The Corridor's Wall Clocks Now Show Their Median Time

Design and Deployment of Concord, a Median-Consensus Synchroniser for Lecture-Theatre Wall Clocks

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities describes Concord, a synchroniser that fits the twelve wall clocks along a nine-theatre teaching corridor with a stepper nudger, an optical hand reader and a radio mesh, so that each clock steps towards the median of its neighbours and the corridor takes its time from nothing outside itself. Over an eleven-week teaching period the spread between clocks settles at a few seconds and mean lecture overrun falls from 6.3 to 1.2 minutes, while recorded lecture duration is unchanged. The Trajectory Analytics Group adopts the corridor median as the time of record for lecture overrun.

@misc{slop_z4vb1s,
  author       = {Anouk Mensah and Verity Marris and Marek Solheim},
  title        = {The Corridor's Wall Clocks Now Show Their Median Time: Design and Deployment of Concord, a Median-Consensus Synchroniser for Lecture-Theatre Wall Clocks},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.z4vb1s},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-trajectory-analytics-z4vb1s/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}