42.4 per cent. Technicians in the top quartile of complex-job share carry a published rate 9.4 points below the network mean, and the dispatch rule allocates complex work by published rate. Twenty-four alternative specifications move the composition component by no more than 0.6 percentage points.