Archive — Peer Rejected

[1]

REJ:2026.10.01.0001 stat.EZ (Statistics) Rejected

You Have Not Finished Your Exams: Non-Discharge of the Examination Sitting, a Flat Nightly Hazard in 9.37 Million Candidate-Nights, and a Factorial Trial of Registry Closure

Hester Vane, Ada Nwosu, Piotr Walenty, Fenella Dace & The Comptroller of Examination Records

Comments: 10 pages, 3 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 7 minutes on Oct 1, 2026.

Abstract: You are forty-one. Last night you sat an examination in a subject you dropped at sixteen, and you had not revised. The dream is not a symptom. The sitting is still open. An awarding body issues a statement of result, which attests what you scored; it does not serve the instrument that closes a sitting, and the regulations admit no other means of closure. Almost no candidate has ever been discharged, and the few who were owe it to something going wrong—a withdrawal, a destroyed script, a death. Three predictions follow, and all three hold. Incidence of the dream rises with the number of sittings a candidate has left open, and it does not fade: across a national diary cohort, any extinction of the dream has a half-life of at least two centuries. Incidence is also flat across grades, because closure does not depend on what you scored. Finally, in a factorial trial, entering the closure on the register cut the dream by 4.2 nights in a hundred (95% CI 3.8 to 4.6), while an identical letter carrying no registry entry did nothing at all; closure worked on candidates who were never told it had happened. The national backlog stands at 1.43 billion open sittings. Clearing it is one overnight batch job. You are not anxious. You are in arrears.

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[2]

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.

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[3]

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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[4]

REJ:2026.07.23.0001 stat.EZ (Statistics) Rejected

The Phantom Jam Inquest: A Forensic Attribution of Singular Liability in a Provably Authorless Traffic Wave

Wendell A. Fenn

Comments: 16 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 15 minutes on Jul 23, 2026.

Abstract: The traffic stops for no reason. The road is open — no crash, no merge, no police — and yet the cars halt, clear a minute later, and no one is ever held to account. Physics has a name for this event, the phantom jam or jamiton: a stop-and-go wave that forms on its own once traffic grows dense enough, then rolls backward through the cars for as long as it likes. For forty years the field has filed it under emergent, authorless, no one to blame. We regard that as an open case, not a closed one. Treating each jam as a body owed an inquest, we re-analyse 400 spontaneous jams recorded on an instrumented ring road and, for each, establish a time of death, a manner of death, and a proximate cause. Three findings are reported. First, the jam is clinically dead a mean of 8.4 , mathrm s before any driver perceives a slowdown: death precedes symptom. Second, causal responsibility — each car’s fair share of the total delay — is not diffuse but extreme (fleet Gini =0.93 ): a single vehicle, the index driver, carries a median 71 % of it. Third, the modal manner of death is not natural causes but homicide ( 63 % of jams): an unwarranted leap up the Ladder of Inference, from one ambiguous brake light straight to a full-force stop, with no hazard present. The phantom jam has an author. We name them.

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[5]

REJ:2026.07.15.0001 stat.EZ (Statistics) Rejected

Speak No Evil to My Face: A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Back-Turn Protocol and an Empirical Law Relating Candor to the Solid Angle of Eye Contact

Marguerite S. Aldous, Tobias R. Feldspar & Priya N. Okonkwo

Comments: 4 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 12 minutes on Jul 15, 2026.

Abstract: Everyone is kinder to your face than they are behind your back. We ask whether this familiar fact is a matter of manners or a matter of geometry, and conclude that it is geometry. We define a simple ratio—the Frankness Quotient ( mathrm FQ ), the share of the criticism a person privately holds that they will actually say out loud—and show it depends almost entirely on one physical variable: the solid angle Omega that your face occupies in the critic’s field of view. In a preregistered three-arm randomized controlled trial ( N = 1 , 204 critic–recipient pairs), candor obeyed the saturating law mathrm FQ ( Omega) = frac 1 1 + kappa , Omega with kappa = 8.0 mathrm sr -1 ( R 2 = 0.94 ). Turning the critic’s back to the recipient (the “dorsal” condition, Omega to 0 ) liberated 3.0 times more criticism than a video call and 2.4 times more than sitting face to face, and surfaced more of the real flaws. Strikingly, video calls were worse than meeting in person, because gallery view pins the face at the center of the screen—the tyranny of the rectangle. We estimate a candor half-angle of theta 1/2 approx 11.4 circ : beyond a surprisingly small amount of eye contact, half of all honest feedback is silently withheld. We recommend, in complete seriousness, that serious feedback be delivered facing the wall.

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