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

Stopped the Clock, Kept the Seat

Marek Solheim, Ronja Oyelaran · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.8mpaeq

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities instruments eight of a board game café's sixteen tables with a silent RFID chip-in/chip-out sensor against a staggered rollout, comparing nine months of self-reported kiosk stop times to sensor-confirmed vacate times. Self-reported stops cluster in the two minutes before each half-hour billing boundary, and the sensor shows tables remaining occupied for a median 27 minutes after the self-reported stop, a gap an in-café honesty-nudge placard leaves unchanged.

Paper

More Minutes, Less Motion

Torun Ezeigwe, Joost Nwosu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.k9uxse

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement fits validated accelerometer collars to 214 client dogs of a six-territory dog-walking franchise and compares 1,142 walks' company-billed GPS minutes against independently measured active-motion minutes, finding billed minutes explain almost none of the variance in measured activity (r = 0.13, r² = 1.7%). Activity yield falls monotonically with billed walk length, from 82% in the shortest-billed quartile to 34% in the longest, and is lower for walks billed by a per-minute-paid contractor than for a salaried walker on a matched-length route.

Paper

Baked Today, Believed When

Fenna Okoro, Marek Solheim · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.kgiuw6

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities audits sticker-to-oven-log lag and self-reported freshness-lapse cutoffs across sixteen in-store bakery counters of a regional supermarket chain, finding a median 29-minute lag that widens across the trading day and a freshness cutoff that tracks respondent role far more closely than the chain's own written four-hour mark-down policy.

Paper

Scored Enough, Awarded Less

Torun Ezeigwe, Dagny Okafor · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.6k9y5a

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement audits a twenty-four-dojo martial-arts franchise's headquarters checklist for belt grading against the independent, blinded verdict of rotating guest examiners across 1,384 gradings, finding 86.0% agreement (Cohen's kappa = 0.41) and a checklist-implied pass rate that exceeds the examiner-awarded rate at every sampled site. Disagreement is asymmetric in its consequences: students the checklist cleared but the examiner deferred withdraw within the following term at several times the rate of every other group, while an ablation removing the checklist's forms cluster leaves both the agreement statistic and the attrition association unchanged.

Paper

Raised the Number, Not the Tip

Casimir Beng, Mirela Hanke · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.mwjyhb

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement tracks tipping across a nine-shop independent bike-repair chain as its payment terminals receive a staggered suggested-tip default increase, finding measured tips rise by 1.6 percentage points while tip incidence is unchanged, and that staff's own estimate of customer generosity rises roughly five times faster than the measured change and continues to diverge for a full quarter.

Paper

The Occupancy Count That Changed No One's Mind

Casimir Beng, Marit Osayande, Osei Vandermeer · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.qzqub7

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement tracks a 31-location bouldering gym chain's staggered rollout of a live wall-occupancy indicator, using a group-time quasi-experimental design to test whether climbers who can see the indicator before arriving change how often they bail a session or return within a fortnight. The indicator's introduction is associated with no detectable change in either outcome, and the null holds under an ablation restricted to first-visit day-pass climbers.

Paper

The Constant Outlived the Cup

Sten Okwuosa, Marit Osayande, Ingeborg Nwachukwu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.ntc5qi

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement audits a self-serve frozen-yogurt chain's programmed tare constant against the empty-cup stock two supplier changes have since put in circulation, sampling 960 cups across 24 stores. The legacy supplier's cups match the register's 14.2 g constant almost exactly, while the two subsequent suppliers drift to opposite sides of it (-1.57 g and +1.61 g), simultaneously undercharging product on some transactions and overcharging customers on others. The chain's own daily scale-variance self-test --- the record finance uses to sign off scale accuracy --- never flagged either transition across two years and 17,304 store-day records, because its reference-mass check never involves a cup or the tare constant at all.

Paper

Timed to the Wrong Table

Torun Ezeigwe, Joost Nwosu, Mirela Hanke · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.ty5q4d

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement designs and field-tests an audit tool that cross-references a food court's pager-reissue logs against each stall's kitchen-ticket times across a six-week season and all fourteen tenancies, finding the published buzz-to-return leaderboard correlates only weakly with a cleaned, audit-verified ranking, and that a staff directive to scan returned pagers immediately left both the reissue rate and the leaderboard largely unchanged.

Paper

Ranked to Avoid

Verity Marris, Anneke Tolan, Ingrid Vasseur · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.12yh5k

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities embeds with a Tuesday-night board-game club for a fourteen-week season after its convenor begins publishing a projected rank trajectory alongside the live ladder, finding opponent-avoidance behaviour organised around the projection rose to 41% before the projection's three-week extrapolation could plausibly be informative, and held statistically unchanged after the convenor withdrew the projection.

Paper

Shelved Without a Look

Iben Chikere, Anouk Mensah · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.dkvt1q

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities interviews 26 volunteer curators across a metro street-library network and logs 1,204 donations across eight of its 19 boxes, finding self-reported checklist adherence diverges from observed adherence at every criterion --- most sharply for the duplicate check, self-reported at 74% against 19% observed --- and that the resulting shortcut, not the written policy, is what gets passed to each new curator at handover.

Paper

Wherever the Tall Guy Left It

Sten Okwuosa, Thandiwe Solberg, Ingeborg Nwachukwu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.efc5ec

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement surveys 612 floor staff across 34 stores of a national supermarket chain, finding the chain's own planogram-reset compliance score explains almost none of the variance in staff self-rated confidence finding items for a customer (r = 0.09, R² = 0.008), while tenure explains substantially more; staff report navigating by landmark products and carried-over spatial memory far more often than by the compliance score itself, which they name least often of six heuristics.

Paper

On Time to the Rack, Behind on the Bench

Mirela Hanke, Casimir Beng · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.eth1lp

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement compares 63,482 tool-crib checkout records against blinded formal competency assessment scores for 189 apprentices across four workshop sites and three intake cohorts, finding a Readiness Proxy Score built from return timeliness correlates only weakly with formal outcomes (r = 0.09) and barely shifts when an automated return reminder is introduced.