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

It Held in the First Sample

Ingrid Vasseur, Thandiwe Solberg, Anneke Tolan · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.vjkmc1

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reports a pre-registered direct replication of the Pick-Up Reliance Scale across 26 primary schools and 1,438 households, four months after an out-of-school-hours-care provider wrote the twelve items into its enrolment form and began flagging households at a score of 34. The instrument's reliability reproduces (alpha 0.88 against the original's 0.89) while the association it was adopted for does not: Handover Deferral correlates with post-hoc roster renegotiation at r = 0.06 (95% CI [0.01, 0.11]), below the smallest effect the original was adequately powered to detect, and the resulting flag does not separate households on observed handover failures (AUC = 0.53).

Paper

Twelve Means Nine Things

Anneke Tolan, Anouk Mensah, Verity Marris · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.iv44yy

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities treats the printed clothing size as a measurement instrument and estimates its item parameters directly. A panel of 118 wearers produced 4,918 analysable binary fit judgements over 246 garments labelled 8 to 18 from nine retailers, with every label concealed at the point of judgement and allocation balanced under an incomplete block design. A two-parameter item-response model places each garment on a common latent scale: the nominal label accounts for 34.1% of the variance in item difficulty and the retailer for 28.6%, and while the mean step between adjacent labels within one retailer is 0.47 logits, thresholds among garments labelled 12 vary across the nine retailers with a standard deviation of 1.11. Retailer intercepts span 2.48 logits, so garments labelled 10 at one shop sit above garments labelled 14 at another. The decomposition is unmoved by model specification. The size availability index the retailers report against counts labels present at audit, and fit returns are coded to a change-of-mind category excluded from quality reporting.

Paper

The Fridge Holds What the Form Does Not

Petra Umbile, Ronja Oyelaran, Marek Solheim · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.q7mzab

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities assembles 1,164 household instruction notes photographed at handover across three metropolitan pet-sitting agencies and one neighbourhood care exchange, and codes their 19,847 instruction units into a nine-category taxonomy applied by two independent coders (Cohen's kappa = 0.84). Contingency material --- the conditions under which a carer should escalate, and the decisions the household explicitly delegates --- is the largest cluster at 31.8% of coded instructions and is addressed by none of the six fields on the providers' shared booking form, which reaches the form's median note at 4 of 18 instructions. The care-plan completeness score computed from those fields averaged 0.94, and notes accompanying its highest-scoring quintile carry no more instruction content than those in its lowest (median 17 against 18, Kruskal-Wallis H = 3.4, p = 0.49).

Paper

One Row, Four Rates

Torun Ezeigwe, Marit Osayande, Joost Nwosu · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.5b349c

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement recovers the attempt-level event log behind five seasons of a metropolitan junior sports association's volunteer umpire accreditation record (4,318 volunteer-seasons, 61 clubs, 18,704 attempts) and re-scores it under four aggregation rules. The association's published rate of 98.6% keeps each volunteer's best attempt; the same records yield 39.6% under a first-attempt rule and 68.4% under a mean-of-attempts rule, and club rank order barely survives the change (Spearman rho = 0.31). The paper identifies no correct rate, tracing the rule in operation to a portal schema that holds one score per volunteer-season rather than to any documented decision.

Paper

The Wall Runs Out First

Iben Chikere, Runa Adegoke, Petra Umbile · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.81wtfb

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities transcribes 121 painted honour boards across 68 volunteer-run halls (4,918 entries lettered between 1946 and 2024) and links them to 6,013 office-bearer role-years verified independently from association annual returns, hall minute books and newsletters, finding 19.0% of verified role-years absent from every board. Omission tracks the board's remaining ruled-line capacity rather than any property of the hall --- 32.4% where three or fewer lines remain against 13.1% where more than ten do --- and recomputing the association's completeness-based continuity index on the linked record moves halls a median 12 places of 68 and removes 9 of the 17 halls from its top maintenance-weighting band.

Paper

The Weighbridge Sets the Ceiling

Kwame Lindqvist, Fenna Okoro, Ingrid Vasseur · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.xg98oi

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities times 5,842 inbound vehicle movements at a metropolitan council's principal waste and recycling centre across fourteen Saturdays and twelve weekdays, then sweeps 72 configurations of attendant staffing, tipping-hall bays, payment terminals and a Saturday booking quota through 2,000 simulated trading days each. No configuration attains the operator's published six-minute mean inbound wait: the best reaches 11.4 minutes (95% CI 11.1-11.7) against a worst of 23.8, and two analytical bounds --- a Pollaczek-Khinchine floor of 7.1 minutes under perfectly smoothed arrivals and a fluid bound of 12.5 minutes on the observed arrival profile --- place the shortfall beyond the reach of anything downstream of the single inbound weighbridge. Run on weekday arrivals, the same standard is attained at every configuration with more than four minutes to spare.

Paper

Two Ways to the Same Gate

Torun Ezeigwe, Thandiwe Solberg, Osei Vandermeer · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.et468g

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement measures 3,148 household-school journeys across 22 schools twice over --- the straight line a regional travel-pass scheme applies to decide eligibility, and the shortest walked route on a barrier-aware pedestrian network --- and reports agreement rather than association. The two measures correlate at r = 0.93 but are not interchangeable: the walked route exceeds the straight line by a mean 0.83 km (95% limits of agreement -0.11 to 1.77 km, concordance correlation coefficient 0.71), and the median detour index rises from 1.19 where no severance feature intervenes to 1.74 where both a rail corridor and a waterway do. Applying the scheme's 2.6 km radius to route distance reclassifies 412 journeys (13.1%), 396 of them from ineligible to eligible, while the authority's published transport-access indicator moves with its own geocoding reference rather than with any change in the journeys it reports on.

Paper

The Ninety-Four Minute Working Bee

Marit Osayande, Sten Okwuosa, Solveig Adeyemi · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.56i2pj

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reconciles the volunteer- hours ledger behind a metropolitan council's maintenance rebate --- 11,486 signed hours from 214 working bees at 38 community sports clubs --- against two independent records of the same mornings: momentary time sampling by two observers at 46 of those bees (38,704 person-instants) and a photographic before-and-after inventory of every maintenance task completed on site. Attendees were present for 80.0% of the hours they signed for and observed on ground and facility work for 31.5% of them, the median attendee signing for four hours and two minutes against ninety-four observed minutes on task. A third of the 1,203 completed tasks had no signed attendee performing them, and club rank on signed hours is not positively associated with rank on observed on-task hours (Spearman rho = -0.29).

Paper

Passed on the Day

Thandiwe Solberg, Torun Ezeigwe, Solveig Adeyemi · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.5e3jfu

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement re-inspects 312 certified backyard pool barriers unannounced, 1,058 times over 76 weeks, and fits a reversible three-state Markov model to the panel. At a randomly chosen moment 61.4% of certified barriers met every criterion, against a council register figure of 98.1%, and the fitted mean sojourn time in the fully compliant state is 14.6 weeks against a certificate valid for 156.

Paper

Ten Millimetres, Give or Take Twelve

Ronja Oyelaran, Torun Ezeigwe, Verity Marris · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.b36m76

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities pairs 26 sites of a metropolitan council's volunteer rainfall network with co-located calibrated gauges over eighteen weeks, yielding 1,304 paired daily totals. The two records correlate at 0.97 but their 95% limits of agreement span 24.0 mm, and volunteer readings heap on 0 and 5 mm at an adapted Whipple's index of 267, so the council's rule closing a blocked-drain complaint at a 10 mm reading reaches a different decision from the reference gauge on 23.6% of complaint days.

Paper

Twenty Dollars, No Difference

Dagny Okafor, Solveig Adeyemi, Ingeborg Nwachukwu · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.1jjfkf

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement randomises a $20 booking deposit across the 38 salons of one metropolitan hairdressing chain, nineteen taking the deposit and nineteen booking on trust, over twenty-one weeks and 61,430 booked appointments. The no-show rate is 7.6% under the deposit against 7.9% without it, an intention-to-treat difference of -0.31 percentage points (95% CI -1.18 to 0.56) that falls inside the pre-specified equivalence margin, while bookings per chair-hour fall 2.1% and rebooking at the chair falls 2.9 points. The chain's own before-and-after comparison within the deposit salons returns a fall of 3.2 points, all of which is present in the arm that never took a deposit, and it was that figure the portfolio rollout cited four weeks before the trial reported.

Paper

Ineligible by Return Code

Torun Ezeigwe, Thandiwe Solberg, Marit Osayande · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.iis0cs

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement treats a container-deposit scheme's reverse vending machines as a diagnostic test for container eligibility and assesses them against a blind hand-sort. Trained sorters classified all 41,392 containers presented in 216 validated sessions across fourteen return points, without sight of the machine's decision. Specificity held at 0.991 while sensitivity fell from 0.881 to 0.724 over eight quarters, and a standard misclassification correction moves the network's published eligible-presentation success rate from 94.2% to 79.1% (95% bootstrap CI 77.4 to 80.6). The divergence is structural rather than behavioural: containers the machine codes as out of scheme leave the denominator against which the machine is scored, and by the final quarter 46.1% of them were eligible.