{"dossiers":[{"portfolio_id":"EXP03-POSTHOC-01","plain_language_title":"Testing Hidden Patterns in Library Exposure","one_sentence_summary":"This post-hoc candidate proposes an offline test of whether coupled exposure patterns persist across digital-library updates and whether targeting those patterns would outperform ordinary monitoring and direct category constraints.","problem_plain":"Digital libraries usually monitor engagement and exposure one item or category at a time. That can miss a combination of modest subject, format, branch, or creator-group imbalances that persists or grows through repeated ranking updates. Such a pattern could steadily narrow what patrons discover even while average engagement and every individual category measure appear acceptable. It is not yet known whether these cross-cycle patterns occur reproducibly in an actual library system.","proposal_plain":"Using deidentified records from eight ranking-update cycles, analysts would represent each cycle as exposure and engagement deviations across policy-approved resource groups. They would fit a restricted model on six cycles to estimate which combinations persist, decay, or grow, while controlling for catalog availability and query mix. Two sealed cycles would test whether this model predicts exposure better than ordinary category-by-category monitoring. Only then would offline replay compare carefully bounded, mode-targeted ranking adjustments with direct per-category constraints. Nothing would change for patrons. The proposed control would be rejected if it failed utility, privacy, representation, conditioning, residual-error, or stability limits.","transfer_plain":"The transferred archetype decomposes a changing system into combinations that evolve together. Here, those combinations are recurring mixtures of library-resource exposure deviations, and their gains describe whether they fade or grow between updates. The mapping is plausible but structurally weak because library discovery is nonlinear, partly human-driven, and represented by only a few observed transitions.","why_it_advanced":"This candidate was identified only after Experiment 3 through a stricter combined opportunity screen. It is a post-hoc survivor, not a preregistered experimental success. It advanced because library studies document exposure disparities and recommender feedback effects, while an offline, reversible test offers strong safeguards despite substantial data and identification gaps.","prior_art_and_open_claim":"The individual parts already have adjacent prior art: dynamic exposure controls, spectral analysis of recommender feedback, and data-driven mode decomposition with control all exist. The narrower unresolved claim is whether a low-rank operator over approved library-resource groups finds reproducible cross-cycle modes and whether targeting them produces better held-out exposure equity and retrieval utility than both category monitoring and direct category constraints. The search did not establish that library-specific combination or its added value.","test_and_decision":"Preregister a zero-deployment retrospective study using eight consistently defined cycles. First calculate whether five training transitions contain enough information for the proposed state dimension; stop unless a justified low-rank restriction makes estimation credible. Fit category-lag and modal models on cycles one through six, then evaluate prediction, conditioning, residuals, alignment, and spectral separation on cycles seven and eight. Advance to offline control replay only if the modal model wins; reject the intervention if it fails to beat direct constraints without harming utility or represented groups.","deployment_and_cost":"The first evidence study is estimated at a rough 2026 resource-equivalent cost of $50,000–$250,000. Initial deployment and operational launch are each estimated at $250,000–$1 million, with $50,000–$250,000 annually. These are assessment bands, not vendor quotes. Deployment would also require logs, platform access, local metadata mapping, and accountable library review.","risks_and_uncertainties":["Analysts could misdescribe statistical modes as traits or preferences of patrons or communities.","The model could conceal missing or poorly cataloged resources by treating their absence as a ranking dynamic.","With few transitions or a small spectral gap, modes could rotate or exchange identities under minor data changes.","Improved modal exposure could come at the cost of retrieval relevance or create harm in an omitted group.","Granular exposure strata could leak private information or lack enough observations for reliable estimation."],"expert_types":["Library discovery and collection-governance specialist","Recommender-systems fairness researcher","Dynamic-systems or system-identification statistician","Privacy and representation reviewer","Library ranking-platform engineer"],"expert_questions":["Can the available logs produce eight consistently defined cycles after catalog, query, seasonal, and policy changes are accounted for?","What effective state dimension is estimable from five training transitions, and what low-rank restriction would be defensible?","Do the fitted modes remain aligned under resampling, alternative group definitions, and both sealed cycles?","Would direct per-category constraints provide equal or better equity and utility with less modeling risk?","Which minimum-support and aggregation rules prevent privacy leakage and the reification of communities?"],"ranking_note":"The harmonized review placed this candidate between ranks 49 and 58, in band D. That score is only a post-hoc reading order using a cost-based affordability proxy; it is neither an experimental endpoint nor evidence of economic value.","source_ids_used":["S1","S2","S3","S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},{"portfolio_id":"EXP06-PARTNER-09","plain_language_title":"A Governed Contest Between Ethnographic Explanations","one_sentence_summary":"This candidate would test, first with fictional data, whether tightly governed comparison of rival ethnographic explanations exposes cherry-picking and overreach without sacrificing context or unfairly creating a canonical winner.","problem_plain":"When several research teams explain why neighborhood mutual-aid organizations survived or dissolved, scarce publication and funding slots can reward selective cases, privileged contextual help, larger teams, rhetorical confidence, or coordinated submissions. Ordinary peer review sees completed manuscripts but may not reveal how teams chose evidence, handled contradictory episodes, or influenced one another. A winning account can then be treated as authoritative, potentially narrowing later inquiry and misrepresenting the people whose records supplied the evidence.","proposal_plain":"Editors and an authorized data steward would run a secure, staged comparison under a rulebook fixed before analysis. Eligible teams would receive the same corpus, clarification archive, funded analyst hours, workspace period, and submission format. Each would preregister its main explanation, expected observations, scope, case-selection rule, and treatment of contrary evidence before viewing reserved cases. Submissions would map claims to episodes, alternatives, negative cases, and uncertainty. Independent reviewers would score several dimensions rather than one proxy, reproduce leading analyses, and audit misconduct indicators. Two complementary explanations could be commissioned, while follow-up funding would seek a discriminating observation rather than declare one cultural truth. Awards would remain nonexclusive and appealable.","transfer_plain":"The bounded-rivalry archetype becomes a research contest with scarce commissions, equal resources, explicit legal moves, audits, sanctions, appeals, and limits on winner power. The structural mapping is detailed: competition is confined to comparable explanations of one bounded outcome, while participant identity, credibility, lived meaning, and representational authority remain outside the contest.","why_it_advanced":"It qualified only for the separately calibrated empirical-partner lane, not strict success. Existing practices show that secure qualitative-data review, preregistration, claim-to-evidence annotation, registered reports, and adversarial collaboration are feasible. However, no field study, adopter commitment, prevalence estimate, or evidence of the combined package’s comparative benefit exists.","prior_art_and_open_claim":"Nearly every epistemic component has adjacent prior art, including qualitative preregistration, transparent claim annotation, registered reports, controlled repositories, and empirical adversarial collaboration. The remaining claim concerns their governed combination: whether equal access, reserved cases, multidimensional scoring, leader audits, resource limits, and nonexclusive portfolio selection detect more planted cherry-picking and unsupported scope claims than ordinary review, without materially reducing contextual adequacy, increasing status sensitivity, or hardening one explanation into a canon.","test_and_decision":"Preregister a synthetic trial using a fictional 18-organization corpus and eight engineered submissions. Randomly assign blinded panels to the bounded arena, ordinary peer review, or a plural symposium, then repeat after changing team names and status cues. Advance only if the arena detects at least 80% of planted cherry-picking or fabrication, keeps false misconduct referrals at or below 10%, maintains rank concordance of at least 0.80, preserves contextual adequacy within 0.30 standard deviations of the symposium, and improves negative-case visibility and scope calibration.","deployment_and_cost":"The synthetic first-evidence study carries a rough 2026 resource-equivalent estimate of $50,000–$250,000. Startup and operational launch are each estimated at $250,000–$1 million, with annual recurring costs also at $250,000–$1 million. These are not quotations and omit uncertain incident, litigation, and follow-up-grant costs.","risks_and_uncertainties":["A common rubric may falsely treat distinct interpretive traditions as directly comparable.","Reserved cases may reward simplified prediction and penalize legitimate contextual revision.","Shared records and evidence maps may expose protected context or detach statements from relationships needed to interpret them.","Resource limits may still favor teams with existing code, theory, staff, or tacit familiarity.","Collusion screens may mistake common intellectual lineage or legitimate collaboration for misconduct signals requiring inquiry alone, not guilt findings."],"expert_types":["Qualitative and ethnographic methods scholar","Research-integrity and journal-governance specialist","Qualitative-data repository steward","Human-subjects, privacy, or IRB specialist","Participant or source-community governance representative"],"expert_questions":["Can reviewers reliably distinguish planted evidentiary weakness from legitimate differences between interpretive traditions?","Do reserved cases measure explanatory adequacy, or do they systematically reward decontextualized prediction?","Which materials can be shared, mapped, and reproduced without violating consent, cultural-access rules, or confidentiality?","How should panel-composition sensitivity and false misconduct referrals affect the decision to stop?","Would a plural symposium, registered report, or collaborative follow-up produce comparable integrity gains with less burden and canonization risk?"],"ranking_note":"The harmonized review placed this candidate between ranks 56 and 58, in band D. This is a post-hoc reading aid, not an experimental endpoint or value estimate; its affordability input substitutes cost bands for an independently measured pilot timeline.","source_ids_used":["S1","S2","S3","S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},{"portfolio_id":"EXP04-STRICT-03","plain_language_title":"Mapping Coupled City Budget Deadlocks","one_sentence_summary":"This candidate proposes a retrospective test of whether combinations of moderate budget disagreements predict bargaining trouble better than ordinary issue-by-issue tracking and can be linked to reversible procedural responses.","problem_plain":"City budget negotiators bargain over packages covering revenue, staffing, capital projects, debt, reserves, and district allocations. Officials usually track each disagreement separately, although movement on one issue can change positions on several others. A combination of moderate gaps may therefore persist, oscillate, or grow while no single issue looks exceptional. The negotiation can drift toward repeated rejection, rushed concessions, or a missed legal deadline before an issue-by-issue dashboard provides a clear warning.","proposal_plain":"For one bounded budget process, analysts would turn formally recorded, caucus-level proposal gaps into a small vector for each bargaining round. A local model would estimate which combinations of gaps decay, persist, oscillate, or grow. A mode would become actionable only if it met preregistered gain, persistence, resampling, reconstruction, and deadline-risk rules. Analysts would then model whether an already authorized procedural step—such as reordering discussion, separating a package, holding a joint factual briefing, or requesting simultaneous clarification—selectively reduces that mode. The facilitator could make a nonbinding recommendation, but elected officials would retain all authority over offers and votes. Drift, residual, or spectral-gap failures would suspend the dashboard.","transfer_plain":"The mode-decomposition archetype is instantiated as a map of how combined budget gaps change between bargaining rounds. Its modes are weighted packages of disagreement, and their gains indicate decay, growth, or oscillation. The transfer is structurally explicit, but its usefulness depends on an approximately stable local process and enough comparable rounds—both currently unshown.","why_it_advanced":"This candidate passed Experiment 4’s strict researched-candidate bar. That endpoint reflects the experiment’s screening criteria only; it does not establish real-world validation, novelty, deployment authority, or economic impact. It advanced with a falsifiable archival test, clear comparators and stopping rules, identifiable public authorities, and reversible, nonbinding use.","prior_art_and_open_claim":"Adjacent systems already track city budget amendments, support multi-issue negotiation, analyze negotiation processes over time, and decompose fitted dynamic operators. The open claim is narrower: within one stable city budget process, can an aggregate proposal-gap model find a resampling-stable coupled mode that improves held-out prediction over separate issue gaps, deadlines, official tracking, and observable shocks, leaves no consequential structured residual, and maps selectively to a procedure the authorized body can reverse? That claim remains unvalidated.","test_and_decision":"Run an eight-week archival feasibility study with one consenting city and no live recommendation. Inventory formal packages, amendments, votes, and dated forecasts; stop if they cannot form reproducible aggregate snapshots. Preregister no more than eight coordinates, rank and sample rules, regularization, stability and spectral thresholds, residual limits, and both comparators. Use forward-chaining held-out tests. Advance only if a stable mode beats separate issue gaps plus deadline and the official tracker plus observable shocks, survives removal of shock rounds, and maps selectively to an authorized reversible procedure.","deployment_and_cost":"First evidence is estimated at a rough 2026 resource-equivalent cost of $10,000–$50,000. Initial startup is $50,000–$250,000; operational launch is $250,000–$1 million; and recurring annual cost is $50,000–$250,000. These are not vendor quotes. Live use would additionally require local legal, records, accessibility, governance, and procedural authorization.","risks_and_uncertainties":["Too few comparable bargaining rounds could produce an overfit or rank-deficient model.","Modes might reflect how clerks recorded proposals rather than how bargaining actually changed.","Officials or the public might interpret a descriptive mode as evidence of motive, loyalty, or blame.","A nominally procedural recommendation could redistribute agenda power or public visibility among constituencies.","Negotiators could manipulate recorded positions, or conflict could move into an omitted dimension while the retained mode appears to improve."],"expert_types":["Municipal budget-process and public-law specialist","Negotiation and political-process researcher","Dynamic-mode decomposition or system-identification statistician","Neutral public-sector facilitator","Public-records, privacy, and data-governance counsel"],"expert_questions":["Does the archived process contain enough independent full-state snapshots to estimate the preregistered model reliably?","Do mode shapes and gains remain stable under resampling, minor coordinate changes, and removal of shock rounds?","Does the modal model beat both comparators on held-out prediction or reconstruction by the declared margin?","Can any procedural lever be shown to affect the risky mode selectively rather than merely accompany broader political change?","Who has legal authority to approve each recommended procedure, derived-data retention rule, and publication decision?"],"ranking_note":"The harmonized review ranked this candidate 59th in every profile, in band D. That post-hoc order does not alter its strict-success endpoint and does not measure value; the pilot-speed input was only a cost-band affordability proxy.","source_ids_used":["S1","S2","S3","S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]}]}