Research papers

Research papers published by 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.

2543

Research outputs

66.92

Outputs per academic FTE

$6.7M

Funding awarded

$175,940

Research income per academic FTE

Outputs and funding over time

Published outputs

Paper

Contours Never Cross

Brynjar Obiora · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.w9n27w

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions gives a six-item level-set instrument to 187 students in a second-year service calculus unit and interviews twelve who had completed field mapping, finding that the field-mapping students read contour diagrams better at regular values but reject the self-crossing contour at a saddle (13% accept it, against 38% of their classmates), and that a task shifting the contour interval moves ten of the twelve to an account in which the crossing depends on where the counting starts.

Paper

How Long a Price Holds

Fenna Okoro, Ingrid Vasseur · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.nchu50

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reads the quotation register of a regional export-readiness programme (186 first-time exporting manufacturers, 2,412 quotations, 611 first orders) and finds that fixed-price quotations held for more than 60 days win more first orders but are followed by markedly fewer second orders (hazard ratio 0.58), a penalty that runs through the size of the exporter's next price and does not appear when the same quotation carries a price-adjustment clause.

Paper

Where the Lattice Starts

Ylva Onyekwere, Bram Ntuli · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.k0qp22

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement treats the placement of high-dose vertices in lattice radiotherapy as a constrained sphere-packing problem, comparing four placement rules across 240 simulated irregular targets under an analytic dose kernel. A face-centred cubic lattice places the most vertices in 88 per cent of targets, but any lattice's count shifts with where it is laid by as much as the difference between lattices, and valley dose rises linearly with vertex density whichever rule produces it.

Paper

One Seek, One Trial

Ragnhild Uzoma, Mirela Hanke · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.iqyzl0

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions shows that a remote data possession audit's chance of detecting a contiguous run of lost blocks is bounded by its number of physically separate reads rather than its number of blocks, so that a single contiguous-range challenge is nearly blind to run-shaped loss. It derives the run length a passing audit can certify, confirms the analysis in 1,600 fault-injection trials, each audited five ways, on a three-node object store, and proposes that audit reports state that certified run length beside the pass.

Paper

Allocating the Ray Budget

Kwame Lindqvist, Anouk Mensah · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.rkjtnu

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities treats the division of a fixed Monte Carlo bundle budget among the surfaces of three simulated two-dimensional enclosures as an allocation problem in stratified sampling. Neyman allocation barely improves on customary power-proportional emission, but once the exchange factors are smoothed for reciprocity and closure the optimal design moves its budget onto the target surface, proving 318 times as efficient for a sensor strip occupying 1 per cent of a cavity's perimeter.

Paper

Subgrains in the Pore Lattice

Ragnhild Uzoma, Brynjar Obiora · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.icm3da

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions anodises 24 aluminium foils in oxalic acid for between 1 and 96 hours, locates 22.4 million pore-bottom dimples, and classes the boundaries between ordered domains by misorientation as a petrologist would. Domains coarsen as the 0.39 power of time, but low-angle boundaries fall from 41% of boundary length to 9% while high-angle boundaries thin more slowly and come to sit over the grain boundaries of the metal, which the authors read as subgrain coalescence followed by a mosaic pinned by its substrate.

Paper

The Seismic Water Table Is the Top of the Capillary Fringe

Vigdis Emenike, Ragnhild Uzoma · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.ecq3zq

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions shoots a 240 m seismic line across an alluvial terrace carrying eleven monitoring bores and sets the water table returned by P-wave refraction tomography and by Poisson's ratio from surface-wave inversion against levels dipped on the survey day. At the eight bores inside the resolved section both seismic interfaces lie above the dipped level, by 0.14 to 0.81 m after correcting for the inversion's smoothing bias, and the offset rises with the fines content of the core above the water level, which the authors read as the top of the capillary fringe.

Paper

The Trolley as a Bath

Hedvig Anyanwu, Brynjar Obiora, Ronja Oyelaran · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.vobkbu

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Underlying Conditions applies Edwards' statistical mechanics of granular packings to 212 crate-moves across four office restacks, finding that crates repacked for a move share one equation of state and reach a common compactivity within four trolley runs, while crates carried forward unopened fluctuate at a median 0.62 of the predicted variance and never agree with their neighbours.

Paper

The Box Marked "Others"

Ylva Ogunbanjo · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.xozf1u

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities follows one advisory practice's due-diligence team through eleven months, 96 versions of the group structure charts drawn for 23 client engagements and 27 interviews, and finds that above about thirty boxes a chart stopped growing: the rest of the group, 1,253 entities across the engagements, was folded into a single box marked "Others", which reached the risk register as one row rated low. It argues that the structure chart, not the statute or the published statement, is where the scope of diligence is settled.

Paper

Waiting for the Words

Ronja Oyelaran, Ylva Onyekwere · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.so5bip

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities compares sixteen council community information sessions in six halls, half with automatic live captions projected beside the slides, across 612 transitions from presenter to floor. With captions on, the median gap before a resident spoke rose from 0.4 to 2.1 seconds and tracked the caption latency of the presenter's final word, overlap at transitions fell from 14.2 to 3.9 percent, and nearly one floor turn in five opened by reading the screen back, a third of them quoting a misrecognition the presenter repaired before answering.

Paper

The Week the Cage Wash Stopped

Marit Osayande, Solveig Adeyemi · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.22pvln

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement links eleven birth years of an in-house NOD mouse colony's monitoring records to 1,122 entries in the animal facility's incident log. Among 1,146 female monitors, none of eight routine event categories moved the onset of autoimmune diabetes; incidence rose after the colony's move to a barrier suite, and sixteen litters whose first weeks spanned an eleven-day cage-wash outage reached 49.2 per cent against 77.0 per cent in the litters around them.

Paper

The Queue Offshore

Eivind Onwuka, Osei Vandermeer, Vigdis Emenike · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.5wm02b

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement and the School of Underlying Conditions follows dry-bulk ships waiting off one export terminal, the nitrogen oxides they emit while waiting, and night-time NO2 at a shoreline and an inland monitor in the town downwind, for a year before and a year during a berth-slot trial. Ships at anchor fell from a monthly mean of 11.1 to 5.2 with throughput unchanged, and shoreline NO2 on onshore-wind nights fell by about a quarter after normalisation; but the trial's anchorage admission rule sent part of the remaining queue to drift beyond the horizon, so waiting emissions fell by only a quarter while those released within 15 km of the shore halved.