Peer Rejected

rejections > cs.NO > REJ:2026.07.09.0001

REJ:2026.07.09.0001cs.NO (Computer Science)PRJ-2026-0012Vol. 2, No. 7DOI 10.5555/prj.2026.the-sperry-floorStatus: Rejected

The Sperry Floor: A Critical Alertness Beyond Which the Optimal Supervisor Is Asleep

Sølve H. Marchetti-Okonkwo1, Ineke R. Vásquez-Blyth2, Tobias E. Nakamura-Field3

1. Laboratory for Supervisory Control & Human Factors, Sperry Institute of Technology · 2. Centre for Circadian Systems Engineering, Marlowe Institute · 3. Division of Vigilance Dynamics, Ossory Institute

Submitted and rejected July 9, 2026 · 5 pages · 2 figures · review duration: 19 minutes

[pdf][share on x]

Abstract

Safety culture has one commandment: stay awake, stay alive. We show that once automation is good enough this advice quietly inverts, and that the point where it inverts is a measurable constant. The idea is simple. A near-perfect autopilot rarely needs help, so an alert human with a free hand spends that hand on corrections the machine did not need—and every needless nudge adds error. We fold this trade-off into one number, the Sperry number , and find the best alertness is , which reaches sleep at . In plain terms: past a threshold, the safest supervisor is a sleeping one. On the clinical sleepiness scale this threshold is the Sperry Floor, —and a driving-simulator study (), a field study of episodes, and simulations all agree on it. The blunt corollary: for a good-enough self-driving car, the safest driver is asleep.

keywords: supervisory control · human factors · vigilance · automation · Sperry Floor · sleep

Cite this rejection

@article{PRJ20260012,
  title   = {The Sperry Floor: A Critical Alertness Beyond Which the Optimal Supervisor Is Asleep},
  author  = {Sølve H. Marchetti-Okonkwo and Ineke R. Vásquez-Blyth and Tobias E. Nakamura-Field},
  journal = {Peer Rejected},
  year    = {2026},
  note    = {Rejected manuscript, PRJ-2026-0012},
  url     = {https://peerrejected.com/papers/the-sperry-floor}
}

Citing this paper is done at your own professional risk.

The paper, in full

[open in new tab]

Your browser can't display the PDF inline.

[download the PDF]

More from cs.NO

REJ:2026.08.22.0001 cs.NO (Computer Science) Rejected

Restoration Occurs While the Plug Is Out: A Concealed-Interval Randomised Trial of the Thirty-Second Rule

H. R. Okonkwo, Ingrid Sundqvist, Tomás Errázuriz & Margaret Aylward

Comments: 7 pages, 6 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 5 minutes on Aug 22, 2026.

Abstract: The instruction is always the same — unplug it, wait thirty seconds, plug it back in — and nobody has ever explained the thirty. We report that the interval is the treatment: a device recovers while the power is off, and switching it back on early interrupts the recovery. In an instrumented fleet of mains-monitored equipment, seventy-two-hour fault recurrence fell monotonically with the length of the dark interval. Because a technician who waits longer may simply be a technician who works better, we then randomised faults to four fixed intervals using a sealed inline unit that reconnects on its own schedule and emits randomised interim tones, so that no technician knew how long the equipment had been off. Recurrence was 34.1 % after half a second and 8.8 % after two minutes. Residual charge does not explain this: the effect was undiminished in devices whose bulk capacitance was bled to ground in under a fifth of a second. Restoration follows a saturating exponential with a half-time of 19.4 , mathrm s (95% CI 17.8–21.1), which leaves the customary thirty seconds at two thirds of restoration. We propose no mechanism. We propose a minimum of ninety seconds. Switching it back on does not repair the machine; it only ends the repair.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

REJ:2026.07.24.0001 cs.NO (Computer Science) Rejected

The Load-Bearing Counterfeit: Fakes as Error-Correcting Redundancy in the Authentication of Luxury Goods

Ingrid Sölveig

Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 6 minutes on Jul 24, 2026.

Abstract: Every luxury house treats the counterfeit as an enemy: a theft of value to be raided, watermarked, and litigated toward zero. This paper argues, and then proves within a formal model, that the house has misread its own accounts. I model an authentic object as a codeword — a bundle of small, redundant, deliberately over-built signals (the too-tight stitching, the serial number no customer reads) — and authentication as decoding a possibly corrupted copy back to the nearest genuine original. Three consequences follow. First, a good’s perceived value tracks not its usefulness but its redundancy: the craftsmanship that exists only to be checked. Second, a house cannot be both ubiquitous and unmistakable on a fixed craft budget — a version of the Singleton bound I christen the authenticity Singleton bound. Third, and least comfortably, the market’s ability to tell real from fake is a classifier, and a classifier needs counterfeits the way it needs negative examples: drive their prevalence p to zero and authenticity becomes unverifiable, because "genuine" has nothing left to contrast against. Value is maximized at a strictly positive counterfeit rate p star . I report a redundancy audit, an appraiser decoding trial, and a natural experiment in which an anti-counterfeit crackdown made authentication measurably harder. The counterfeit, it turns out, is load-bearing.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

REJ:2026.07.16.0001 cs.NO (Computer Science) Rejected

You Are Because We Ate: A Byzantine Threat Model of the Communal Refrigerator and a Restorative-Justice Protocol for Recovering Stolen Lunches

Naomi K. Adeyemi-Frost, Bartholomew J. Osei & Ingrid P. Vandermolen

Comments: 5 pages, 5 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 34 minutes on Jul 16, 2026.

Abstract: You labelled the sandwich. You wrote your name on the bag. It is gone anyway. We argue that the disappearing office lunch is not a failure of manners or memory but a security problem, and that treating it as one explains everything you have ever felt standing in front of a shared fridge. We model the communal refrigerator as a distributed system with an untrusted, shared store and at least one Byzantine participant—a coworker who may break the rules for their own benefit while denying it convincingly. Our central result is an impossibility theorem: because a name on a container is a claim and not a proof, no protocol can both correctly identify the thief and never falsely accuse the innocent. Formally, when a label can always be peeled or forged (binding strength beta < 1 ) and the thief always has an excuse (deniability d > 0 ), the chance of a just verdict is bounded by Pr[ text just verdict ] le beta + (1- beta)(1-d) < 1. Catching the culprit is therefore not merely hard; it is impossible without accusing someone innocent. Guided by the Southern African ethic of ubuntu—“I am because we are”—we abandon blame altogether and specify RAITH, a restorative protocol that makes the victim whole from a communal buffer and issues zero accusations. Across a 14-week study of 37 real office fridges it cut total lunch loss by 19% while raising measured team trust. One cannot out-secure the lunch thief, we conclude; one can only remove the reward.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]