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.

Published outputs

Paper

Two-Person Piece Counts Do Not Reduce Piece Loss in a Postal Jigsaw-Lending Club

Kwame Lindqvist, Runa Adegoke, Ronja Oyelaran, Lindiwe Achterberg · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.sdn90v

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities evaluates a two-person handover count in a postal jigsaw-lending club, in which the sending and receiving custodians count a puzzle independently and reconcile before the circulation closes. Across six branches, fourteen four-week periods, and 1,184 circulations, the protocol produces no detectable reduction in piece loss (adjusted difference -0.04 pieces per circulation, 95% CI -0.31 to 0.23), while verification effort accumulates to 852 counter-hours; the null is reported in full, and the club retains the protocol and reports its counter-hours as a member-participation figure.

Paper

Nine Ways to Count a Main Street

Torun Ezeigwe, Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Joost Nwosu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.67ay7v

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reads the method statements attached to 78 acquitted grants from one state regional-events fund, deriving a nine-class frame for how funded committees count a crowd (two coders, Krippendorff's alpha 0.84), and runs a common protocol alongside the committee's own count at 41 of those events: instantaneous fixed-point counts of a bounded area at twenty-minute intervals with a turnover model, two observers per event (ICC 0.96). The acquitted figure exceeded the protocol estimate at 35 of the 41 events, by a median factor of 1.88 (IQR 1.14 to 2.51, range 0.58 to 5.12), and counting method accounts for 88.1 per cent of the variance in the log ratio against 3.1 per cent for event size. Cost per attendee spans $2.48 to $8.20 across methods as published and $5.82 to $7.78 recomputed on the protocol count; 14 of the 41 events cross the fund's renewal threshold when the ranking is recomputed, and three of the four ranked most efficient fall below the median.

Paper

Quiet Where the Sign Has No Name

Thandiwe Solberg, Sten Okwuosa, Bram Ntuli · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.ba3177

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement re-estimates the attribution step behind a state rail safety regulator's published level-crossing occurrence rate, applying a Fellegi-Sunter linkage model with kilometrage blocking and clerical review to 6,142 driver-filed occurrence reports lodged against 2,388 public crossings over five financial years. At the operating point that reproduces the published counts, 71.4 per cent of reports resolve to a unique crossing, and the resolved share moves 21.6 points across three defensible thresholds. Reports naming a road and a locality resolve at 94.6 per cent; reports giving only a rail kilometrage, as the signage at 1,043 of the crossings does, resolve at 34.7 per cent. Those crossings are 43.7 per cent of the network and 11.2 per cent of the published occurrences, and against a 400-report hand-resolved audit sample their occurrence rate rises from 0.06 to 0.33 per crossing-year, above that of the named-road crossings. Recomputed on the corrected rate, 51 of the 120 crossings the education campaign and current upgrade tranche were directed at change.

Paper

No Field for the Tide

Runa Adegoke, Anouk Mensah, Bram Ntuli, Kwame Lindqvist · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.j5e6xi

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reconciles the criterion weights one coastal shire's 2024 boating facilities consultation produced, from 1,148 participants across seven drop-in sessions, against the asset register the shire's renewal priority score for its 34 public boat ramps is computed from. Three of the six adopted criteria are recorded for no ramp at all and enter each score as the same imputed constant: usable tide window and a floating pontoon carry 0.57 of the adopted weight and 0.0 per cent of the between-ramp variance, while surface condition, weighted 0.09, accounts for 84.6 per cent of it. The adopted ranking reproduces the condition-only ranking it replaced at Spearman 0.996; a ranking recomputed from a 214 person-hour field census of all 34 ramps, under the same weights, agrees at 0.43 and leaves no ramp in its position.

Paper

Handed Out While the Chairs Went Up

Anneke Tolan, Iben Chikere, Verity Marris · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.1qd9gp

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities follows the end-of-term Participant Experience Form across the five neighbourhood centres of one metropolitan council, pairing 33 semi-structured interviews with tutors, coordinators and programs-unit staff against a census of eleven terms of the paper archive: 3,417 returns across 1,046 class-instances, a return rate of 96.8 per cent. Separating the instrument into collection, reading and consequence, it finds collection at ceiling in every centre and every term, four references to a return across eleven terms of agendas, minutes and annual reports, all of them counts rather than content, and no timetabling decision that turned on one. Classes continue by default at 89.2 per cent, and adding mean form sentiment to an allocation model of room availability, tutor availability and prior-term continuation moves predicted continuation by 0.4 percentage points (n.s.).

Paper

Everyone Else's Accidents

Fenna Okoro, Ronja Oyelaran, Dagny Okafor, Verity Marris · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.69uloo

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities transcribes 412 conditions-of-entry signs at council sites across 19 member councils of one state's local government mutual liability scheme, segments them into 4,187 clause instances against a 61-class taxonomy (two coders, Krippendorff's alpha 0.86), and traces each instance to the scheme's template bulletins and to the de-identified claims digest circulated to members. 78.4 per cent of clauses reproduce a template revision and 3.9 per cent are site-authored; template vintage accounts for 0.61 of between-site variance in clause content against 0.004 for the site's own incident history, and the odds of a clause given a matching local incident are 1.06 (95% CI 0.81 to 1.38). Clause classes enter the template a median 12 months after a claim of that class appears elsewhere in the membership, and the signage-currency discount 17 of 19 councils hold is unassociated with their incident rates.

Paper

Edited, Not Opened

Ronja Oyelaran, Anouk Mensah, Lindiwe Achterberg · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.d3oueo

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities follows one town-centre precinct of 118 ground-floor premises, 96 of them chamber members, through a twelve-month evening activation pilot, setting the chamber's published evening trading coverage against a fixed-route observation record of 202 circuit passes and 23,836 door observations at 18:15 and 19:15. Declared coverage rises from 31.3 to 57.3 per cent while the share of member premises observed open at 18:15 moves from 24.6 to 27.1 per cent (95% CI -1.4 to +6.3). Of the 28.1 points of gross entry into the declared category, 21.9 come from premises whose observed hours did not change at all; fourteen further premises extended their evening trading without editing a listing and are absent from the figure entirely. Where a closing time is declared, the door closes a median 38 minutes before it, and recomputing coverage under two alternative definitions moves the year-end figure by at most 3.1 points while preserving the monthly ordering exactly.

Paper

The Bar Only Goes Up

Sten Okwuosa, Casimir Beng, Joost Nwosu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.a1s6a7

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reconstructs dated repaint histories for 214 community fundraising campaigns at 96 facilities across eleven years of one shire's scheme records, reading painted levels from 4,706 board photographs and pairing each history with the association's audited returns. A discrete-time complementary log-log hazard model finds the repaint hazard falls by a factor of five once the matched-contribution threshold has been cleared on the board (hazard ratio 0.19), the median campaign records its final repaint 19 months before close, and the painted level exceeds banked receipts in 78.0 per cent of campaigns.

Paper

Every Letterbox, Regardless

Renke Sabel, Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Osei Vandermeer · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.xjhrzt

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement costs one financial year of a shire's four quarterly newsletter editions across seven delivery zones (9,299 dwellings), taking print, artwork and distribution from the shire's own ledger and setting them against a stratified survey (n = 1,204) of residents able to recall at least one item unprompted six to eight weeks after delivery. Delivered coverage holds between 95.2 and 99.1 per cent everywhere, while unprompted recall runs from 29.8 to 44.8 per cent and rises with remoteness. Cost per informed resident is $1.03 in the town centre and $24.71 on the outermost run, widening to $1.17 against $44.13 once recall is restricted to residents who credit the printed copy rather than the shire's emailed or online editions. Three zones holding 11.3 per cent of dwellings absorb 58.8 per cent of distribution cost, and the recall rate that would buy them town-centre cost-effectiveness exceeds 100 per cent in each. Substituting the friction-cost method for the replacement wage, or valuing volunteer distribution at zero, leaves the zone ranking unchanged.

Paper

Only What Has an Outline

Runa Adegoke, Verity Marris, Anneke Tolan · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.zgk44a

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities codes 6,148 purchase lines from four years of one community-workshop association's acquittal returns against each site's own inventory control, and inventories the toolkit on site at all 46 workshops. At the 29 sites running a painted shadow board, 61.2 per cent of purchase lines refilled a vacant outline and 4.1 per cent introduced a tool type the board did not already carry, against 39.8 and 19.6 per cent at the 17 sites keeping a written list; board sites hold about three-quarters the number of distinct tool types at comparable membership and spend, while 268 outlines were painted over and recorded completeness rose from 91.3 to 97.9 per cent.

Paper

A Quick Visit Scores Best

Sten Okwuosa, Joost Nwosu, Torun Ezeigwe · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.9xmvu7

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement fits a mixed logit to 12,432 choice observations from 1,036 residents living near a kerbside stop on one council's four mobile library routes, expressing every trade-off in minutes of additional walking. Residents accept 11.3 extra minutes for an after-work arrival window and 2.1 for tripling the time the van stays, and ranking the service's 41 stops by predicted utility rather than by loans per van-hour produces an order whose correlation with the review's own is 0.14.

Paper

Two Dollars Is Not a Signal

Joost Nwosu, Renke Sabel, Casimir Beng · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.iluyix

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement fits individuals and moving-range charts to eighteen months of end-of-shift cash-drawer counts at 34 suburban hospitality venues, covering 37,208 closes across 68 drawer streams. The natural process limits run from minus $7.93 to $7.71, placing the group's fixed $2.00 investigation trigger well inside common-cause variation: 11,682 closes breached it and 98.5 per cent of the resulting investigations carried no special-cause signal, while 85.9 per cent of the 1,046 signals detected consisted entirely of sub-trigger closes and were never investigated. Venue investigation closure rate, the group's reported cash-integrity indicator, is uncorrelated with special-cause incidence and moderately correlated with the drawer's own noise.