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

PANTRY

Anneke Tolan, Petra Umbile, Ingrid Vasseur · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.vohh3z

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reports the design and season-long deployment of PANTRY (Peer Assessment of Neighbourhood-Tested Recipes and Yields), a review-management workflow that applies double-anonymous review, proximity-weighted conflict-of-interest declarations, meta-review, and a seven-day rebuttal window to the 143 recipe submissions of a suburban primary school's fundraiser cookbook. Every submission received a documented decision letter; volunteer inter-reviewer agreement (weighted kappa = 0.28) fell within the bands reported for academic venues; the rebuttal window changed no decision and is retained for completeness; and the organising committee has adopted the season's 49.7% acceptance rate as the cookbook's headline quality indicator.

Paper

Locating the Efficiency Frontier of an Equipment-Hire Network

Renke Sabel, Mirela Hanke, Sten Okwuosa · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.36mdpr

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement estimates input-oriented technical efficiency for all 61 depots of one national equipment-hire group across four consecutive quarters, correcting the finite-sample bias in envelopment estimators with a smoothed homogeneous bootstrap. Mean bias-corrected efficiency is 0.812 (95% CI 0.786 to 0.838) and 19 depots sit on the frontier, 14 of them in the lowest fleet-size tercile; the ten depots most often named as peers hold a median of 14 machines against a network median of 63. An ablation removing wash-bay hours from the input set moved mean efficiency by 0.004 and changed no depot's frontier status. Over the following quarter the six largest depots, issued reference sets and convened in a capability sprint, reduced their fleets by a median of 14 machines; their mean efficiency rose from 0.681 to 0.771 and their completed hires fell by 8.4 per cent.

Paper

Towards a Discrete-Event Model of Container-Refund Depot Throughput

Fenna Okoro, Anouk Mensah, Solveig Adeyemi · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.nkxa2l

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement builds a discrete-event model of the over-the-counter container-refund transaction from 14,208 timed handovers at eleven privately operated depots, decomposing service time into presentation, opening, counting and settlement stages. The opening stage --- in which the load is made available to the operator --- accounts for a mean 31.4% of handover duration and 54.9% of its variance, and across a sweep of 10,000 replications per configuration a second counting lane returns 6.0% more throughput against 23.3% for moving the arrival stream to its fastest-observed presentation class. An ablation removing the arrival-batching component shifts mean throughput by 0.5% (n.s.) and is retained for completeness.

Paper

Does a Shorter Interval Hold the Second Half?

Thandiwe Solberg, Sten Okwuosa, Joost Nwosu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.h6skfa

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a pre-registered stepped-wedge cluster-randomised trial in which eleven volunteer-staffed community theatre venues crossed over from a twenty-minute to a fifteen-minute advertised interval across one season, with two observers per performance timing 4,118 returns to seat over 34 performances. Return by the five-minute mark was 96.2 per cent under the longer interval and 96.0 per cent under the shorter, an adjusted difference of 0.2 percentage points that falls inside the pre-registered equivalence bound; bar takings per patron, late returns and a bell-protocol ablation moved no further, and return times measured backwards from curtain-up were near-identical in every wedge step. Curtain-down came 5.1 minutes earlier, the only effect to reproduce at every venue. The Indicator Commons has since ratified a Standard Interval Duration of twenty minutes and added interval observance to each venue's annual attestation.

Paper

Multi-Objective Fixture Construction for a Suburban Darts League

Verity Marris, Ingrid Vasseur, Anouk Mensah · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.2q3v7p

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities formulates one metropolitan darts association's 18-round season fixture as a fourteen-term multi-objective integer program, eliciting the terms from twenty seasons of fixture-committee minutes and solving 10,000 weight vectors drawn from the fourteen-simplex. No term varies by more than 4.6 per cent of its own optimum between the 5th and 95th percentile of draws, the median solution shares 92.6 per cent of its assignments with the one the ratified weights produce, and lifting the single-night availability window at one venue is worth 3.4 times the travel spanned by the entire weight simplex.

Paper

Repeatability and Reproducibility of the Pre-Move Volume Estimate

Casimir Beng, Torun Ezeigwe, Kwame Lindqvist · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.9ae0mt

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement and the School of Emergent Priorities runs the removalist's walk-through volume estimate through a fully crossed gauge repeatability-and-reproducibility study: eight estimators from independent operators each quoted the same twelve furnished households three times, blind to their own earlier figures, against a reference volume measured from the loaded vehicle at pack-out. Of the variation in 288 estimates the estimator and its interaction with the household account for 59.9%, against 35.4% for the household itself; combined repeatability and reproducibility reaches 80.4% of total study variation and the system resolves one distinct data category, so the eight estimators' means on the same twelve houses run from 21.1 to 36.7 cubic metres. Mean bias is +3.70 cubic metres, a bedroom-count rule of thumb tracks the reference more closely on all three agreement measures, and restricting the panel to estimators with ten or more years in the trade moves the headline figure by 1.8 percentage points (n.s.).

Paper

SLUMP

Solveig Adeyemi, Iben Chikere, Thandiwe Solberg · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.k0jc8n

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement describes and deploys SLUMP, a specimen-lineage service that carries concrete test cylinders from domestic and small-commercial pours --- the carport slab, the shed floor, the shopfront ramp --- through five attested custody events to the crush bench. Across nine months and 214 participating sites the service handled 1,388 cylinders and 6,940 custody events, raising lineage completeness from 17.2 per cent under the incumbent paper docket to 94.6 per cent. An ablation removing the tamper-evident seal module left 28-day compressive strength distributions indistinguishable (F(2,1385) = 0.41, p = 0.66), and 61.2 per cent of owners requested a lineage certificate that carries no standing with any authority.

Paper

CAUTION

Petra Umbile, Fenna Okoro, Kwame Lindqvist · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.hgk1nh

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities describes CAUTION, a sensing platform that fits each portable folding hazard cone with an ultra-wideband tag, a duty-cycled accelerometer and a hinge-state switch, and decodes its position and deployment state against the tenancy floor plan. Across a fourteen-week deployment of 412 tagged cones and 61 anchors at three regional shopping centres, the decoder reaches a macro-F1 of 0.941 against 486 hours of direct observation, with median map-matched positional error of 0.58 m. The 8,614 recovered episodes are strongly bimodal on a log scale, with a median of 41 minutes, a 90th percentile of 6 h 21 min and a longest episode of 34.2 days; removing the accelerometer channel changes macro-F1 by 0.004, and the trace is released under an institutional schema intended to support settlement of facilities-services contracts on cone-hours.

Paper

A Standard Time for the Community Kiln

Bram Ntuli, Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Torun Ezeigwe · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.a4m8i7

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports an element-level work-measurement study of volunteer kiln packing at nineteen community pottery studios, in which two observers timed 486 loads over fourteen months, rated each of five elements against a standard scale, and derived relaxation allowances from observation rather than from a published table. The standard time is 34.7 minutes per shelf-equivalent on a total allowance of 23.6 per cent, of which conversation accounts for 11.4 percentage points; the estimate is insensitive to the allowance schedule chosen. Participating studios adopted it as a packing roster, a per-firing figure reported beside each volunteer's name, and a method-training referral threshold, and over the following six months the share of loads packed by more than one volunteer fell from 61.3 to 22.8 per cent.

Paper

Overnight Pre-Chilling Does Not Extend Cold-Hold in Portable Eskies

Osei Vandermeer, Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Torun Ezeigwe · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.ubvdcc

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement instruments 214 portable eskies across 96 community events over one summer, logging 1,964 esky-hours of payload temperature, and matches containers chilled overnight against those packed from ambient on heat, shade, ice mass per litre, wall thickness, payload mass, set-up hour and lid traffic. The matched difference in cold-hold duration is +0.18 hours (95% CI -0.38 to +0.74), inside a margin of indifference lodged before data access, and four alternative specifications move it by at most three minutes; ice mass and lid discipline account for 71 per cent of between-esky variance against pre-chill status at 0.4 per cent, and the pre-chill step has since been written into a ratified set-up declaration.

Paper

The Composition of the Mixed Lolly Bag

Iben Chikere, Runa Adegoke, Lindiwe Achterberg, Marit Osayande · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.k4n874

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement treats the hand-assembled three-dollar bag of mixed lollies as compositional data, purchasing 1,180 bags at 63 independent milk bars across eleven weeks and hand-sorting all 22,417 pieces to a fourteen-class scheme fixed before collection. Analysis on centred log-ratio coordinates finds composition markedly more stable within a shop than between shops (median Aitchison distance 0.21 against 0.58), with shop identity accounting for 44.1 per cent of variation against 6.8 per cent for region, and no distinguishable shift across price bands. The closed geometric mean of the per-shop centres yields a reference composition, now carried by the Indicator Commons as a standing reference against which catering supplied under the University's own arrangements is assessed.

Paper

Reclaim Hall B and the Stand-Back Line

Marit Osayande, Casimir Beng, Ingrid Vasseur · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.iltbdg

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement instruments a single-carousel baggage reclaim hall with four ceiling-mounted time-of-flight sensors for twelve months, recording 251,308 anonymous dwell tracks across 3,914 arrivals while the hall's stand-back line is repainted three times from 900 mm to 1,800 mm from the belt lip. Mean modal standoff distance of the front rank varies within a 17 mm band with no monotonic relationship to the line's position, while the operator's published line-adherence figure falls from 34.1 to 3.7 per cent; an attended block raises standoff by 394 mm, an effect that decays to baseline a median of 38 seconds after the attendant leaves the hall.