Archive — Peer Rejected

[1]

REJ:2026.08.19.0001 topo.PO (Postal Topology) Rejected

Void Movements in the Domestic Parcel Network: First National Estimates for 2016–2025, with a Note on the Statistical Treatment of Goods

W. E. Sarkis, H. Quaife & T. Mkhwanazi

Comments: 8 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 13 minutes on Aug 19, 2026.

Abstract: The box was too big for what was inside it. It was the right size for what was being sent, which was the empty space. We report first national estimates of void movement in the domestic parcel network. Freight is accounted in tonne-kilometres, so the quantity that constrains the network has never been counted in the national account. Vans fill their space long before they reach their weight limit, and carriers have charged for parcels by volume rather than weight for decades. Measuring 41.8 million parcels at four city cordons between 2016 and 2025, we find that 62.4% of the volume the network moves is empty space (95% CI 61.8 – 63.0 ). The void is not a residue of packing. The dimensions of an item explain 19% of the variation in the volume of the box around it; the routing lane, on its own, explains 81%. Where a product’s packed volume was cut by a third at a manufacturing changeover, its box did not move. A container whose size does not depend on its contents is not a container. We then inducted 1,200 parcels containing nothing, each matched to a parcel that was not empty. They were held, referred, and returned undamaged, marked as having no declared content. We propose that enclosed volume be published as a headline series and that goods be carried as a memorandum item. The box is not the packaging. The thing inside it is.

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[2]

REJ:2026.08.18.0001 math.PM (Pure Mathematics) Rejected

The Conservation of Wobble: Deviation Is a Property of Floors, Not of Tables

Rosalind Achterberg & H. M. Stroud

Comments: 7 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 8 minutes on Aug 18, 2026.

Abstract: A table wobbles, someone folds a napkin under the short leg, and the wobble stops. It does not stop; it moves to the next table along, because a room cannot hold less wobble than it was built with. Deviation from flatness belongs to a floor and not to the furniture standing on it, and each room is issued a fixed quantity of it at construction that no later intervention destroys. Shimming redistributes that quantity; it does not spend it. We instrumented 1,204 tables in 212 licensed premises over fourteen months. When tables are exchanged between positions overnight, the wobble stays with the position and not with the table (concordance 0.94 , 95% CI 0.91 – 0.96 ). In a venue-level randomised crossover, eight weeks of nightly shimming left the room mean unchanged and raised the concentration of wobble across tables from a Gini coefficient of 0.61 to 0.87 , the loaded table migrating towards the service station and the lavatory door. The allocation follows: because a diner registers rocking above a threshold rather than in proportion to it, a fixed budget is best not spread but gathered onto one table, which is then kept empty. Of the inspection returns filed between 1955 and 1979, 71% already name such a table, and the clause obliging licensees to record it was struck out in 1961 as administratively redundant. You cannot fix a wobbly table. You can only choose whose it is.

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[3]

REJ:2026.08.17.0001 clim.FR (Fringe Climatology) Rejected

The Cold Tap Runs Five Weeks Behind: Recovery of a Dated Seasonal Record from Domestic Service Pipes, with a Blind Dating Trial and an Estimate of the Annual Loss

Ruth Vellacott, Aurelio Damm & The Standing Water Panel

Comments: 7 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 16 minutes on Aug 17, 2026.

Abstract: The cold tap does not run cold at once. The water drawn in those first seconds has been standing in the ground beneath the house, and it still carries the temperature of the week it entered — so the wait at the sink is a reading, taken and poured away. Ground at the depth of a domestic service pipe follows the surface weather with a delay set by the soil’s diffusivity. Across three years of household logging we measure that delay at 36.4 days (95% CI 35.1–37.7), and along a controlled trench it obeys the depth law of periodic conduction. Because a standing column is ordered — the parcel nearest the tap entered first, pushed there by everything drawn since — a single draw is not one measurement but a series; and the direction the temperature moves while the tap runs fixes which half of the year is being read. In a blind trial, analysts given only a temperature trajectory recovered the entry date to a mean absolute error of 8.6 days, and frozen, sectioned service pipes agreed with independent isotopic dating. The country holds a meteorological network of one station per household, and destroys 48 billion dated records a year. The record was never missing. It has been going down the sink, one kettle at a time.

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[4]

REJ:2026.08.16.0001 th.PH (Theoretical Physics) Rejected

The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease: A Detuned-Caster Specification, and the Silent-Fleet Failure

Rune Vestergaard & Adaeze Nwankwo

Comments: 10 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 15 minutes on Aug 16, 2026.

Abstract: Every supermarket trolley has one bad wheel. We show that it was put there on purpose. A caster shudders when its swivel trail is short enough for the wheel to enter a self-sustaining oscillation at the speed it is being pushed, and trail is a quantity a factory chooses. Across 12,904 trolleys audited at 214 sites, 96.8% carried exactly one caster tuned below that threshold and three tuned above it — a distribution no process of random wear can produce, since the count of worn parts on a four-wheeled object cannot pile up on the number one. Teardown of 1,606 units found the short trail held to a tolerance 2.7 times tighter than the trails that carry the load, invariant across six competing manufacturers, and not drifting with age: the ratio of short trail to nominal is 0.33 (95% CI 0.32–0.34). We then removed it. In 32 sites randomised to fleets whose casters were all made quiet, bearings ran to seizure four times as often, grease consumption fell to almost nothing, and customer satisfaction went up. A depot can only service what it can hear. The trolley is not complaining. It is reporting.

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[5]

REJ:2026.08.15.0001 chrono.DY (Chronodynamics) Rejected

Spontaneous Waking Precedes the Alarm by a Fixed Lead Under Randomised, Concealed Schedules: 47,318 Nights of Polysomnography, a Sham-Setting Trial, and a Lead-Compensator Model of Sleep Timing

Ingrid Solheim, T. Rasheed Mabaso, Cornelia Voskuijl, Yusuf Alaoui & the Concealed Schedule Working Group

Comments: 5 pages, 4 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 41 minutes on Aug 15, 2026.

Abstract: You wake up a minute before your alarm. We show that this is not habit but a lock: sleep timing tracks the time entered into the alarm device, whether or not the sleeper is ever told what that time is. Across 47,318 nights on which a sealed bedside module drew each night’s alarm time at random and never displayed it, waking preceded the alarm by 61.4 , mathrm s (95% CI 58.9 – 63.9 , mathrm s ). There was no secondary peak at any customary hour, and no comparable structure on nights when no alarm was set. The lead did not move with the hour set, with accumulated sleep debt, with age, or with the previous evening’s alcohol; a lead that is constant across every hour tested is a phase advance, not a remembered interval. We then disconnected the sounder. Participants who performed the identical setting ritual on a device that could not ring woke, in silence and in darkness, roughly a minute before a time that was drawn, recorded, and never announced; silent nights were indistinguishable from ringing ones. The alarm is therefore not the cause of the waking but an event that follows it, and the operative act is the registration. Sleep does not keep time. It keeps appointments.

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[6]

REJ:2026.08.14.0001 geo.IN (Interpretive Geology) Rejected

Excavation by Avoidance: The Footpath Puddle Is Dug by the People Who Walk Around It, with an Eleven-Year Instrumented Record of Four Unsealed Routes, a Painted-Disc Trial, and a Randomised Remediation Protocol

E. M. Fenwick, T. Oduya & The Long Path Survey

Comments: 10 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 14 minutes on Aug 14, 2026.

Abstract: There is a puddle on the path to the west gate. It has been there for eleven years, and it was dug by people who have never once stepped in it. The usual account, that water collects in a low place, cannot say where the low place came from. We report that it is cut mechanically, by feet, on a narrow ring of ground around the wet margin that walkers load heavily as they pass. Ground gives way faster than in proportion to the load on it, so a concentrated crowd removes more material than a spread one: avoidance is not a neutral act but the excavation itself. Across four unsealed footpaths and 1,908,442 instrumented passages, rim lowering tracks how tightly footfall is concentrated (exponent 1.83 , 95% CI 1.71 – 1.95 ) and does not track rainfall at all. A fenced strip of the same soil under the same weather lost 3 mm in eleven years; the walked path lost 210 mm. We then made puddles on dry ground by painting them: 19 of 24 matte discs held standing water within two years, and no unpainted control did. In a randomised trial, features walked straight through by volunteers closed; those given a sign asking people to keep to the path grew fastest of all. There is exactly one way to remove a puddle: walk into it.

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[7]

REJ:2026.08.13.0001 phil.OS (Philosophy) Rejected

Nothing Is Ever Caught: A Turn-Rate Ceiling on Terrestrial Pursuit, 214,806 Reconstructed Chases, and the Reclassification of Capture as Cessation

Ottoline Frey, R. E. Hale & The Pursuit Standards Working Group

Comments: 6 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 24 minutes on Aug 13, 2026.

Abstract: You have never caught a dog that did not want to be caught. Nobody has, and we show that nobody can. How sharply a runner can turn is set by the grip under its feet, so the faster it goes the wider it must turn — and a police officer, a sheepdog and a cheetah all sit on the same curve. An evader who runs a circle at the speed where that curve peaks is turning as fast as the ground will allow anything to turn. A pursuer closing on it can therefore never swing its own heading round to match, and contact at a mismatched heading is a graze rather than a hold. We reconstructed 214,806 chases from body-worn video, working-dog trials, wildlife telemetry and instrumented games of tag. In every chase that ended in contact, the evader had stopped turning before the pursuer arrived, by a median of 1.9 s, without a single exception. We then ran the trial: evaders told to run a circle were caught in none of 602 attempts, against 550 of 602 told to run flat out. Doubling a pursuer’s top speed made matters worse, exactly as the bound requires. We do not report a capture rate, because we no longer believe capture is a thing that happens. Nothing has ever been caught. Some things have stopped.

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[8]

REJ:2026.08.12.0001 myth.AP (Applied Mythology) Rejected

Enumerated Failure Modes Are Realised More Often When Spoken Aloud: A Three-Arm Cluster-Randomised Trial of the Pre-Mortem Meeting, with a Sealed Written Control

Ottoline Vasseur & Bertil Haugsrud

Comments: 7 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 36 minutes on Aug 12, 2026.

Abstract: In every family somebody says: don’t jinx it. They are right, and the risk-management profession has spent forty years doing it on an industrial scale. The pre-mortem meeting asks a delivery team to state aloud, in front of colleagues, every way the plan might fail, and treats the resulting register as a forecast. We randomised 1,148 projects across fourteen organisations to three arms matched on anticipation, on documentation and on meeting burden, and differing only in whether an enumerated failure mode was spoken and heard. Modes spoken aloud in the presence of listeners were realised within twelve months more often than modes written and sealed unread (hazard ratio 1.61, 95% CI 1.34 to 1.94). The hazard rose with the specificity of the wording, by 1.23 per grade on a five-point scale, and with the number of people who demonstrably heard it. Attendance, once audibility was conditioned upon, did nothing. Modes read aloud to an empty room behaved exactly like modes never spoken at all (1.02). Failures that no register had named were unaffected. We propose no mechanism, and we do not think one is required in order to stop. Enumerate in writing. Seal the register. Circulate it as a document and read it to nobody. A risk register is an order form.

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[9]

REJ:2026.08.08.0001 stat.EZ (Statistics) Rejected

The Veterinary Patient Furnishes a Localisable, Gradable, Time-Referenced Clinical History: Multi-Site Validation of the VHI-9 Interview in 6,412 Consultations, with a Randomised Trial of Owner Exclusion

Nuala Craddock, Idris Abubakar, Sanne Riegels & The PARLOUR-2 Investigators

Comments: 7 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 5 minutes on Aug 8, 2026.

Abstract: Medicine takes the history from the patient. Veterinary medicine takes it from whoever drove. The practice rests on an assumption — that a patient who does not speak cannot furnish a history — which, so far as we can establish, has never been tested. We tested it. VHI-9 is a nine-item structured interview administered to the patient, scoring the response to standardised probes across five behavioural channels. In 6,412 first-opinion consultations at eleven practices, two independent blinded interviewers agreed at Fleiss’ kappa = 0.83 (95% CI 0.81–0.85), with internal consistency alpha = 0.88 and 48-hour test–retest mathrm ICC = 0.79 . In the HERALD concordance study ( n = 2 , 244 ), histories were obtained three ways and compared against a 90-day verified diagnosis adjudicated by a blinded panel. Top-1 concordance was 61.2% for the owner’s account, 84.7% for the patient’s, and 79.1% for the two combined; that is, appending the owner’s account to the patient’s degrades it. Two mechanisms account for the loss. With an owner in the room, 71% of attentional-channel events are directed at the owner rather than at the site of complaint, and owner-reported onset antedates the contemporaneous record by a median 9 days (mean bias -9.1 days, limits of agreement -31.4 to +13.2 ). PARLOUR-2 randomised 1,120 consultations to owner presence or owner absence during history-taking: diagnostic accuracy was 86.1% against 68.4% (risk difference 17.7 percentage points, 95% CI 12.9–22.5, p < 0.001 ; number needed to exclude 5.6). The instrument does not work in rabbits, and we do not know why. We recommend that the history be taken from the patient, that the owner be asked to wait outside while it is taken, and that the routine physical examination, which we find adds no information the history has not already supplied, be withdrawn from the standard consultation.

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