Peer Rejected

rejections > 2026 > 10 > 05 75 papers on file new rejection daily, 06:00 UTC

Today's rejection

[1]

REJ:2026.10.05.0001 quant.LG (Quantum Linguistics) Status: Rejected

Do Not Skip to the Recipe: Observer-Dependent Proving and the Narrative Preamble of the Online Recipe

Wenceslas Adeyemi & Imre Castellanos

Comments: 5 pages, 5 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 7 minutes on Oct 5, 2026.

Online recipes begin with a story about somebody’s grandmother, and nobody reads it. We show that the story is what makes the bread rise: dough does not prove unless someone is reading about it. In a randomised trial, home bakers sent straight to the recipe by a Jump-to-Recipe button produced loaves 38% shorter than bakers who read the preamble first, and the shortfall closed in proportion to the words read. Reading behaves like an ingredient, and each minute of it buys the dough most of an hour of rising. This predicts a law of preamble length, 4.6 words per minute of stated rest, which a survey of nearly seven thousand recipe pages recovers (95% CI 4.3–4.8) after controlling for search-engine keywords. Of the authors who replied to a survey, 94% attribute their preambles to search ranking. What they say they are doing and what their pages show them doing disagree, and the trial results follow the pages. The effect is absent in focaccia, and we do not know why. We recommend that recipe pages hide the Jump-to-Recipe button while dough is rising. Read the story first, all of it, and do not scroll away while the dough rises.
[pdf][bibtex]
read full paper »

Recent rejections

view all 75 →

subjects: · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

sort: | 74 papers on file

[11]

REJ:2026.09.03.0001 geo.IN (Interpretive Geology) Rejected

The Shop Brand and the Name Brand Come Off One Line: Unimodal Production in 2,144 Product Classes, a Descending Grade Horizon, and the Re-Grading of Stock Sealed in 1988

A. R. Considine, Mihalis Vrettos & The Standing Committee on Grade Concordance

Comments: 11 pages, 4 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 32 minutes on Sep 3, 2026.

Abstract: There is no factory that makes the cheap one. The shop-brand tin, the entry-level machine and the budget tyre come off the same line as the dear version, and what separates them is a test and a label applied afterwards. We went looking for the second line in the industrial register and could not find it: not one plant we audited specifies a target below what it can already hold. If a single line makes everything, then a product class is one population and its grades are intervals cut into that population — which can be tested on shape alone, with no new instrument. Pooling end-of-line measurements in fixed physical units across 2,144 product classes, we find one mode in 2,109 of them, and no gap at any announced grade boundary, because a cut leaves none. The position of the cut is therefore a free parameter, and it has a history. Since 1954 the grade horizon has descended 0.42 grade-widths per decade (95% CI 0.39 – 0.45 ), while the production distribution has stood still. Stock sealed in 1988 and opened for this study was promoted two grades on re-assessment, its measurements unchanged. Blind, accredited assessors cannot separate the top bin from the bottom; told the grade, they can do nothing else. Nothing has been improved. The boundary was moved instead.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]
[12]

REJ:2026.09.02.0001 cs.NO (Computer Science) Rejected

Who Had the Fish? Meal Ownership Is Created at the Table, Not Transmitted from the Kitchen

Teodora Vasiliu, Callum Aitchison, Rukmini Chaudhary & Jonas Brekke

Comments: 9 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 39 minutes on Sep 2, 2026.

Abstract: The plates arrive, and the server has to ask whose is whose. The question is not a lapse of memory: at the moment it is asked, the answer does not exist. An order is entered against a seat, and then travels a pipeline — printer, kitchen display, expediter, pass — built to move courses through stations rather than dishes to people. We measured what survives. Across 1,204,918 tickets from 186 venues, seat identity carries 2.31 bits at order entry and 0.04 bits at the pass, and no step after the pass can recover what the pass has lost. Delivery is nonetheless correct 96.3% of the time. Something creates the assignment at the table, and only one operation is performed there. The trade has already named it. Serving staff call it auctioning the food, prohibit it in every fine-dining manual we obtained, and describe it exactly as an economist would: goods held by no one, offered aloud, allocated to a claimant. We therefore auctioned dishes that nobody had ordered. They were claimed at 88.2% (95% CI 85.9–90.4), faster than dishes that had been, and the claimants remembered ordering them. In a party of two the auction is never held and the plates still land correctly; we have no account of this. The fish belongs to whoever answers.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]
[13]

REJ:2026.09.01.0001 phil.OS (Philosophy) Rejected

Nobody Looks Like Their Passport Photograph: Simultaneous Quadriscopic Capture in 6,209 Sitters Rejects a Common Facial Object, with a Draft Standard for Identity Documents

Solveig Marchmont, Emeka Bassong & The Quadriscopic Working Group

Comments: 6 pages, 5 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 24 minutes on Sep 1, 2026.

Abstract: Nobody looks like their passport photograph. The usual account is bad lighting and a bad day; we find instead that the photograph is accurate, and that it is accurate about something other than the face you have met in the mirror. A face can only be reached through an instrument — a mirror, a still camera, a video link, another person’s eyes — and each has been treated as a noisy view of one object. We built a rig that applies all four to the same face within four milliseconds, so that expression cannot be blamed for any disagreement, and measured sixty-eight points on the face of each of 6,209 sitters. Treating them as one object is a measurement model; it can be tested, has never been tested, and fails. Four separate shapes fit the data instead, and no pair of them is consistent with being the same thing — the largest correlation between any two is 0.72 (95% CI 0.69 – 0.75 ). A sitter’s mirror-face and passport-face lie farther apart in shape space than that sitter lies from a full sibling. A rigid plaster cast of the same head, run through the same rig that afternoon, closes on one factor. We therefore record four faces per person and no fifth object of which they are copies, and recommend that identity documents cite their instrument. You are the only person who has never met you.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]
[14]

REJ:2026.08.31.0001 myth.AP (Applied Mythology) Rejected

On the Actuarial Value of Cold Feet: A Nuptial Life Table Indexed by Plantar Temperature at the Moment of Consent

Wilhelmina Traquair

Comments: 7 pages, 6 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 16 minutes on Aug 31, 2026.

Abstract: A person about to make a promise they cannot take back gets cold feet. The feet are genuinely cold, the coldness can be measured at the altar, and what it measures is how long the marriage will last. The sole is one of the few surfaces the body uses to shed heat on demand, and it withdraws its blood within seconds of any call for resolve; the phrase is a description, and English has forgotten that it was ever technical. We instrumented 12,417 ceremonies with a logging thermistor insole, taking as the exposure not temperature — which is largely a thermometer for the room — but thermal reserve: the departure from what that person’s foot should hold, at that ambient, in those shoes, calibrated the week before. The wedding rehearsal supplies a control that no laboratory could build — the same church, the same shoes, the same audience, the same words, and no legal effect — and the rehearsal does not cool the foot. The ceremony cools it by 2.6 , circ mathrm C . Across twenty-nine years of register linkage each degree of deficit multiplies the dissolution hazard by 1.61 (95% CI 1.57 – 1.65 ), and forty-one covariates a demographer would ask for add nothing once the foot is known; they predict the foot instead. We give the nuptial life table and the expectation of marriage at every reserve. We recommend that the thermometer be read before the register is signed.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]
[15]

REJ:2026.08.30.0001 soc.TH (Social Thermodynamics) Rejected

Courtesy-Driven Deadlock: Simultaneous Speech in Remote Conversation Is Generated by Its Own Repair, Not by Transmission Delay

E. M. Farrow, Sofia Reinholt & The DEFERENCE Study Group

Comments: 6 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 13 minutes on Aug 30, 2026.

Abstract: Two people on a video call start talking at the same time. They both stop, both apologise, and both start again. Everyone blames the connection, and we find that the connection is innocent. Ordinary call recordings cannot settle the question, because they register when a person was heard rather than when they spoke. Using local-onset capture, which timestamps each talker at their own device before transmission, we measured simultaneity in 84,216 calls and then randomised 1,204 participants to concealed one-way delays between 0 and 640 ms. The collision rate did not move: 4.13 per participant-hour, with a latency slope of 0.01 (95% CI -0.04 to 0.06 ). Courtesy moved it a great deal. Teams briefed on yielding etiquette collided half again as often as untrained teams, and teams instructed to appoint one participant who never yields collided a fifth as often as the briefed teams. We account for this with a delay-differential model in which the governing lag is not the network’s but the talker’s — the time to notice an overlap and decide to defer — and in which deference is the loop gain. Above a critical value the exchange undergoes a Hopf bifurcation and the apology begins to manufacture the overlap it was offered to repair. The remedy is structural. Every meeting should appoint someone to be rude.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]
[16]

REJ:2026.08.29.0001 chrono.DY (Chronodynamics) Rejected

The Whine Follows the Bite: Negative Lead Time in 19,844 Instrumented Sleeper-Nights and a Revised Order of Events for the Domestic Mosquito

Ilsabe Rautenbach, Duarte Espinho, Nkechi Obiora & Marek Zawistowski

Comments: 10 pages, 6 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 39 minutes on Aug 29, 2026.

Abstract: You hear it at your ear, put the light on, and there is nothing in the room. In the morning there are bites and no insect. These are not two puzzles but one. The flight tone of a mosquito is not produced on approach but on departure, after the meal is finished, so that every mosquito you have ever heard had already bitten you. We instrumented 19,844 sleeper-nights with a four-microphone pillow array and a film bonded to the skin that registers an insect landing and leaving, timing the meal from the animal rather than from the welt it raises. The whine follows the end of the meal by 2.3 , mathrm s (95% CI 2.0 – 2.6 ), and no tone anywhere in the record arrives before the bite it belongs to. Of the insects caught after a recorded whine, 97.9 % were full of blood, and where the blood could be typed it was the sleeper’s. Whines and bites reconcile at 1.02 whines per bite: every bite is announced, and nothing is announced that is not a bite. Under blinded playback — the true tone cancelled at the ear, a false tone injected — sleepers searched more and were bitten the same. Why the approach is inaudible is not a question this study can answer. The sound at your ear is not a warning but a receipt.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]
[17]

REJ:2026.08.28.0001 stat.EZ (Statistics) Rejected

No Occasion Is Good Enough for the Good Scissors

Rosalind M. Tyer & Yusuf Karadağ

Comments: 11 pages, 6 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 33 minutes on Aug 28, 2026.

Abstract: There is a pair of scissors in the house that nobody is allowed to use. It is not being saved for an occasion; we show that no occasion can occur which would qualify. Households keep a reserved class — the good scissors, the good towels, the tin nobody opens — and custodians state its use rule readily and apply it consistently: the item comes out when the occasion is good enough. We placed occasions and reserved items on one scaled ladder and measured the rule against the item it governs. The threshold is not fixed. It rides on the item, exceeding it by at least a reservation gap of 0.084 (95% CI 0.071 – 0.097 ) that is flat across income, item class and custodian age. A threshold that everywhere exceeds its own argument has no solution, so the qualifying set is empty rather than merely rare. What follows is not stillness but accumulation: acquisition sets a new item’s warrant to the standing threshold, warrant therefore climbs by one gap per acquisition, and it passes the top of the ladder after nine. The median household holds eleven. Instructed to draw, households comply, reclassify the item as ordinary, and most soon buy a better one. The reserve is not waiting for an occasion; it is the reason there is none.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]
[18]

REJ:2026.08.27.0001 neuro.CJ (Neuro-Conjecture) Rejected

A Foot and a Half of Registered Land: Title, Easement, and Prescription in the Space Around the Human Body, with 41,208 Breaching Encounters and a Draft Cadastre

Wren Ackerley, Ines Delacour, Halvard Sømme & The Cadastral Working Party

Comments: 7 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 22 minutes on Aug 27, 2026.

Abstract: Stand a little closer to the person beside you. They will move, and neither of you will have decided anything. This is not discomfort: the space around a body is land, held in title by the body at its centre, and standing too close to someone is a trespass. We surveyed that land. Across 41,208 concealed-allocation breaching encounters at twenty-six public sites, the probability that a holder asserts title passes from indifference to defence across 4.1 , mathrm cm of approach (95% CI 3.8 – 4.4 ) — a boundary finer than the same holders’ ability to judge distance at that range, and therefore held on record rather than perceived. Three consequences follow from the register and from no account of comfort. Resistance is undiminished when the encroacher plainly has not noticed the holder: rudeness requires intent, and trespass does not. Announced encroachment is resisted more strongly than silent encroachment, as an assertion of adverse right must be. And a right of approach vests after twenty uninterrupted encounters, is destroyed in its entirety by a single interruption, and is thereafter reacquired from zero. In couples of long standing, the boundary on the occupied flank does not return after separation. You are not uncomfortable. You are being dispossessed.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]
[19]

REJ:2026.08.26.0001 quant.LG (Quantum Linguistics) Rejected

Nobody Learns the Words: Lyric Recall as an Ill-Posed Inverse Problem

I. Vartabedian, Nils Ødegaard & The STROPHE-2 Study Group

Comments: 7 pages, 5 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 6 minutes on Aug 26, 2026.

Abstract: Everyone can sing the first verse of a song, and almost nobody can sing the second. We report that this is because the words to a song are never learned at all. Singing is a smearing operation: a melody spreads the syllables of a verse into one continuous signal, and what a singer stores is the melody—a few dozen numbers—rather than the words. The words are recovered on the spot by undoing the smear. Recovery is exact while the undoing stays stable, and because each successive verse composes the melody’s operator with itself, the difficulty of undoing it does not accumulate but squares. Across 12,846 recorded sing-throughs, syllable accuracy falls from 0.94 at verse one to 0.11 at verse two and then stops falling—a cliff, not a decay, which no account based on forgetting predicts. A four-arm randomised trial isolates the mechanism: recovery survives transposition into an unfamiliar key, which changes the melody but not its invertibility, and collapses when the melody is withheld. The songs that outlive their authors are precisely those tuned so that exactly one verse can be recovered; the rest are unsingable and are not transmitted. The mumble that replaces verse two is not a failure of memory but a correctly regularised estimate. You have never known the words; you have only ever solved for them.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]