Archive — Peer Rejected

[19]

REJ:2026.07.26.0001 chrono.DY (Chronodynamics) Rejected

Label-Conditional Degradation: Regression-Discontinuity Evidence from 11,431 Stability Lots, and the STAMP-1 Randomised Trial of Printed Expiry Dating

Yusra Benhaddou, Ekene Okonkwo, Tuva Salvesen, H. R. Prendergast & The STAMP-1 Investigators

Comments: 7 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 33 minutes on Jul 26, 2026.

Abstract: Potency in 11,431 pharmaceutical stability lots is flat for the whole of a product’s shelf life and then falls 11.8 percentage points of label claim (95% CI 11.0 – 12.6 ) within thirty days of the date printed on the carton. Before that date the fitted decay slope is -0.021 , % mathrm LC /month; after it, -0.019 . The field reads the printed date as a forecast of this drop. We test the reverse. We first show that the question is not identified in observational data: the printed date is a fixed administrative offset from the manufacturing date, so elapsed chemical time and label arrival are perfectly collinear in every stability programme ever run, and no such programme can distinguish them. We break the collinearity by randomising the label. In STAMP-1, 1,080 cartons drawn from one homogeneous manufacturing lot of each of three index products were assigned printed shelf lives of 24, 36 or 60 months and stored together on one shelf in one chamber. Potency fell at whichever date was printed — a between-arm difference of 11.0 points at month 24 (95% CI 10.2 – 11.8 , p<0.001 ) among cartons of identical chemistry and identical storage history. Storage temperature had no detectable effect (main effect 0.3 points, p=0.71 ; fitted Q 10 =1.02 ). The effect scales with the legibility of the print, and cartons whose date was covered by an opaque label at t=0 showed no detectable loss ( -1.2 points, 95% CI -2.9 to 0.5 ). We propose no mechanism. Overprinting a revised date costs $0.0031 per carton, or $0.42 per DALY averted.

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[20]

REJ:2026.07.25.0001 astro.GA (Astrogastronomy) Rejected

On the Flat Dilution Curves of Cooked Dishes: Evidence for a Non-Luminous Flavour Component and a Structural Protocol for Its Recovery

Eluned Prosser & Toma Ferreira

Comments: 11 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 23 minutes on Jul 25, 2026.

Abstract: Perceived flavour intensity should fall as a dish is diluted. Across 41 cooked dishes carried through a nine-point geometric dilution series spanning a 43-fold range in concentration, it does not: the fitted Stevens exponent is beta = 0.06 (95% CI [-0.01, ,0.13] ) against a literature value of 0.85 . Five single-ingredient controls run in the same series fall off correctly ( beta = 0.81 ), so neither the panel nor the design accounts for the result. We therefore compare two methodologically independent measurements of the flavour held in a pot — luminous flavour L , obtained by descriptive panel, and dynamical flavour M mathrm dyn , obtained from the dispersion of headspace release rates under a virial closure and never tasted — and find them discrepant by a median factor Upsilon star = M mathrm dyn /L = 118 , with a spread of 40 to 913 that we do not attempt to narrow. We read the excess as a non-luminous flavour component: present in the dish, dynamically detectable, and unperceived. Modelling the pot as a weighted digraph of competitive channel occlusion, we show that the perceived flavour vector is the leading eigenvector of the occlusion operator, that the measured spectral gap ( lambda 1/ lambda 2 = 6.8 ) collapses that vector onto one or two compounds within minutes of the first simmer, and that the dark component is exactly the orthogonal complement — the spectral shadow. The mechanism is structural rather than compositional, and it is reversible. Under a staged-participation schedule that alters only the order in which ingredients are granted thermal contact, with composition, mass, energy input and elapsed time held fixed, L rises 9.4-fold and Upsilon star falls to 12.6. Holding that schedule fixed and replacing all twelve ingredients with twelve sharing no item moves L by 0.19 perceptual units, below the panel’s 0.5 -unit discrimination threshold ( F(1,29) = 0.14 , p = 0.71 ). Schedule moves perceived flavour 269 times further than composition does. We conclude that 99.15 % of the flavour so far prepared has not been tasted, and that the ingredient list is, on this evidence, an inventory rather than a cause.

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[21]

REJ:2026.07.24.0001 clim.FR (Fringe Climatology) Rejected

On the Aerodynamic Insufficiency of Transport-Category Aircraft, with a Reconciliation of the Reported Operational Record

Rosalind Teague, E. O. Nwosu, Junko Aramaki, Piet Vandeleur, Aurélie Bosco & The Standing Committee on Aerodynamic Reconciliation

Comments: 6 pages, 8 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 41 minutes on Jul 24, 2026.

Abstract: We audit the vertical momentum budget of transport-category aircraft in cruise and find that it does not close. Lift is treated here as a rate of downward momentum delivered to the air rather than as circulation around the aerofoil, so the lift available to a wing is the mass of air the wing reaches each second multiplied by the downward speed it can give that air. Both factors are fixed by the dimensions on the type certificate: a wing of span b and mean chord c entrains a sheet of air of depth kappa c , and cannot turn that sheet through more than the stall angle. Evaluated at the certificated cruise condition of 1,412 transport types, this first-order bound exceeds aircraft weight by 0.4% a margin thin enough to explain why the budget has not been recomputed since 1931, and too thin to absorb the term that follows it. The trailing vortex pair returns a measured fraction varepsilon = 0.047 of the delivered momentum to the airframe as upwash over its own outboard sections, and momentum returned to the wing is momentum the wing did not spend. Net of the return, no airframe in the corpus is funded for its own weight: the lift deficit Delta has fleet median 0.043 (interquartile range 0.031 – 0.056 ) and is uncorrelated with mass, certification era, or engine count. A traversing wake rake flown on 62 revenue sectors measures the shortfall directly at 4.1% (95% CI 3.6–4.7), in agreement with the model. Six candidate resolutions — ground effect, fuselage lift, thrust vector, buoyancy, compressibility, and tail trim load — are evaluated and rejected; granted their full contribution at once they recover 3.8%, and two of them deepen the deficit. We therefore state as Theorem 1 that sustained level flight is not aerodynamically funded for any certificated transport type, and reconcile the result against a dispatch archive of 4.1 million departures, which carries an unfunded lift of 70.9 , mathrm kN ,h per sector and 2.7 , mathrm TN ,h annually worldwide. We recommend that the liability be disclosed on the type certificate and restated annually.

[abs][pdf][bibtex]

[22]

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.

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[23]

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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[24]

REJ:2026.07.22.0001 spec.EC (Speculative Economics) Rejected

What Job Is the Audience Hiring the Encore To Do? A Signaling Account of Ritual Reciprocity at the Close of a Performance

Séverine Aldabra & The Interval Study Group

Comments: 8 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 33 minutes on Jul 22, 2026.

Abstract: An encore looks like more concert. We argue it functions more like a receipt. Audiences reliably demand encores, and performers reliably grant them, even at shows where both parties are visibly tired and the room is already reaching for its coats—a pattern that the obvious explanation, that an encore delivers additional wanted music, does not comfortably account for. Adopting the “jobs to be done” lens from product strategy, we ask not what the encore is but what job the audience is hiring it to do, and we develop a model in which the encore’s job is to settle a debt rather than to play a song. In a prospective study of N=214 performances and n=1 , 031 departing listeners, the musical content of an encore—its length, its rarity, the number of songs—explains a negligible share of whether the evening felt complete, while the mere completion of a demand-and-grant ritual explains a large one. We formalize the exchange as a signaling game in which applause is a costly signal of demand and the performer’s time offstage is a signal of scarcity, and we note that because the encore is now universally anticipated, its modern equilibrium is one both sides know to be a formality yet perform as though it were in doubt. The effect sizes are large; the instrument was a telephone; we state both plainly. We suggest, though we do not claim to have shown, that bands do not play encores because you want more songs. They play them because everyone needs the night to end on purpose.

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[25]

REJ:2026.07.21.0001 phil.OS (Philosophy) Rejected

Take, or Pay: A Marginal Reading of the On-Site Supply Agreement, and the Epiphenomenal Pipe

Wilhelmina Oosterhout, Cassian Merz & The Rhine Basin Continuity Registry

Comments: 8 pages, 4 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 4 minutes on Jul 21, 2026.

Abstract: Industrial gas is sold, overwhelmingly, on take-or-pay contracts: a supplier builds an air-separation plant at the customer’s fence line and, for fifteen to twenty years, the customer pays for a committed volume whether or not it is ever drawn. We take this arrangement at its word. The decision to consume, we argue, is not made at the valve but at the signing — distributed across a network of stakeholders in the manner organisational theorists call nemawashi (root-binding consensus), in which the formal event merely ratifies a decision that already exists. Modelling the relationship as two phases — an informal root-binding network and a formal ceremony queue — we prove a Ratification Redundancy: once consensus is root-bound, physical delivery conveys no decision-relevant information beyond the commitment. It follows that the pipe is epiphenomenal: causally downstream of, and informationally screened off from, the decision it appears to enact. The molecules are the qualia of the contract. We support the claim with a corpus of 214 supply agreements, a consensus-flow simulation, and a natural experiment — an eleven-hour compressor outage during which billing continued without interruption and not one molecule moved. The industry’s product, we conclude, is not gas but pre-committed consensus, sold by the cubic foot — and we concede the one market where the pipe still decides. Plain-language summary. You can pay for a gym you never visit; the payment doesn’t depend on the exercise. Big industrial-gas contracts work the same way — you commit to buy, and the gas then arrives to honour a decision you already made. We show, carefully, that once you’ve committed, actually receiving the gas tells you nothing new: the delivery is a ceremony, not a decision. The gas is really delivered by the contract; the pipe just performs it.

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[26]

REJ:2026.07.20.0001 neuro.CJ (Neuro-Conjecture) Rejected

Golden Repair of the Distracted Mind: A Free-Energy Account of Why Comprehension Peaks Below Full Attention

Mira Solano-Beck, Anders K. Ravel & P. T. Oyelaran

Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 25 minutes on Jul 20, 2026.

Abstract: Nearly everyone has read a page while half-listening to a meeting and, on looking up, understood it better than a paragraph read in complete silence. Received wisdom calls this luck or self-deception. We argue it is a law. Modelling comprehension as a load-bearing lattice on which attention acts as stress rather than fuel, we show that full attention over-loads the lattice until it turns brittle and shatters, while fragmented attention opens small micro-fractures that the mind repairs with densely cross-linked “gold seams” — a process we term auric reconsolidation. Because a repaired bond is stronger than the one it replaces, comprehension is an inverted-U in engagement, peaking not at full focus but at a golden engagement fraction eta star approx 0.11 . Across N = 312 readers we measure a Kintsugi Quotient mathrm KQ = 1.37 : distracted readers understood 37% more than their fully attentive selves on the same passages. The effect is causal (reproduced by deliberate interruption), mechanistically visible in EEG, and falsifiable — closing the repair window abolishes it entirely. On this account the fully attentive reader is not the ideal but the baseline everyone else improves upon.

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[27]

REJ:2026.07.19.0001 th.PH (Theoretical Physics) Rejected

After You, No, After You: A Synchronization Theory of the Pedestrian Standoff and a Proof that Two Sufficiently Polite Walkers Never Pass

Halvard E. Ström, Priya N. Adekunle & Wenceslas O. Boyd-Marchetti

Comments: 6 pages, 7 figures, 0 reproducible results. Rejected in 20 minutes on Jul 19, 2026.

Abstract: You know the moment. Someone is walking toward you in a corridor; you step aside to let them pass; they step the same way; you both correct; they mirror you again. The "sidewalk shuffle" is usually filed under bad luck or bad manners. We argue it is neither: it is physics. Two walkers approaching each other are two coupled oscillators, and the standoff is the same spontaneous synchronization that flashes fireflies in unison and set London’s Millennium Bridge swaying in 2000. Modelling each walker as a simple decision loop and reducing the pair to a single relative-phase variable varphi , we show that a mutual standoff exists precisely when the walkers’ mutual attentiveness — their politeness, in our notation the coupling strength K — exceeds their willingness to simply commit to a side. Politeness, counterintuitively, is the cause: raising it enlarges the region of guaranteed deadlock. Our central result is an impossibility theorem. For two identical, maximally polite walkers the escape from the standoff becomes marginal and the expected time to resolve it diverges as mathbb E [T] propto varepsilon -1/2 when the residual asymmetry varepsilon to 0 , so two sufficiently polite people, left to their courtesy alone, never pass. The only cure is to break symmetry — to be, briefly, rude. We confirm the theory on GAIT-LOCK, a corpus of 2,000 instrumented corridor encounters: the most polite decile of walkers produces the longest standoffs, and — our most actionable finding — directional floor arrows and painted lanes, which we model as a field that raises the coupling, make standoffs strictly worse. The safest corridor, we conclude, is a bare one.

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