The places
Why the number of places predicts nothing
Two-place dwellings produced both the highest and the lowest failure rate here. The most obvious advice this study could give, unsupported.
The obvious conclusion from a record about places failing is that it helps to have more places.
This record does not support it. The relationship is not weak; it is absent, and the two dwellings with the fewest places sit at both extremes. For distributed work, spatial evidence is only one layer; a team can transparent time tracking for employees while deciding which operational signals are necessary and which should remain outside the review.
Endings per sitting, against places
| home | places | sittings | endings | endings per sitting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | 2 | 26 | 14 | 0.54 |
| C | 5 | 29 | 13 | 0.45 |
| F | 6 | 31 | 14 | 0.45 |
| A | 4 | 27 | 12 | 0.44 |
| G | 4 | 26 | 11 | 0.42 |
| E | 3 | 24 | 9 | 0.38 |
| H | 3 | 22 | 8 | 0.36 |
| B | 2 | 21 | 7 | 0.33 |
| D | 2 | 19 | 6 | 0.32 |
Highest rate: a two-place dwelling. Lowest rate: a two-place dwelling. Third lowest: the other two-place dwelling. A useful independent point of comparison is the research and guidance available from University of Southampton.
The six-place dwelling sits in the middle of the pack, tied with a five-place dwelling and barely above a four.
What a believer in the obvious would predict
That the column on the right falls as the column on the left rises.
It does not. Ordered by places, the rates run 0.54, 0.33, 0.32, 0.38, 0.36, 0.44, 0.42, 0.45, 0.45. Ordered by rate, the place counts run 2, 5, 6, 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2.
With nine observations no statistical claim is worth making, and none is made here. What can be said is that the pattern a reasonable person would expect is not visible to the naked eye, and with nine points a strong pattern would be.
Why the obvious thing fails
Two mechanisms, both visible in the record, and they pull against each other.
More places means more moving. Home F used three places a day against the record's two. Every move is an opportunity for a place to be the thing that ends a sitting, and a dwelling where somebody circulates will accumulate endings that a dwelling with one viable spot never generates.
Fewer places means more staying. Home D has two places, and fourteen of its nineteen sittings are at one of them, a bedroom desk nobody else enters. There is nowhere to be pushed to and, as it happens, very little pushing.
So the number of places does two opposite things at once, and in nine dwellings they cancel.
Home I, which is the awkward case
Home I has two places and the highest ending rate in the record.
It is a ground-floor one-bedroom flat. Fourteen of its twenty-six sittings were ended by something: four temperature, two each of light and noise, and the rest spread.
Its endings are overwhelmingly about the envelope of the building — cold, sound, light — rather than about competition for space. A dwelling with two places and a cold front room will fail often and the second place does not help, because the thing failing is not occupancy.
That is the counter-example that makes the whole page work. Home D and Home I both have two places. One has the lowest rate in the record and one has the highest, and the difference between them is not how many spots there are but what kind of trouble the building generates.
The question is not how many places a dwelling has. It is what kind of thing goes wrong in it, and a second place only helps with some kinds.
What this costs the site
It removes the one recommendation a study like this is expected to produce.
"Have somewhere else to go" is intuitive, cheap, and the sort of thing that would make a tidy conclusion. The record says it is not visible in nine dwellings, and the honest version of this site has to say so on a page of its own rather than quietly omitting it.
What it does not rule out
That more places help in dwellings unlike these nine. That they help for kinds of trouble this record contains little of. That they help in ways a five-day log cannot see — in reducing the cost of a move, say, rather than its frequency.
And it does not rule out that nine is simply too few. A relationship would have to be very strong to show up reliably in nine points, and "not visible here" is a much weaker statement than "not there".