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

Disposition of the Promotional Pen

Ylva Onyekwere, Runa Adegoke, Vigdis Emenike · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.hmbc2u

A paper from the Schools of Emergent Priorities and Underlying Conditions follows two serially engraved batches of 240 promotional pens through one outpatient department, treating visible surfaces as the sampled compartment of a two-compartment model and staff pockets as the unobserved one. After direct placement the surface count declined biexponentially, with half-lives of 1.3 and 13.5 days; a pocket census on one morning resolved the size of the peripheral pool, from which 82% of pens were eliminated, and pens laid out at a sponsored lunch reached the department's surfaces with an absolute bioavailability of 0.61.

Paper

Twenty-Five Wafers, No Label

Signy Okpara, Brynjar Obiora, Thandiwe Solberg · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.uqjc0k

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement and the School of Underlying Conditions identifies a sealed, unlabelled cassette of twenty-five silicon wafers found in a teaching laboratory's store, using flat geometry, hot-probe polarity, four-point-probe resistivity and capacitance-voltage measurement of 937 capacitors. The cassette holds four contiguous groups of wafers, and the mobile ionic charge in uncleaned pieces falls away over about two and a half slots from the one lid corner whose tape had lifted.

Paper

Matter Out of Place at One Part per Million

Ingeborg Nwachukwu · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.rzzcq9

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports eleven months of participant observation in a research group that prepares air-sensitive organometallic compounds, reading its care of a shared glovebox as a system of pollution beliefs: a classification of what may enter, a threefold rite at the antechamber, and a periodic regeneration that renews the record. Of the seven occasions on which the box's atmosphere was judged to have failed, six were attributed to a party before any cause was sought, and the attributions followed seniority more closely than the logbook.

Paper

The Veto at the Table

Brynjar Obiora · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.t3vq8k

A theoretical paper from the School of Underlying Conditions models the household evening meal as a single dish chosen under unanimity, with the cook deciding each night whether to serve from the dishes everyone is known to eat or to risk a new one. It proves that experimentation stops at a finite rotation whose length is within one dish of the square root of a single index, that the cook stops short of the efficient rotation unless the cost of a refused dinner is shared equally, and that when acceptance turns on one characteristic of a dish at most two members determine what is served.

Paper

Down to the Clay

Brynjar Obiora, Vigdis Emenike · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.59wxrw

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions censuses 1,259 nests of a solitary ground-nesting bee along 60 metres of farm track that crosses a surveyed soil boundary, and relates nest density, abandoned starts and brood-cell depth to the depth of the clay subsoil in each of 30 quadrats. Density peaks over 34 centimetres of topsoil and halves 4.3 metres short of the surveyed line, and where the clay is shallower than about 33 centimetres the deepest brood cell follows it upward, keeping a mean 4.9 centimetres clear.

Paper

When the Sides Are Roles

Eivind Onwuka, Thandiwe Solberg, Solveig Adeyemi · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.x4tdlt

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a five-season case study of an app through which the members of a cruising association lend one another their berths, each of them at once a supplier and a customer. From the app's booking log of 2,317 berth-nights, 34 interviews and the minutes of 27 committee meetings, it develops four propositions about platforms whose sides are roles and not populations, among them that a subsidy to one side of such a platform reaches every member and that its imbalances run between places.

Paper

Stopped When Flat

Vigdis Emenike, Brynjar Obiora · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.mdga34

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions tests whether ending a flow simulation when its running mean looks flat degrades the confidence interval reported afterwards, using 240 realisations of one fluid–structure simulation and a yoked control for every stopped run. The stopping habit cost no detectable coverage, 803 of 1,200 intervals covering in each arm, while square-root batching held coverage near two-thirds at every run length because its batches never outgrew a slow modulation of the wake.

Paper

Walking the Disputed Fence

Brynjar Obiora, Lindiwe Achterberg · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.rifu2s

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Emergent Priorities reports three iterations of a six-lesson peace education unit in which 71 Year 9 students, assigned to the two sides of a simulated paddock boundary dispute, augered the ground across the fence themselves. Students who bored by party used the soil as ammunition; those who described each hole on a shared card went on to ask who had decided the fence, and 17 of 23 later named a procedure for settling an unrelated dispute, against 5 of 23 in the first iteration.

Paper

Starting at Ant

Signy Okpara, Lindiwe Achterberg, Thandiwe Solberg · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.6z74an

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement and the School of Emergent Priorities gives 216 children in Years 1 to 6 of one primary school a one-minute animal fluency task in one of two matched rooms, one carrying an animal alphabet frieze and the other a number frieze. The youngest children name the same number of animals in either room, children in Years 3 and 4 name fewer under the frieze because most begin at ant and read along the wall in order, and children in Years 5 and 6 name more, their whole advantage falling in the second half of the minute.

Paper

The Balance to Follow

Ragnhild Uzoma, Vigdis Emenike, Petra Umbile · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.wshmsw

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Emergent Priorities follows 412 part-supplied prescriptions through three community pharmacies for fourteen weeks, from the day each owing is opened to the day it ends. The completing stock arrives after a median of one working day and the made-up balance then waits a median of five more; each pharmacy writes its owing slip to the same unspoken form, and none has anyone whose job it is to end an owing nobody comes for.

Paper

Stopping on the Count, Not the Clock

Mirela Hanke, Joost Nwosu, Solveig Adeyemi · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.i9mrf6

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement treats a stratified quadrat survey of a rocky shore as a sampling design with a different deadline in each stratum, set by the flood tide. It shows that the variance-optimal allocation is the greatest convex minorant of the cumulative deadlines, that a stratum worked until the water arrives returns a mean biased downward by the quadrat left unfinished, and, in 10,000 simulated surveys at each of seven tidal windows, that a count-stopped rule cuts relative bias from as much as 2.6 per cent to 0.4 per cent while carrying the largest root mean squared error of the four designs compared, repaying its cost once about nine tides are averaged.

Paper

The Same Sauce Twice

Eivind Onwuka · October 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.6nii9t

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reads the deposited papers of an unnamed table-sauce company as the record of a replication experiment: eleven years in which a tasting bench staffed from the original works judged whether a branch works made the same sauce. Once a works chemist coded the bottles the bench called the original works' own sauce "not ours" in 71 of 412 pairs, and the paper argues that the question was closed by the original works' rebuilding and not by evidence.