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

Tapped, Not Filled

Casimir Beng, Sten Okwuosa, Thandiwe Solberg · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.gy1qjf

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement audits Slop University's hydration-station activation sensors against direct observation and a campus self-report survey, finding full fills a minority cause of the taps credited toward the Living Dashboard's bottles-saved tally. A duration-based recount lowers the term's headline total by more than a third without changing the Sustainability Tile's funding-tier placement.

Paper

Ranked, Then Reordered

Ingrid Vasseur, Lindiwe Achterberg · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.qe42zi

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities interviews 22 households who moved off the University's community-garden waitlist onto a plot, checking their own account of how they advanced against the published Stewardship Priority Score. Neither self-reported reason nor measured wait time separates households above and below the list's median score, with directly asking the rostered convenor dominating both halves alike.

Paper

Grace Under a Timer

Casimir Beng, Joost Nwosu · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.dzfu3a

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement pilots a lightweight release agent that reclaims a booked-but-empty shared study room once a grace window elapses with no check-in signal, comparing weekly room utilisation across three treatment buildings and three matched controls. Utilisation rises modestly where the agent runs; auditing the releases themselves finds a small population of near-miss evictions concentrated at the buildings still running a vendor's shipped eight-minute default rather than a deliberately chosen grace window.

Paper

Eight Seconds to Elsewhere

Verity Marris, Casimir Beng, Petra Umbile · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.a2a085

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities exploits a staggered rollout of a mandatory eight-second wifi captive-portal notice across fourteen lecture theatres to test whether the notice reduces dropped connections during class. A three-arm ablation cannot distinguish its effect from a content-free delay of the same length, while theatres running the notice show a reliably larger rise in students tethering to mobile data instead.

Paper

A Typology of Pigeonhole Clearance

Fenna Okoro, Kwame Lindqvist, Anouk Mensah · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.2iwb4d

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities shadows Slop University's central mailroom pigeonhole wall for an unannounced two-week window and induces a four-type typology of staff clearance behaviour, finding the mailroom's own binary "cleared" flag agrees only fairly with independently observed addressee engagement, converging for two of the four types and diverging sharply for the other two.

Paper

New Scorecard, Same Waitlist

Kwame Lindqvist, Ingrid Vasseur, Dagny Okafor · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.6apmck

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities matches 890 parking-permit applicants across the University's retired blanket waitlist and the priority-tier score that replaced it, comparing legacy queue position against the new score's rank and eventual allocation outcome. The two schemes' rankings correlate closely and their recipient sets overlap substantially, and an ablation removing the score's mobility-need weighting changes allocation outcomes for a statistically indistinguishable share of applicants across both scored cycles studied.

Paper

Quiet by Other Means

Thandiwe Solberg, Sten Okwuosa · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.gj64uh

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement interviews eleven staff who maintain the University's central courtyard and finds their undocumented routines --- window closures, retimed bin collection, and a tolerance for the device's own faults during exam weeks --- track closely with the automated bioacoustic deterrent's own reported improvement in pigeon sightings, holding steady through a nine-day scheduled outage the device's compliance log would otherwise credit to itself.

Paper

Not the Kiosk's Fault

Anneke Tolan, Casimir Beng · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.kwf82j

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement reports an intercept-interview study of 214 library patrons who abandoned a self-checkout session, matched against the automatic fault ticket every abandoned session generates, finding only nine per cent of walk-aways involved an actual kiosk fault and that technicians resolve most of the rest by resetting equipment that was never broken.

Paper

Logged as Reflection

Mirela Hanke, Dagny Okafor · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.2yybzl

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement interviews 64 students shortly after a booking in one of the University's forty single-occupant wellbeing pods, coding what they report doing into a six-category taxonomy and setting it against the Living Dashboard's wellbeing-engagement tile, which counts every completed booking as restorative use. Coursework, a private phone call, and napping together account for three-quarters of coded sessions, against a smaller share for the reflection or mindfulness activity a booking must be filed under; a mid-term revision dropping the intake form's mandatory reason field changes neither the coded activity mix nor session duration, while the engagement tile continues climbing throughout.

Paper

Marked for the Camera

Lindiwe Achterberg, Mirela Hanke · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.yjud2l

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement surveys staff on why they mark up meeting-room whiteboards, and finds deliberate marking strongly predicts a room's photo-audit engagement score but is only weakly related to whether the meeting reached a decision.

Paper

Propped, Not Reported

Dagny Okafor, Bram Ntuli · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.5uwpmh

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement sets the Work Health and Safety Directorate's quarterly fire-door walk-through against an anonymous survey of 438 staff and students across the same eleven buildings. The walk-through logs stairwell fire doors closed on 97% of its scheduled passes; three in five survey respondents report propping the same class of door open at least once in the past month, most often with a folded document, a shoe, or the corridor's own fire extinguisher.

Paper

Validating the Corral Occupancy Sensor

Lindiwe Achterberg, Casimir Beng · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.gdacz4

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities audits the automated occupancy sensor governing Slop University's share-scooter corral network against an unannounced manual headcount, finding the reading used to allocate next term's bike-rack capacity correlates only moderately with the number of scooters actually present and tracks each corral's scooter dwell time more reliably than it tracks headcount.