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

Ninety-Four Per Cent, In the Wrong Places

Ronja Oyelaran, Marek Solheim, Fenna Okoro, Kwame Lindqvist · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.zrepcu

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities audits one state's backyard beehive register across a metropolitan area and its peri-urban fringe, fitting a log-linear multiple-systems model to three independent enumerations of apiary sites --- 1,341 registered sites, a volunteer swarm-collection callout log of 431, and a street-level survey of 246 across 96 sampled mesh blocks run blind to both. The lists jointly name 1,398 distinct sites against an estimated 1,429 (95% CI 1,402-1,478), placing register ascertainment at 93.8% (95% CI 90.7-95.6) and failing to reproduce the 44.2% shortfall an earlier study of a reports-driven list reported. Stratified by zoning band, ascertainment runs at 98.4% inner suburban and 93.0% outer suburban but falls to 62.9% (95% CI 51.4-74.8) on the peri-urban fringe, which holds 7.3% of the modelled population and 44.3% of the modelled shortfall; eight estimator specifications move the aggregate by no more than 2.1 points and all clear the register's 90% assurance floor.

Paper

Twenty-Two Point Nine

Fenna Okoro, Marek Solheim, Petra Umbile · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.ybc4oz

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities matches 41,206 desk-recorded checked-baggage weights to the ramp weigh-belt reading for the same bag, across four stations of one carrier's network over eleven weeks. The two instruments agree away from the 23.0 kg allowance (mean difference 0.02 kg, limits of agreement -0.31 to 0.35 kg), but the desk record carries an excess-mass ratio of 2.18 in the final 0.25 kg below it where the ramp distribution returns 1.02, and 22.9 kg is the modal recorded value at 5.1 per cent of all bags. Of 4,912 bags ramp-weighed between 23.1 and 25.0 kg, 61.3 per cent were recorded within allowance; a crossed-effects model attributes the variation to the accepting agent rather than the station, and the desk-recorded rate stepped 1.9 points when it joined the weekly station scorecard while the ramp-recomputed rate did not move.

Paper

Described, Then Decided

Torun Ezeigwe, Dagny Okafor, Solveig Adeyemi · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.j1llhz

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a pre-registered factorial vignette experiment in which 219 licensed claims assessors, across eleven claims teams of one general insurer, each determined twelve home-insurance files drawn from a resolution-IV fractional design (2,628 determinations). The customer's own description of the cause of loss was varied across three wordings while every assessor-facing physical fact --- loss date, photographs, damage extent, sum insured --- was held identical: acceptance in full runs 70.2, 66.6 and 54.6 per cent across those wordings, a spread of 15.6 points (95% CI 11.4 to 19.8) exceeding that attributable to documentary evidence (6.1 points), claim value band (3.8) and prior claims history (1.4, n.s.) combined. A within-study reproduction of the insurer's own assessment-consistency audit on the same determinations returns 95.8 per cent and does not vary across the wording conditions, and the mandatory justification field cites the physical evidence in 91.7 per cent of determinations against the customer's description in 2.1 per cent.

Paper

Well Presented, Slightly Overset

Thandiwe Solberg, Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Osei Vandermeer · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.be6zz8

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement randomises 46 preserves and baking classes at nine regional agricultural shows to return either a written judge's comment card with each entry or the placing card alone, with the outcomes, the equivalence margin, and the analysis model registered before the first entry book was opened. Exhibitor re-entry the following season was 61.4 per cent under comment cards and 60.2 per cent under placing cards (difference 1.2 percentage points, 95% CI -4.9 to 7.3; ICC 0.08), inside the registered ±8 percentage point margin, and two ablations of the card template left entries per class unchanged. Over the same period the engagement-weighted projection six of the societies use to set the schedule reached 72.6 per cent against an observed 60.8, the engagement term entering the index both directly and through the projection it feeds.

Paper

Nobody Asks for a Worse One

Fenna Okoro, Marek Solheim, Petra Umbile · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.akmw3y

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities assembles six years of one metropolitan council's food-premises register, covering 1,904 premises and 8,617 inspection events, and separates the rating a premises displays in its window from the rating it last received at a routine inspection. The district mean displayed rating rises 0.79 stars across the window, of which a three-term decomposition attributes 0.51 to opt-in re-inspection and 0.24 to premises turnover, leaving 0.04 stars (95% CI -0.06 to 0.13) to change measured on routine inspections alone; the routine series is flat throughout. Re-inspections are requested by the premises and may be withdrawn before publication, and 214 of 1,206 were, carrying provisional field ratings a mean 1.8 stars below the requester's displayed rating. A shopfront audit of 612 addresses finds a median displayed-certificate age of 2.9 years with 34.2 per cent already superseded, of which 81.4 per cent show a rating higher than the premises' current one.

Paper

Punctual by Timetable, Slower on the Ramp

Anneke Tolan, Kwame Lindqvist, Petra Umbile · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.lv6uqp

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities observes six free vehicular cable-ferry crossings on one inland river system over 72 crossing-days, recording 9,431 vehicle movements from the queue to the far ramp. All six are assessed under a road authority's service standard whose punctuality indicator scores departures against a published timetable, so the three crossings that run continuously on demand are returned as not assessed in every quarter while the three that have adopted a notional timetable report 96.7 per cent. Observed median waiting time at the timetabled crossings is 6.7 minutes against 2.1 minutes at the on-demand ones, a difference of 3.8 minutes (95 per cent CI 2.4 to 5.2) once arrival rate, crossing length and time of day are accounted for. At 34.2 per cent of timetabled departures the deck was loaded and the far ramp clear for at least 60 seconds before the notional departure time, with 61 per cent of held minutes falling between 10:00 and 14:00; five recomputations of the published figure move it by no more than 0.6 points.

Paper

Complete by Construction

Torun Ezeigwe, Sten Okwuosa, Joost Nwosu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.2ma9rw

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports eleven months of the Inspection Capture Record, a tablet instrument the University built with a state vehicle-inspection authority and put into service at 19 independent workshops, covering 34 licensed testers, 12,412 inspections and 583,364 item observations. The instrument will not submit a record until every one of the schedule's 47 items holds a state, and none posted incomplete, against a paper-era rate of 11.4 per cent of worksheets returned with at least one item blank. Its own interaction timestamps qualify that result: median dwell per item is 3.1 seconds, 18.6 per cent of item states are entered in under one second, and 14.2 per cent of inspections contain a burst in which five or more items acquire a state inside two seconds, 71.3 per cent of those states falling in the final tenth of session time. Over the same window the share of defects filed under the residual code rises from 6.1 to 19.7 per cent at a median attached note of four characters. The authority has adopted the instrument's monthly export as the input to its tester-audit process.

Paper

The Regular, or Whoever Was Available

Dagny Okafor, Iben Chikere, Casimir Beng · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.0fv9gk

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement places an observer on 214 scheduled afternoon runs across 38 contracted school bus routes over one term and codes the 96 driver-substitution events recorded into a seven-category taxonomy, of which only two alter the depot sign-on record the network's continuity score is computed from, leaving 59 events invisible to the instrument. Runs the score classifies as continuous and as non-continuous differ by no more than 0.7 percentage points on four independently observed outcomes, and merging the two rarest categories leaves both the category distribution and the outcome comparison unchanged.

Paper

Nobody Rang the Second Time

Dagny Okafor, Sten Okwuosa, Solveig Adeyemi · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.y092u9

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a pre-registered direct replication of an earlier Slop University field trial, randomising 47 residential streets in a second metropolitan district across five stated reward levels over 1,142 street-weeks. The effect of stating any reward on the weekly probability of a tip-off call is 1.9 percentage points (95% CI -4.6 to 8.4), an interval excluding both the original 15.2-point estimate and the small-telescopes detectability threshold without establishing equivalence to zero; the Reward-Tier Schedule re-cut on the original estimate remains in force, its amendment pathway providing only for a superseding estimate.

Paper

Contested at 110 Centimetres

Runa Adegoke, Lindiwe Achterberg, Petra Umbile, Kwame Lindqvist · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.4nwepl

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities treats one amusement operator's 110 cm minimum-height rule as a discontinuity, pairing 21,447 queue-board readings at 14 rides across six sites with independent stadiometer measurements and with restraint-gap measurements taken for every child in the 14 cm window on the static seat rigs the operator uses for its own checks. The probability that a measurement is contested falls 38.5 percentage points at the threshold and the step recurs at all six sites, while residual restraint gap moves 0.4 mm against a trend of 0.61 mm per centimetre of stature; the queue-recorded height fails a density test at the cutoff, and the 110 cm figure traces to a 1987 restraint plate matched by three of the fourteen rides.

Paper

Page Three Cleans the Street

Joost Nwosu, Casimir Beng, Lindiwe Achterberg · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.jeud5r

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a pre-registered split-ballot experiment embedded in the 2026 wave of a residents' survey shared by four adjoining metropolitan councils, in which 5,412 households received one of three otherwise identical questionnaires differing only in whether the neighbourhood amenity module sat second, fifth, or eighth of nine. The amenity composite falls 0.62 points on the 0-10 scale between the earliest and latest positions (95% CI 0.48 to 0.76), against a spread of 0.41 points across the 22 ward means the councils rank to schedule hard-rubbish collections; re-scoring the wave to a constant position moves seven wards across a collection tier without improving agreement with an independent kerbside audit of 1,914 dumped-goods piles, and the single discontinuity in the eight preceding waves falls in the year the module was displaced behind a new rates-and-charges module. Six pre-specified analysis variants move the primary estimate by no more than 0.03 points.

Paper

They Said They Would Walk

Ronja Oyelaran, Fenna Okoro, Bram Ntuli · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.r5xph8

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities re-estimates the discrete choice experiment behind an open-space amenity index six adjoining metropolitan councils use to rank candidate drinking-fountain sites, and validates it against observed behaviour at the fountains it governs. A choice survey of 1,842 residents (22,104 choice observations, mixed logit with correlated random parameters) returns a marginal willingness-to-walk of 331 m for a bottle filler, against a revealed marginal detour of 10.8 m recovered from 24,106 passers-by and 2,418 drinking events observed at 96 fountains over 328 sessions, a ratio of 30.6. Four pre-registered estimation variants move the stated figure by no more than 8 m, and the attribute ordering is preserved across both measures; re-calibrating the index weights to the revealed detours moves 14 of 96 candidate sites across the funding cut-off. A paired delivery test finds the fountain non-delivering at 31.2 per cent of visits, a condition the attribute set excludes because the design brief scoped it to features specifiable at procurement.