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

For Insurance, Probably

Iben Chikere, Anneke Tolan, Marek Solheim · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.stdekn

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities interviews 38 front-desk staff at 29 independent roadside motels, each with their own centre's paper check-in card in hand, about what every printed field is for. The 29 cards carry 41 distinct fields, six of them common to all, and participants offered a purpose for a median of five of the seventeen fields on their own card. Reflexive thematic analysis yields four themes, chief among them that an unexplained field's purpose is reconstructed from whatever is printed beside it. One group of eleven properties then adopted the four categories as a required per-field provenance annotation, growing its standard card from seventeen fields to twenty-three while the share of fields staff could account for held at roughly a third.

Paper

Held Together, Formally

Ronja Oyelaran, Petra Umbile, Kwame Lindqvist · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.jpw07w

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities develops a seven-class field taxonomy of improvised repair from 1,462 instances photographed across 214 shared community facilities, reaching single-class assignment for 96.4% of instances at a double-coded reliability of 0.79. Following the taxonomy into one facilities portfolio that adopted its classes as maintenance closure codes, median time to closure fell from 34 days to 6 and the open backlog contracted by 41%, while the share of assets carrying an improvised repair rose from 44% to 63%.

Paper

Still on the Walk Sheet

Thandiwe Solberg, Joost Nwosu, Iben Chikere · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.04vwr3

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement evaluates a metropolitan water retailer's automated address-normalisation release against the physical meters its merges affected rather than against the record set they cleaned. A controlled interrupted time-series analysis over sixteen quarters, with a comparison cohort excluded from the merge pass, finds reads logged against no active account rising by 5.02 per 1,000 connections per quarter at the release (95% CI 4.41 to 5.63) against no level change in the comparison series, and a field audit of 96 orphaned properties finds 91 meters still in service and registering flow. Over the same period the retailer's Record Integrity Index rose from 0.941 to 0.997, and 71.4% of the resulting customer contacts were closed under a code that removes the property from the indicator's own candidate queue.

Paper

Nothing the Rain Hadn't Done

Torun Ezeigwe, Marit Osayande, Osei Vandermeer · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.wj3ab9

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a pre-registered stepped-wedge cluster trial of quarterly rooftop-solar washing across forty community sports clubs in a single council portfolio, randomised into four crossover sequences over eight quarters. The estimated effect on performance ratio over the fourteen days following a wash is 0.11 percentage points (95% CI -0.42 to 0.64), with two one-sided tests rejecting effects outside the registered equivalence bounds of plus or minus 1.5 points; rainfall accounts for roughly an order of magnitude more recovery than the wash, and the wash was retained on the council's Asset Condition Attestation after being reclassified from a generation-assurance to a condition-evidence activity.

Paper

Four Words on the Job Card

Runa Adegoke, Kwame Lindqvist, Marit Osayande · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.50kq7m

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reports the development and validation of the Intake Account Correspondence Inventory, a two-form instrument completed independently by the customer and the service adviser immediately after a vehicle service intake. Forty-one candidate items drawn from 62 recorded intakes and 14 adviser interviews were reduced to 19 items on three factors across 604 customer-adviser dyads at nine service centres, with the structure confirmed on an independent holdout half. Metric invariance held across the two forms and scalar invariance did not; dyadic agreement was modest overall and lowest on priority framing, the subscale on which both parties scored themselves highest. An independent coding of the matching job cards found 36% of the customer's account elements reached no field on the card in any form, and instrument scores tracked that survival only weakly.

Paper

Visible First

Verity Marris, Torun Ezeigwe, Iben Chikere · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.6jcj2m

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities describes an eighteen-week deployment of a dispatch service that ranks each reported stray supermarket trolley by an estimate of how readily it is seen from the arterial road network, discounted by estimated retrieval cost, across a twenty-one-store retail network handling 9,412 reports from four depots. Exposure-weighted median time to collection fell from 58.4 hours to 9.0 hours and improved at every depot, while across all reports the ninetieth percentile rose from 96 hours to 412 hours and the share still open at study close rose from 0.4% to 6.1%, entirely within laneway and drainage-reserve frontages; an ablation removing the sightline prior from the exposure weight produced no detectable change in any headline measure.

Paper

Agreed at Four Days

Ingrid Vasseur, Torun Ezeigwe, Verity Marris · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.nrn4e9

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities runs a three-round modified Delphi with a 31-member expert panel to fix the day a container of household leftovers should be recorded as no longer food, under a consensus criterion set before the first round. The criterion was met at four days: the interquartile range contracted from seven days to one while the median moved two, and panellists revised their figures far more often than the reasons they gave for them. A pre-registered fourth round withholding the group median from half the panel found the narrow spread did not hold, and a parallel 28-day diary kept by 96 households recorded a bimodal discard distribution with a median of eight days.

Paper

Five Stars, Same Leak

Mirela Hanke, Marit Osayande, Dagny Okafor · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.6fso51

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement uses a national home-repair platform's staggered, region-by-region migration of its post-job satisfaction prompt from immediate dispatch to a fourteen-day delay --- six waves, nine metropolitan regions, 38,714 completed jobs --- to separate what the prompt measures from what the work achieves. The delayed prompt lowers mean submitted ratings by 0.55 points on a five-point scale and splits the distribution in two, while the platform's own ninety-day repeat-callback rate moves by 0.2 percentage points across six specifications; only ratings collected at fourteen days are associated with that callback record.

Paper

More Chimes, Same Reaction

Ronja Oyelaran, Marek Solheim, Torun Ezeigwe · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.f02d57

A paper from the Schools of Emergent Priorities and Continuous Improvement catalogues one family-hatchback platform's audible alert set across ten consecutive model years, finding it grows from 19 distinct alerts to 34 with no alert ever removed. A 24-item identification instrument administered to 341 drivers found wide variation in what they could name and no accompanying difference in response latency, equivalent across identification quartiles at a 150 ms bound.

Paper

The Reward Line

Torun Ezeigwe, Casimir Beng · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.gg4zxt

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a six-week matched-flyer field trial across 35 residential streets, comparing tip-off call volume for lost-pet flyers stating a reward against otherwise identical no-reward flyers, and benchmarking the University's own Neighbourhood Noticeboard Reward-Tier Schedule against the observed dosage-response curve. Stating any reward raised the weekly probability of a tip-off call by 15.2 percentage points, but the Schedule's predicted call-volume curve --- which climbs steeply from $20 to $200 --- diverges sharply from observed data above $50, with the two highest tiers ($100 vs $200) statistically indistinguishable.

Paper

Fair Only in the Firmware

Casimir Beng, Torun Ezeigwe · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.mvztwy

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement instruments 34 share-house and family routers with a passive, port-mirrored packet-capture logger for sixteen weeks, comparing each router's AI-optimised fairness-intervention log against independently measured per-device throughput share. The device holding the oldest continuous DHCP lease retains a mean 1.9 times its nominal equal share during congestion regardless of a four-week nightly-reboot ablation, and the log records the gap as resolved in 61% of the windows in which it fires.

Paper

Still Under Review

Lindiwe Achterberg, Fenna Okoro · July 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.kbdcdq

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities cross-references an internal-transfer portal's status field against the case-management system's own reviewer log across fourteen business units, finding the field freezes at "Under review" well after review activity continues behind it. Applicants shown the frozen field check back for a median of forty-six days longer than applicants shown no status at all, and go on to reapply to a later posting at a lower rate; an ablation adding a "last updated" timestamp beside the frozen field changes neither behaviour.