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

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.

Paper

Fault-Tree Decomposition and Per-Mode Weibull Hazards for a Coin-Operated Pool Table

Thandiwe Solberg, Joost Nwosu, Ingeborg Nwachukwu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.v12p0c

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement resolves an eleven-event fault tree for the coin-operated pool table, fitting per-mode Weibull hazards to eighteen months of instrumented observation across 62 tables at 41 venues, with 44,318 logged coin insertions and 1,207 structured inspections. Top-event unavailability stands at 0.084, four accessory modes carry 0.76 of total Fussell-Vesely importance, and chalk absence alone returns a decreasing hazard of shape 0.71 against a scale of 6.4 days. The operator retained its uniform fortnightly round, adopted a game-readiness figure on its quarterly venue scorecard, and moved accessory restock to a work order.

Paper

Someone Wrote a Number Down

Torun Ezeigwe, Dagny Okafor, Lindiwe Achterberg · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.munqx5

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement assesses whether the emergency-contact field on a junior sport registration measures anything about contactability, using three seasons of records across 186 affiliated clubs (38,417 registrations) and the state association's own annual verification round. Completion reached 96.8% of registrations while 23.7% of 2,412 verified fields resolved to a reachable adult who confirmed the nomination, the largest single outcome being a duplicate of the lodging adult's own number. Agreement between indicator and criterion was negligible (Cohen's kappa = 0.01), and the 41 clubs operating a mandatory-field rule reported complete fields with contactability unchanged.

Paper

Everyone Already Has the Code

Thandiwe Solberg, Sten Okwuosa, Ingeborg Nwachukwu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.64irsz

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement interviews the 38 cleaners, maintenance contractors and property managers who open the front-gate lockboxes at 41 short-stay properties under one letting franchise's access-assurance standard. No participant states the between-guest code rotation requirement unprompted and recognition of the standard's four remaining provisions stays below half once the clauses are read aloud, while every participant can produce a current code from at least one location outside the system of record; 27 describe the digits themselves as recording which office last held the listing.

Paper

Witnessed, and Otherwise Unchanged

Ingrid Vasseur, Petra Umbile, Marek Solheim, Kwame Lindqvist · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.zjm0s2

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities follows the six classes of statutory declaration handled by one state administrative agency across 72 months and 1.34 million lodgements, one of which moved to an unwitnessed online lodgement in month 37 while the other five retained the witnessing requirement as concurrent controls. The estimated level change in materially incorrect declarations subsequently identified is 0.14 per 10,000 (95% CI -0.61 to 0.89) and the slope change -0.004 per month, with equivalence supported against a pre-specified margin of 1.0 per 10,000 and eleven alternative specifications spanning 0.24. Over the same window documents witnessed per staffed session at nine signing stations fell 40.7 per cent with the roster unchanged, and the honorary Justice of the Peace scheme's next annual return recorded that fall as unmet demand for accessible witnessing capacity.

Paper

Accurate Only in Order

Iben Chikere, Runa Adegoke, Petra Umbile, Verity Marris · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.203dz3

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities assembles fifty-four months of assessment, listing, adoption, and return records from one regional animal welfare service's three rehoming centres (9,214 assessments, 6,431 dogs listed, 722 returned within six months) and separates what a fifteen-item placement-suitability composite predicts from what it arranges. In routine operation, where the composite sets the order in which animals are photographed and listed, it discriminates return within six months with a c-statistic of 0.708 (95% CI 0.686-0.730), matching the figure the service publishes; among the 604 animals listed during a rolling kennel-block refurbishment, when listing followed block-emptying order instead, it reaches 0.528 (95% CI 0.487-0.569). The composite orders days-to-listing sharply, from a median of 3 days in the top quintile to 23 in the bottom, and conditioning on that interval moves the odds ratio for return per five composite points from 0.62 to 0.94, while removing the five core temperament items changes discrimination by 0.004.

Paper

Blank Means Yes

Sten Okwuosa, Marek Solheim, Joost Nwosu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.68wiyy

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement assembles every media-consent record held by one franchised bakery network across eleven annual review cycles (214 sites, 9,418 staff records, 41,206 record-years) and treats a lodged refusal as a time-to-event problem with separation from the network as a competing risk. Of 1,347 refusals lodged at onboarding, the cumulative incidence of conversion to recorded consent reaches 54.1 per cent by the third review cycle against 23.1 per cent for separation, with a median of 1.4 cycles among those that convert, while transitions in the opposite direction number zero. Over the same period the network's reported consent-currency measure rose from 71.3 to 99.1 per cent as the share of staff who had actively signed within the current cycle fell to 28.6 per cent.

Paper

One Call Per Cycle

Kwame Lindqvist, Anouk Mensah, Marek Solheim · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.x58j8t

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities develops a nine-category taxonomy of pedestrian demand-registration events at push-button crossings and applies it to 11,482 kerb arrivals coded from 214 hours of structured observation at 38 suburban sites across three local government areas (Cohen's kappa = 0.83). Arrivals in the one category a controller is capable of logging account for 31.9 per cent of the coded population; the remaining 68.1 per cent fall to delegation, redundancy, reassurance, inheritance and three residual categories the call record does not distinguish from silence. The matched windows return 4,061 registered calls against 11,482 arrivals, a median of two arrivals per call rising to a mean of 6.4 at school-zone sites in the afternoon band, and recomputing the road authority's renewal ranking on observed arrivals rather than calls moves 14 of the 38 sites by at least one decile. An intercept survey of 612 pedestrians found belief that pressing advances the phase indistinguishable between actuated and fixed-time sites (difference 1.3 points, 95% CI -6.9 to 9.5).

Paper

Displayed, Not Comparable

Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Joost Nwosu, Bram Ntuli, Torun Ezeigwe · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.19q87i

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement audits 14,206 supermarket shelf labels across twelve stores and three banners, groups them into 1,038 shelf sets, and codes each for whether its competing lines resolve to a common comparison unit. Compliance with the industry code's unit-price display requirement is 98.6 per cent while 41.3 per cent of shelf sets carry no common unit. Mobile eye tracking over 1,406 in-aisle comparison episodes finds the unit-price field fixated in 34.1 per cent of episodes at split-unit sets against 18.9 per cent where a common unit exists, with dwell roughly twice as long; selection of the cheaper line is 88.4 per cent accurate at common-unit sets and 51.7 per cent (95% CI 46.9-56.5) at split-unit sets. The code's revised minimum type size separates neither measure.

Paper

Nothing Moved but the Benchmark

Dagny Okafor, Sten Okwuosa, Ingeborg Nwachukwu · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.joj6v6

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement synthesises all 46 evaluations lodged across seven rounds of one workplace-activity accreditation (16,082 participants), under a scheme whose benchmark is recomputed each round as the pooled effect of the evaluations lodged the round before. The pooled gain is 1,318 steps per day (95% CI 1,074 to 1,562) with substantial heterogeneity (I2 = 89.4 per cent), of which measurement source explains 68.7 per cent: evaluations whose counts came from the challenge application return 1,712 steps per day, those issuing sealed accelerometers read independently of the challenge return 118, an interval including zero. Funnel asymmetry is present (Egger's intercept 2.41, p = 0.002), 15 of 61 registered challenges were never lodged, and trim-and-fill adjusts the pooled estimate to 624 steps per day. Across the seven rounds the benchmark rose from 640 to 1,318 steps per day while the independently measured estimate stayed between 74 and 141, and refitting under REML with the Knapp-Hartung adjustment moves the pooled estimate by 24 steps per day.

Paper

Covered as the Crow Flies

Fenna Okoro, Lindiwe Achterberg, Anouk Mensah, Verity Marris · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.lmsv7q

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities recomputes one water authority's published fire-hydrant coverage indicator --- the share of serviced properties lying within 120 metres of a serviceable hydrant, measured straight-line --- over a traversable-ground network assembled from cadastral boundaries, fence lines, waterways, sound walls, rail reserves and private-road edges. Across 41,608 serviced properties and 1,942 hydrants in nine suburbs, straight-line coverage is 97.2 per cent and hose-lay coverage of the same properties against the same hydrants is 71.4 per cent. Straight-line coverage separates five lot configurations by 5.7 points and hose-lay coverage by 67.2, falling to 29.2 per cent at battle-axe rear lots, while eight network-construction variants move the recomputed figure by 3.2 points in total. The same straight-line test certifies new lots as hydrant-serviced under the authority's subdivision-servicing standard: 83.8 per cent of the most recent three-year certification cohort lies in the two configurations with the lowest hose-lay coverage, and every certified lot enters the reported indicator as covered.

Paper

Two-Person Piece Counts Do Not Reduce Piece Loss in a Postal Jigsaw-Lending Club

Kwame Lindqvist, Runa Adegoke, Ronja Oyelaran, Lindiwe Achterberg · August 2026 · doi:10.5555/slop.sdn90v

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities evaluates a two-person handover count in a postal jigsaw-lending club, in which the sending and receiving custodians count a puzzle independently and reconcile before the circulation closes. Across six branches, fourteen four-week periods, and 1,184 circulations, the protocol produces no detectable reduction in piece loss (adjusted difference -0.04 pieces per circulation, 95% CI -0.31 to 0.23), while verification effort accumulates to 852 counter-hours; the null is reported in full, and the club retains the protocol and reports its counter-hours as a member-participation figure.