Absolute Advantage

A per-good comparison of output per unit input between two producers — establishing that productivity differences exist (the precondition for gains from trade) while deliberately not settling who should specialize in what.


Absorption Phase

Carve out the rising limb of a drug's plasma curve as a distinct stage with its own two determinants — how fast the dose crosses into circulation and how much survives to arrive — so before-circulation variability is not confused with what happens after.


Abstract Syntax Tree

Represent a program's grammatical structure as a recursive tree built from a parser, keeping the meaning-bearing constructs and discarding surface details — whitespace, comments, redundant brackets — so two sources that differ only in formatting yield the identical tree.


Accelerator Effect

The macroeconomic mechanism by which a change in the level of consumer demand produces a proportionally larger swing in investment, because desired capital tracks output at a fixed ratio — so it is the rate of change of demand, not the level, that drives capital ordering.


Access URL

Reach a resource through a published, dereferenceable handle that names a route rather than the bytes — so location, storage, and hosting stay hidden behind a routing layer and identity can outlive the link.


Accessibility

The design commitment to keep a system perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust for the full distribution of intended users including the sensory, motor, cognitive, and infrastructural tails — by designing to those tails rather than to the median.


Acquisition event

Record the punctual moment an actor took possession of a resource — with a before-state, after-state, transfer instrument, and timestamp — so isolated holdings become a walkable chain of title that provenance can be reconstructed from.


Action Research

Braid inquiry and situation-change into one repeating plan-act-observe-reflect cycle in which researchers and participants overlap, pursuing usable practical change and transferable knowledge together under the rule that neither may be sacrificed for the other.


Active Failure

The frontline operator's act at the sharp end that completes a hazard path by aligning with holes latent conditions had pre-positioned in a system's layered defenses — the proximate, visible half of Reason's Swiss cheese model.


AD–AS Model

The workhorse macroeconomic framework that plots the economy as the intersection of an aggregate-demand and an aggregate-supply schedule in price-level × output space, reading disturbances as curve shifts and diagnosing their source from a four-quadrant typology.


Ad Baculum (Appeal to Force)

The fallacy of securing acceptance of a claim by threatening the listener rather than giving reasons bearing on its truth — a relevance error in which a payoff-altering signal is substituted for a truth-bearing one, so compliant assent and warranted belief come apart.


Ad Hominem

Reject or discredit a claim by substituting an attack on its source — character, motives, circumstances, inconsistency, or affiliation — for evaluation of the claim and its evidence.


Ad Misericordiam (Appeal to Pity)

Win acceptance of a claim by evoking sympathy or pity rather than supplying evidence, substituting an affective shift in the audience for epistemic support on a proposition that is independent of the speaker's circumstances.


Ad Nauseam (Argument from Repetition)

Diagnose the fallacy of treating a claim as established by bare repetition, where frequency raises felt credibility through processing fluency while adding zero new evidential warrant.


Ad Populum (Appeal to the People)

Name the fallacy of treating a claim as established by its popularity, and expose the defect with one test — did the believers independently weigh the same evidence, or inherit the belief through a social channel? — that separates warranted aggregation from an influence cascade wearing the same clothes.


Ad Verecundiam (Appeal to Authority)

The informal fallacy of treating a claim as established by an authority's credential under conditions where the citation carries no evidential weight — the credential being a signal that load-bearing conditions (domain competence, evidence access, disinterest, convergence) hold, used as though it guaranteed what it only heuristically suggests.


Adaptive Reuse

Retain an existing building's physical substance — structure, envelope, site, silhouette — while replacing the function it serves, fitting a new program into the inherited constraint envelope rather than designing a building around the program.


Adsorption

Molecules partition out of a bulk fluid to concentrate on a solid surface bearing a finite population of binding sites, producing a saturating relationship between bulk concentration and surface loading captured by an adsorption isotherm.


Adsorption Isotherm

At fixed temperature, trace how much adsorbate accumulates on a solid surface against its bulk concentration, then fit the curve to a functional form whose shape both extracts the surface's capacity and affinity and tests whether its sites are uniform, heterogeneous, or multilayer.


Adverse Drug Event

Harm to a patient caused by the pharmacology of a drug rather than the process of delivering it — bracketing mechanistically unlike injuries under one causal structure so the prescribing question becomes a benefit-to-harm ratio, not a binary safety verdict.


Adverse Drug Reaction

Classify an unintended, harmful response arising under correct drug use — not through any administration error — by an ABCDEF taxonomy whose pivotal dose-related-versus-idiosyncratic split reads off predictability, remedy, and whether trials could ever have caught it.


Adverse Event

Record an unfavorable medical occurrence during treatment without yet attributing it to the treatment, preserving a causally agnostic outer surveillance category from which drug-causal events are separated by explicit causality assessment.


Aesthetic Coherence

The holistic judgement that a composed artifact's parts belong together under a shared organising constraint, recognised faster than analysed — detectable from any patch yet localisable to none — with variety resolving into unity rather than accumulating as juxtaposition.


Agenda Building

Explain why some issues climb into an institution's finite attention while most do not — through a distributed multi-actor competition of entrepreneurs, focusing events, and amplification loops — so a docket reflects which ingredients aligned, not an objective ranking of importance.


Agenda Distortion

The structural pattern in which the volume of media attention an issue receives becomes the audience's cue for its importance — even though coverage is allocated by newsworthiness and shareability, criteria that have little to do with actual significance.


Agenda-setting

The mass-communication finding that media determine not what people think but what they think about — by allocating prominence to some issues over others, gatekeepers reweight the salience distribution audiences use to rank what concerns them, without moving attitudes.


Aggregate Demand

The total planned expenditure on final goods and services at a given price level, summed as C + I + G + (X − M) and matched against aggregate supply to set short-run output and the price level.


Aggregate Supply

The total real output producers will supply at a given general price level — sloping up in the short run because wages are sticky, but vertical at potential output in the long run once the binding constraint migrates from nominal rigidity to capacity.


AI Supply-Chain Attack

The compromise of an upstream AI-pipeline component — training data, weights, packages, eval sets — by an adversary who exploits the deployer's trust in the producer's channel rather than breaching the perimeter, so the poisoned artefact is imported voluntarily.


Alabama Paradox

The failure of house-monotonicity in Hamilton's largest-remainders apportionment: increasing the total number of seats can shrink a constituency's allocation, because raising the house size reorders the fractional-remainder ranking that deals surplus seats.


Alarm Fatigue

Reframe an operator's habitual silencing of clinical alarms as the rational response to a warning channel whose predictive value has collapsed, relocating the fix from the operator's discipline to the channel's specificity.


Albedo

The dimensionless fraction (0 to 1) of incident shortwave radiation a surface reflects — so its complement, the absorbed fraction, drives temperature, and its self-reinforcing feedback gives it disproportionate climate leverage.


Alternative label

Admit non-preferred surface forms that resolve silently to a concept's one canonical label — widening the search surface so any variant finds the concept, while the preferred form alone governs every display and authoritative output.


Allais Paradox

An engineered pair of lottery choices whose majority preference pattern (A over B, D over C) violates the independence axiom of expected-utility theory, isolating the certainty effect as the culprit.


Allee Effect

Below a critical density a population's per-capita growth falls instead of rising, because the processes that need conspecifics break down — so low density itself becomes a demographic liability that can drive extinction even with ample resources.


Allen's Rule

Predict endotherm appendage proportions from climate via one thermoregulatory geometry — shorter, compact limbs and ears toward the cold to conserve heat; longer, vascularized ones toward the heat to radiate it.


Allophone

One of the context-conditioned phonetic realisations of a single phoneme — predictable from environment and non-contrastive, so substituting one for another never changes which word is recognised, as decided by complementary distribution and the minimal-pair test.


Alluvial Fan

The fan-shaped sediment landform built where a confined, sediment-laden channel exits a steep upland at a slope break, loses transport competence, and deposits its load coarse-to-fine as successive lobes avulse radially around the apex.


Ambiguity Aversion

The regularity that people prefer options with known probabilities over those with unknown ones even at equal expected value — a Savage-violating tilt toward the precise that the single-prior model can't represent, repaired by scoring acts against a set of priors.


Anagnorisis

Aristotle's moment of dramatic recognition — a character's discrete move from ignorance to knowledge of a load-bearing fact about identity or agency that retroactively reorganizes the meaning of every prior scene rather than adding a new event.


Analytic Memo

Externalise interpretive reasoning in writing during analysis — dated, typed, indexed memos sitting between raw evidence and finished claims — so the analysis becomes generative, auditable, and revisable.


Annotation Drift

The gradual, undocumented shift over time in how annotators apply an unchanged rubric, so identical instances get different labels — a silent recalibration of a measurement instrument, invisible to within-slice agreement and detectable only by re-annotating frozen gold.


Anonymous Sourcing

Publish information with the source's identity hidden from the audience but known to and vouched for by a reputation-staking intermediary, so the intermediary's verification procedure substitutes for the source's named credibility in the audience's trust calculus.


Anscombe's Quartet

Four hand-built bivariate datasets that share nearly identical low-order summary statistics yet have radically different scatter geometries, demonstrating that summaries are lossy projections and that one must visualize before granting any parametric summary authority over the data.


Antimicrobial Resistance Selection

Read the erosion of an antimicrobial's effectiveness as directional selection — the agent's use prunes susceptible organisms and spares pre-existing resistant variants — so a failing protocol reports a shifted population, not a degraded drug, and the user of the agent is the source of the pressure.


Antithesis

Sharpen a contrast by fusing two primitives — parallel grammatical form and opposed content — so a matched syntactic frame delivers the opposition at a controlled, audible beat.


Apologia

Analyze or build a defense of impugned conduct as a combination of four strategy primitives — denial, bolstering, differentiation, transcendence — where denial and transcendence are mutually exclusive, so mixing them produces an incoherent, self-damaging apologia.


Apportionment Paradox

Recognize that integer rounding of real-valued quotas makes four fairness axioms — quota, house, population, and new-states monotonicity — jointly unsatisfiable, so choosing an apportionment rule is choosing which guarantee to surrender.


Arrow–Debreu Model

Prove that a competitive economy has a set of prices at which every market clears at once, by treating each date-and-state-indexed good as its own priced commodity and applying a fixed-point argument to joint excess demand.


Arrow's Impossibility Theorem

Prove that no ranked-preference voting rule over three or more alternatives can jointly satisfy four minimal fairness axioms — certifying the 'fair in every respect' region of design space empty and reducing the debate to which axiom to knowingly sacrifice.


Aspect Qualifier

Attach a controlled modifier from a small closed list to a subject descriptor so the indexed claim names a topic in one specific sense — Aspirin/adverse effects, not aspirin-as-such — factoring topic from aspect to gain precision without vocabulary bloat.


Assembly Bonus Effect

The small-group finding that on the right task types a group's output exceeds even its best member's predicted performance — a positive interaction residual from mutual error-correction and partial-insight combination that no aggregation of individual scores captures.


Assurance Game

The stag-hunt game in which each player strictly prefers to cooperate if and only if the others do, producing two self-enforcing equilibria — a payoff-dominant cooperative one and a risk-dominant defection one — so the binding constraint is mutual confidence, not incentives.


Asymmetric-Amplitude Error Correction

A correction issued through the same channel as the original assertion but at systematically lower amplitude, so it reaches far fewer receivers and population belief stays stuck on the now-incorrect original even though a correction is formally on the record.


Atomistic Fallacy

The inferential error of reading a within-individual relationship directly onto a group or population, ignoring the contextual variance operating only at the group level — the mirror image of the ecological fallacy.


Atonality

Deliberately withhold a tonal centre by constructing pitch relations that resist tonicisation, denying the ear the gravitational hierarchy it uses to parse tonal grammar, so a constructed no-privileged-pitch surface is organised by motif, interval, rhythm, and texture instead.


Attachment

A behavioral-motivational system that regulates proximity between a vulnerable individual and a protective figure — a safe haven sought under threat and a secure base enabling exploration — whose learned expectations form an internal working model that classifies into stable attachment styles.


Attentional Bias

The systematic tilt in how finite attention is allocated across the perceptual field — pulled by anxiety, reward history, depression, or expertise rather than sensory salience — a property of the perceiver, at perceptual selection, upstream of judgment.


Attenuation Bias

The systematic shrinkage of an OLS regression coefficient toward zero caused by classical random noise in the regressor — the estimate equals the true slope times the reliability ratio, a known-sign distortion invertible by dividing out that ratio or instrumenting.


Attribute Substitution

The dual-process mechanism behind a whole family of judgment biases: when a target attribute is hard to assess, the mind unconsciously swaps in an easier, correlated attribute and reports its value — producing a confident but directionally biased answer.


Attrition Trap

Diagnose a grinding campaign as failing-without-being-lost when its operational clock runs but its strategic clock has stopped — because the conversion assumption linking losses to strategic transition was falsified — and lock-in prevents exit.


Attrition Warfare

Seek military decision by exhausting the adversary's war-making capacity faster than it can be replaced, reducing a war's outcome to a four-rate ledger — own and adversary depletion against own and adversary replacement — read against a will-threshold.


Atwood's Law

Jeff Atwood's observation that any application that can be written in JavaScript eventually will be — naming the dynamic by which a general-purpose default's accumulated ecosystem advantage colonises a specialist's niche once it crosses a threshold, regardless of the technical gap.


Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC)

Support or replace failing speech not by handing over a device but by running a clinical pathway — assess residual capability across four channels, match a modality to it, design a core vocabulary, train the communication partners, and migrate the system as the condition changes.


Authentication Failure

The breakdown of a system's identity-verification, in which a claim is accepted when it should not be — because the procedure checked too little, the wrong evidence, or evidence an impostor could produce — yielding a session that inherits the real actor's privileges and corrupts every control conditioned on 'who is this?'


Authority Bias

Decompose any act of deference into a content term and a source-cue term, and flag the upward tilt as bias whenever authority signals — titles, uniforms, confident bearing — inflate credence beyond the authority's genuine expertise in the specific claim.


Authority Record

Fix one governed identity per entity in a curated registry — preferred label, variant set, disambiguating notes, and a persistent identifier — so every catalog entry cites it rather than re-spelling the name, and one edit propagates everywhere.


Authorized access point

Assign each entity one rule-built, human-readable string that serves at once as heading, retrieval key, and cross-reference anchor — with a disambiguating qualifier carried in the string so two namesakes never collapse into one index entry.


Automation Bias

The human-factors regularity in which operators over-weight an automated system's outputs and under-weight contradicting evidence, so the human-automation team can perform worse on rare anomalies than the unaided operator would — through commission errors (acting on a false recommendation) or omission errors (staying passive when the system is silent).


Availability Heuristic

The systematic human tendency to judge how frequent or probable an event is by how easily instances of it come to mind, so retrieval fluency stands in for frequency and estimates track what is memorable rather than what is common.


Available-to-Promise

Gate every new delivery commitment against a date-bucketed residual curve — on-hand plus scheduled receipts minus prior promises — so a request is accepted only if no future bucket goes negative, distinguishing what is physically present from what is contractually free.


Axial Coding

Re-link the fragmented categories from open coding around a fixed relational paradigm (conditions / phenomenon / context / intervening conditions / actions / consequences), turning an atomised code list into a relational map ready for theoretical integration.


Axonal Transport

Supply a neuron's remote, synthetically helpless synaptic terminals from its central soma via motor proteins walking microtubule tracks — kinesin outward, dynein inward — so a failure starves the terminal first, producing a distal dying-back signature.


Backfire Effect

The phenomenon in which evidence contradicting an identity-bound belief produces not revision but firmer commitment, because the challenge is processed as an attack on self and parried by counter-arguing that rehearses and strengthens the original position.


Backorder

The fulfilment arrangement in which an order is accepted as a binding obligation despite a stock-out, becoming a queued claim against future supply tracked in a visible ledger and clocked against an estimated resupply, rather than being refused as a lost sale.


Balance-Sheet Recession

A contraction caused not by weak income but by impaired private balance sheets — after a debt-financed boom collapses, actors switch from profit maximization to paying down debt, so monetary policy goes inert and only fiscal deficits sustain demand until balance sheets heal.


Balassa-Samuelson Effect

The mechanism by which countries with fast-growing tradable-sector productivity end up with systematically higher price levels and appreciating real exchange rates — because tradable wage gains spill through mobile labor into non-tradable prices that cross-border arbitrage cannot compete away.


Baldwin Effect

A learned, practiced, or behaviorally acquired trait becomes easier to produce across generations as selection favors heritable variants that reduce its acquisition cost, without inheriting the learned state itself.


Ballast-Water Transfer

The marine mechanism by which a ship entrains a port's pelagic community in ballast water taken on for stability and discharges it at a destination — an accidental, infrastructure-coupled vector whose commercial route, not ecology, sets which ecosystems become biologically linked.


Bank Run

A self-reinforcing mass withdrawal or refusal to renew short-term claims on a financial institution, where a finite liquid pool rewards early exit and each withdrawal worsens later claimants' prospects, so even a solvent institution can be drained by the race.


Barnum Effect

The tendency to accept vague, high-base-rate personality descriptions as strikingly accurate accounts of oneself when framed as personally intended — because the reader privately narrows a statement that actually fits almost everyone.


Barrier to Entry

Read market power off the durable, asymmetric cost of joining a market rather than the current count of firms — sorting each barrier into structural, strategic, or legal to select the remedy that can actually remove it.


Base Rate Fallacy

The systematic human tendency to underweight or ignore the prior probability of a hypothesis when vivid, specific evidence is available, so a posterior estimate collapses toward the likelihood instead of tracking Bayes' rule.


Basis-Risk Failure

Diagnose why a hedge collapses at the worst moment: the proxy instrument, chosen for its calm-market correlation with the exposure, decouples under stress, so protection that passed every ex-ante metric evaporates exactly when it is needed.


Battle of the Sexes

A 2×2 game in which both players prefer coordinating on some common outcome to failing, but each prefers a different one — so the conflict is not whether to cooperate but which of two cooperative agreements is reached, a distributional fight the payoff matrix cannot settle.


Baumol's Cost Disease

Explain why labor-intensive sectors with little productivity growth become relatively more expensive as wages rise with productive sectors through a shared labor market while stagnant-sector output per worker does not.


Bayes Factor

The ratio of the marginal likelihoods of the data under two specific models, isolating the data's weight of evidence between them and updating prior model odds to posterior odds multiplicatively — with an automatic Occam penalty on flexible models.


Bayesian Nash Equilibrium

The solution concept for games of incomplete information: recast not knowing an opponent's payoffs as Nature drawing each player's private type from a common prior, then solve for a fixed point of type-conditional strategy functions where every type's action is a best response in expectation and the supporting beliefs are Bayes-consistent.


Bayesian Persuasion

Model how a sender who cannot lie — committed to a public, truthful signal structure faced by a Bayes-rational receiver — still shifts the receiver's action by choosing how informative the signal is, solved geometrically as the concave closure of the sender's value over posteriors.


Beat Reporting

The journalistic practice of assigning a reporter to sustained coverage of a bounded subject area, so accumulated tacit knowledge and a cultivated source ecology yield depth no generalist can match — while risking beat capture, the drift of the reporter's frame toward the sources'.


Beauty Contest Game

Have players simultaneously pick a number to land closest to p times the group average, so that iterated best-response contracts the target toward zero — turning the infinite tower of 'what others expect others to expect' into a single measurable reasoning-depth scalar read off the choices.


Begging the Question

Detect an argument whose premises presuppose the very conclusion they are offered to support — valid, even sound, yet dialectically empty — by testing whether the premises would survive an interlocutor who denies the conclusion.


Belief Bias

The tendency to judge an argument's logical validity by the believability of its conclusion rather than its form — a cheap plausibility check displacing an effortful logical-form check — exposed by crossing validity against believability in a 2×2.


Bellman Equation

The recursive optimality condition V(s) = max over a of [R(s,a) + γ·E V(s')] that reframes a sequential decision problem as a fixed point in value space, collapsing a combinatorial search over policy sequences into a solvable |S|-dimensional problem.


Bell's Law of Computer Classes

The empirical generalization that roughly every decade a new, cheaper, smaller class of computer emerges on a new platform technology and displaces the prior class from volume dominance — a discrete threshold crossing derived from continuous Moore scaling.


Ben Franklin Effect

The finding that doing a voluntary, costly favor for someone increases the doer's liking of them — the causal arrow running from act to attitude, as cognitive dissonance is cheaply resolved by revising the attitude to fit what one has already done.


Benford's Law

Score a dataset's honesty by checking whether its leading digits follow the fixed logarithmic curve log₁₀((d+1)/d) — about 30% start with 1, only 5% with 9 — that scale-spanning multiplicative data must obey.


Benjamini–Hochberg Procedure

A step-up rule that sorts m p-values and rejects through the largest rank k where p(k) ≤ (k/m)·α, bounding the false discovery rate — the expected proportion of false rejections among discoveries — rather than the probability of any false positive.


Bergmann's Rule

The ecogeographic generalization that within a clade of endotherms, colder-climate populations tend to be larger, because the surface-to-volume ratio falls with body size (surface scales as the square, heat-producing volume as the cube), so larger bodies conserve heat.


Bertrand Paradox (Economics)

Compute the extreme corner of price competition — two firms selling an identical good at equal marginal cost price at marginal cost with zero profit — as a deliberately-wrong baseline whose gap to real margins becomes a five-assumption diagnostic audit.


Betteridge's Law of Headlines

The editorial heuristic that any headline phrased as a yes/no question can reliably be answered 'no' — because a reporter who could assert a claim writes it declaratively, so the question mark signals evidence too thin or risky to source.


Bezold Effect

The color-perception phenomenon in which a target's apparent hue shifts toward a finely interspersed surround rather than away from it — assimilation, gated by whether the surround falls inside the visual system's spatial integration window.


Bias Blind Spot

Explain why people spot biases in others but not themselves — self-assessment defaults to an introspective channel (a felt sense of careful reasoning) that is constitutively blind to the automatic biases the behavioral channel reveals in others, so awareness of a bias does not close the gap.


Big O Notation

Classify a function by its order of growth — discarding constant factors and small-input detail — so algorithms can be compared by how they scale rather than how fast they run on one machine.


Biogeochemical Cycle

Track how a chemical element moves through Earth's reservoirs via biological, geological, and chemical transformations, treating its conserved mass as a closeable budget of stocks, fluxes, and residence times.


Biogeochemical Cycling

Model the circulation of a conserved Earth-system element through compartmental reservoirs — each with a stock and residence time — linked by canonical transformations and governed by a rate-limiting bottleneck, with mass balance forced to close.


Biological Pump

The suite of biological and gravitational processes that transfer carbon fixed in the sunlit surface ocean down into the deep ocean and sediments, maintaining the surface-deep dissolved-inorganic-carbon gradient that keeps atmospheric CO2 far lower than it would otherwise be.


Bioturbation

Recognize that resident organisms continuously rework the sediment they inhabit — mixing grains, ventilating pore water, and transporting material — so an inhabited substrate is never undisturbed and its layered record is smeared to the mixing depth.


Birthday-Number Effect

The small implicit preference for numbers in one's own birth date over neutral ones — a valence-transfer effect from the implicit-egotism family, real only in the residual that survives controls for a number's baseline pleasantness and cohort base rates.


Bit Rot

The failure mode in which an untouched software artefact loses usefulness over time not because its bytes changed but because its environment moved — 'working' being a relation between a static artefact and a churning world that erodes without upkeep.


Black Elephant

A high-impact hazard that is widely known and clearly foreseeable yet collectively ignored until it materialises as a disaster narrated as a surprise — foreseeable-but-unowned, failing at the incentive layer, not the knowledge layer.


Black Hole Information Paradox

Sharpen the conflict between quantum unitarity and general relativity at an evaporating black hole into a measurable constraint — the Page curve, whose entropy must rise and turn back to zero if information is preserved rather than destroyed.


Black–Scholes Model

Price an option without forecasting the stock by noting that a continuously rebalanced stock-and-bond portfolio can replicate its payoff exactly, so no-arbitrage forces the price to equal that replication cost — leaving volatility as the only input to estimate.


Bloom Filter

A probabilistic data structure that answers set-membership from a compact bit array and k hash functions with a deliberate one-sided error — it may report false positives but never false negatives — so a negative answer is safe to act on.


Blue Carbon

Treat organic carbon anaerobically preserved in coastal vegetated sediments (mangroves, seagrass, salt marshes) as an asset whose defining feature is a stock built over centuries that disturbance can oxidise over years, so climate value lies in avoided-emission preservation.


Blue-on-Blue Risk

The risk that a force's own friend-or-foe classification mechanism misfires and its engagement rule fires on a friendly — harm that is symmetric and non-recoverable, so the only leverage is preventive, at the identification layer, never at the trigger-puller.


Bonferroni Correction

Control the family-wise probability of any false rejection across m tests by comparing each p-value with alpha/m, or equivalently multiplying each p-value by m, without requiring independence.


Quality inherence

Refuse to let a property exist on its own — bind every attribute to a bearer, a context, and the inherence relation that ties them, so a value with no namable owner is a category error, not a discovery.


Boundary Value Problem

A differential equation on a domain paired with conditions on the domain's boundary, such that the interior solution is a derived consequence of the law plus the edge data rather than freely specified — the equilibrium counterpart of the marchable initial value problem.


Build Trap

Diagnose a team that ships at high velocity yet moves no business outcome — because its measurement, calendar, and incentives are all set to what was built rather than to whether it mattered — by reading those three dials and asking what outcome the team owns.


Bulverism

Assume an opponent's conclusion is false, then explain the psychological or sociological cause of their 'error' — substituting a genetic account of the belief for the logical evaluation that was owed.


Bundling

A seller conditions access to one good on accepting another by offering a combined package, extracting more surplus when component valuations are dispersed and negatively correlated — or leveraging market power in one good to foreclose rivals in a complementary one.


Burkean Pentad

Kenneth Burke's five-term grammar — act, scene, agent, agency, purpose — for diagnosing the motive attributed to a human act, where the privileged pairing (the ratio) is itself the attribution and can be named, compared, and contested.


Bus Factor

The minimum number of team members whose sudden simultaneous loss would halt a project — a per-capability count of how many people could take a subsystem, credential, or relationship over tomorrow, exposing where tacit human knowledge is dangerously concentrated.


Business Cycle

Read the joint state of a whole economy off one phase label on an ordered ring — expansion, peak, contraction, trough, recovery — by tracking position relative to trend and direction of motion rather than the absolute level of activity.


Business Model Canvas

Osterwalder's nine-block single-page template that renders a venture's operating logic all at once — segments, value, channels, revenue, resources, activities, partners, costs — so its components and their interdependencies become simultaneously visible and testable as hypotheses.


Byzantine Generals Problem

Formalize distributed consensus under adversarial faults — collapse the unbounded space of misbehaviors into a fault budget f and a population n, then read whether all loyal participants can agree straight off the proven floor of 3f+1 (or 2f+1 with signatures).


Callback Hell

The readability collapse that results when a sequential chain of asynchronous steps is written as nested continuation callbacks, so indentation depth grows with step count and the code's textual shape inverts the computation's temporal order.


Campbell's Law

When consequential social decisions depend on a quantitative indicator, measured actors game it and distort the process the indicator was meant to monitor.


Canon

The bounded, institutionally policed set of works a tradition treats as exemplary and interpretively authoritative — taught as models, cited to adjudicate disputes, and contested at the boundary — as distinct from the totality of what it has produced or widely read.


Preferred label

Among the many surface forms that could name one concept, have a vocabulary authority choose, declare, and protect exactly one per language as the form the vocabulary speaks in its own voice, demoting the rest to aliases recognized at input but suppressed at output.


CAP Theorem

A distributed data store cannot guarantee consistency and availability at once during a network partition, and since real networks always partition, the architect must choose which to sacrifice when one strikes.


CAP Theorem (and variants)

Characterize any replicated data store by its coordinates on a small set of axes — the forced C-versus-A choice under partition, PACELC's latency-versus-consistency choice at rest, plus granularity dials and the CRDT merge-algebra escape.


Capital Accumulation

Track an economy's whole productive base as one state variable growing under the law of motion ΔK = I − δK, a self-feeding loop of output-saving-investment that diminishing returns brake into a steady state where thrift raises the level but not the long-run growth rate.


Capital Stock

Treat a durable productive resource as a priced stock with four operations — investment, depreciation, accumulation, and return — plus a present-value pricing convention that renders holdings of different capital forms commensurable on one ROI ledger.


Carbon Source

The designation for a system whose carbon flux is net outward over an accounting period — emitting more carbon than it absorbs — a signed-flux label that closes the atmospheric budget as an identity and whose sign is relative to window, boundary, and species.


Carbonate Saturation State

Collapse the coupled seawater carbonate equilibrium into one dimensionless ratio, Ω = [Ca²⁺][CO₃²⁻]/Ksp, whose threshold at 1 tells whether calcium-carbonate structures will form or dissolve — the variable a calcifier feels, not pH.


Carryover Effect

The validity threat in crossover and within-subject designs where residual influence from an earlier treatment persists into a later measurement window, biasing the contrast — its magnitude set by the unit's relaxation time against the inter-treatment gap.


Case-Definition Drift

The surveillance failure in which the operational definition of 'a case' silently changes across time, place, or data source while counts are still reported and compared under a stable label — conflating real epidemiological change with an artefact of what the instrument now counts.


Causal Inference

Infer the effect of changing X on Y from data by fixing a causal estimand and defending an identification design or assumption that separates that effect from noncausal association, then quantify its uncertainty and scope.


Centipede Game

A sequential finite-horizon game in which each player can take the larger share or pass to grow the pot, where backward induction prescribes taking on the first move — isolating common knowledge of rationality as the load-bearing assumption cooperation depends on.


Central Executive Network

Coordinate goal-directed, externally oriented cognition through a distributed frontoparietal control network that maintains task rules, working-memory contents, and top-down attention while flexibly coupling to other systems as demands change.


Central Pattern Generator

A localized neural circuit that produces structured rhythmic motor output — locomotion, breathing, chewing — from its own intrinsic membrane and synaptic properties, so sensory and descending signals are demoted from pacemakers to mere modulators.


Central Route Processing

The Elaboration Likelihood Model's pathway in which a recipient with both motivation and ability scrutinizes a message's argument substance, producing attitude change that is more durable, counter-persuasion-resistant, and behaviorally predictive than cue-driven peripheral change.


Certainty Effect

Capture the way people overweight an outcome made fully certain relative to one merely probable of equal expected value, so the move from 0.99 to 1.0 commands a disproportionate premium the arithmetic does not justify.


Channel Conflict

The distribution failure mode in which a producer's new direct pathway to customers undercuts the margins its own intermediaries depend on, triggering rational retaliation that erodes the expected gain — so a new channel's true worth is gross gain minus incumbent-channel loss.


Channel Richness

The cue-carrying capacity of a communication medium, determined by the varieties of cues, feedback, linguistic flexibility, and personalization it can support.


Cheap Talk

Costless, non-binding communication whose credibility rests entirely on incentive alignment: as the gap between sender and receiver interests widens, the information a costless message can carry shrinks through ever-coarser partitions down to meaningless babble.


Cheerleader Effect

Explain why a face is rated more attractive in a group than alone by ensemble coding — the visual system assimilates each individual percept toward the group's averaged, and thus more attractive, mean.


Chekhov's Gun

Treat every conspicuous element in a designed work as an implicit promise of payoff — so an introduced element that never returns breaks the audience's trust, and a payoff that arrives without setup feels arbitrary; setup implies payoff, payoff requires setup.


Cherry Picking

Selectively presenting confirming evidence while suppressing disconfirming evidence from the same available population, so the offered sample gives an impression the full distribution would not support — locating the dishonesty in the selection process, not the individual data points.


Chiasmus

State two elements in one order and then restate them with their roles swapped (A-B, then B-A) across a pivot, so the crossed inversion silently asserts that the relation runs both ways.


Chicken Game

A two-player payoff structure (DC > CC > CD > DD) where each side prefers the other to yield and mutual non-yielding is catastrophic but off-path, so the strategic question is not what to play but which asymmetric equilibrium gets selected — resolved by whoever can most credibly and irreversibly commit first.


Choice-Supportive Bias

Explain why we misremember past decisions in our own favor: dissonance reduction rewrites the stored memory so the chosen option looks better and the rejected ones worse than the evidence actually showed at the time of choice.


Chronological Snobbery

The fallacy of dismissing a belief solely because it is old — substituting a temporal fact for a content-specific reason — corrected by Lewis's question of whether the view was actually refuted or merely fell out of fashion, with an age-as-credit mirror in appeal to tradition.


Chronotope

Read the coupling of a narrative's time-pattern and space-pattern as an admissibility structure that determines which events, encounters, and protagonists can take shape inside it, rather than as separable descriptive settings.


Circular Flow

Represent the whole economy as two loops running opposite ways between households and firms, then track every off-loop flow as a leakage or an injection whose sums must balance when the loop closes in steady state.


Circular Reasoning

Diagnose an argument whose conclusion already appears among its premises by tracing its justification graph for a cycle that never touches a node the audience grants independently.


Citation Pointer

A structured reference that identifies a source well enough to locate and verify it — an identification-plus-resolution bridge from claim to artifact that builds the infrastructure for verifiability without asserting the support is adequate, so 'has a citation' and 'is well-supported' stay separate findings.


Class Imbalance

Diagnose why a 99%-accurate classifier can be useless: when one class vastly outnumbers the class of interest, additive loss aggregation lets majority examples dominate the gradient, so the model learns to ignore the rare minority.


Clearance

Express the body's power to eliminate a substance as the virtual volume of plasma fully cleared per unit time (Cl = elimination rate / concentration), a concentration-independent capacity that sums additively across organs.


Closed Set

Certify with one structural bit that no legitimate process inside a set — taking a limit (topology) or applying an operation (algebra) — can carry you outside it, discharging every boundary check in a proof at once.


Closure (programming)

The runtime value that packages a function's executable code with the bindings of its free variables captured at construction, so that when applied later its free variables resolve through that captured environment rather than the caller's — preserving lexical scope across the gap between where a function is made and where it runs.


Club Good

Classify a shared resource as excludable-and-non-rival-up-to-congestion, which fixes that it can be provided privately by membership fee, and select its pricing regime by which side of the congestion threshold it sits on.


Coase Theorem

State that with clear property rights and zero transaction costs, parties bargain to the same efficient allocation whatever the initial assignment — so the assignment fixes only who pays whom, and observed inefficiency is read contrapositively as the signature of a specific friction.


Coastal Upwelling

The process by which sustained alongshore winds drive surface water offshore via Coriolis-mediated Ekman transport, forcing cold, nutrient-rich deep water up to replace it — fueling the ocean's highest productivity where a coast, rotation, and a stratified reservoir coincide.


Coastline Paradox

A rough natural coastline has no fixed length — it grows without bound as the measuring ruler shrinks — so the stable thing to report is not a length but the fractal dimension governing how length scales with the ruler.


Cobweb Model

The economic model of self-sustaining price-quantity oscillation in markets with a rigid production lag, where producers commit output on today's price and discover it clears at another — tracing a cobweb spiral whose stability follows from the supply-to-demand slope ratio.


Code Smell

Treat an observable feature of code as defeasible evidence of a deeper design or maintainability problem—not proof of a defect—so inspection triggers a context test and a refactoring hypothesis.


Cognitive Reframing

Deliberately substituting the interpretive lens applied to a fixed situation so that emotional and behavioral responses re-couple to a more adaptive frame.


Cognitive Walkthrough

A usability-evaluation method in which an expert evaluator steps through a bounded task as a first-time user, asking four action-cycle questions at each step, so learnability breakdowns are localized to a specific step and broken link rather than yielding a holistic rating.


Cohesion (software / module-level)

Grade how tightly the responsibilities inside one code module turn around a single articulable purpose — from coincidental to functional — reading nameability, isolation-testability, and low-risk replaceability straight off the level.


Cohort Effect

An observed outcome difference associated with membership in groups defined by a shared birth or entry interval, kept distinct from aging, period shocks, and any unproven causal account of the cohort contrast.


Collaborative Maintenance

Keep a shared knowledge artifact current through an open community working under five documented-and-exercised governance pathways — proposal, review, dispute resolution, deprecation, and attribution — rather than a single custodian.


Collateral-Damage Blowback

Diagnose why a tactically successful action ends net negative — its peripheral harm feeds a reaction channel that routes cost back to the actor's own future capacity, delayed and amplified — distinguishing a return channel from an ordinary externality.


Collateral Squeeze

The procyclical spiral in which a fall in a pledged asset's price cuts every leveraged holder's borrowing capacity and forces sales into the same market that sets the price — coupling firms through a shared observable rather than a counterparty network.


Collinearity Inflation

The pathological ballooning of individual regression-coefficient variance when predictors carry overlapping information — a near-singular predictor cross-product matrix that degrades per-predictor attribution while leaving joint prediction untouched, unfixable by more data.


Commander's-Intent Ambiguity

Locate incoherent decentralized execution in the purpose artefact one level up: when delegated subordinates must re-derive action under changed conditions but the intent statement is too imprecise to disambiguate their choice, locally rational actions aggregate into globally incoherent outcomes.


Comments as Deodorant

Read the need for an explanatory comment as a diagnostic signal, not a virtue — a clear paragraph explaining a confusing function masks a retirable design problem instead of fixing it, so do the rename or split that retires the comment rather than maintaining it.


Common Fate

Group visual elements that change together — moving, flickering, or co-varying synchronously — into one perceived object, on the inference that things sharing a fate usually share an origin.


Common-Operating-Picture Breakdown

The failure mode where a multi-party response acts incoherently because its engineered shared picture fails to synthesise participants' partial views — relocating the fault from the responders to the artefact, whose currency, completeness, and consistency become the lever.


Common-Pool Resource

The taxonomy cell for a good that is rival yet non-excludable — a conjunction that opens an appropriability gap between private and social cost, switching on the overuse dynamic and posing a three-way governance choice: privatize, regulate, or self-govern.


Compactness

Certify that a space is finite-like — every open cover has a finite subcover, equivalently every sequence a convergent subsequence — so a whole package of existence theorems fires automatically on it and fails without it.


Comparative Self-Assessment Crossover

When people estimate their standing from their own felt ability while underweighting the peer distribution, perceived task difficulty selects the direction of error: above average on easy tasks and below average on hard ones.


Compiler

Translate a fully specified source language ahead of time into a semantically equivalent target form through a pipeline of formal-interface phases, so the whole program can be globally analysed and optimised once while its observable behaviour is guaranteed preserved.


Complete Streets

A transportation doctrine that designs a fixed-width road corridor for a declared portfolio of all users — pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, freight, drivers — allocating the right-of-way as a zero-sum choice and auditing it by multi-modal level of service.


Complex Question

Expose a question that smuggles a contested claim in as its presupposition, so every direct answer silently ratifies the claim and the only sound reply is to refuse the frame.


Complexity Class

Sort computational problems into a small lattice of named strata — P, NP, PSPACE, and their kin — by the resource bound they admit under a fixed model, so that placing a problem by one reduction transitively imports its whole feasibility profile.


Compound-Hazard Stacking

The planning failure in which co-occurring hazards interact through shared drivers, infrastructure, or response resources, so their joint impact exceeds — and the available capacity falls below — what a plan built from independent single-hazard analyses predicts.


Subject Heading String

Assemble a main topical heading with an ordered sequence of controlled subdivisions — topical, geographic, chronological, form — into one concatenated string at indexing time, eagerly committing a multi-facet intersection as a single citable, browsable, retrievable token.


Concentration Illusion

The failure where a portfolio looks diversified across many labels but its holdings share a hidden common factor — so a single shock moves them together and realized risk tracks the rank of the factor-exposure matrix, not the count of positions.


Concession

Grant a peripheral or indefensible part of the opposing case while continuing to contest the rest, purchasing credibility through costly-looking admission and, if the granted claim was not load-bearing, harvesting narrowing, burden-shift, and board-clearing at once.


Configural Processing

A perceiver recognizes an over-learned whole through relations among its parts and feeds that whole-level representation back onto part processing, so canonical arrangement improves constituent recognition and exposes relational violations that isolated features miss.


Confirmability

Certify a qualitative finding as objective not by eliminating the interpreter but by exhibiting an audit trail through which any claim can be walked backward to the data segments that produced it.


Confirmation Fatigue

The interaction-design failure where a blocking confirmation prompt fires so often, and so rarely marks a truly consequential choice, that users develop an automatic dismiss reflex that discharges the prompt without reading it — leaving it syntactically present but informationally inert.


Congruence Bias

The reasoning bias of designing only tests that could confirm a favored hypothesis rather than tests that discriminate it from equally plausible rivals — a failure of test design, not evidence evaluation, that leaves a probe locally valid but globally non-diagnostic because its likelihood ratio sits near one.


Conjunction Fallacy

Detect a probability-judgment error by watching for a more detailed scenario being rated more probable than the simpler scenario it is a strict subset of — the signature of resemblance quietly standing in for probability.


Conservatism Bias

Capture the tendency of people to revise a probability judgment less than Bayes' rule prescribes when evidence arrives — the reported posterior landing short of the correct one, anchored too close to the prior — measured as a signed gap against an explicit Bayesian benchmark.


Consonance

The perceptual stability of simultaneously sounding pitches whose low-integer frequency ratios let their partials reinforce rather than beat — split into a fixed sensory layer set by acoustics and a negotiable functional layer set by a style's grammar.


Consumer Surplus

The aggregate welfare buyers gain by paying a market price below what each would have been willing to pay, measured as the area between the demand curve and the price line — giving voluntary exchange's buyer-side value a monetary magnitude for welfare analysis.


Contact-Tracing Delay

Frame outbreak containment as a race on the contact graph: once the time to find and isolate a case's contacts exceeds the pathogen's generation interval, tracing only documents the chain, and more staff cannot restore containment.


Contestable Market

Diagnose market power from entry conditions rather than firm count — where entry and exit are costless, the mere credible threat of hit-and-run entry disciplines even a monopolist to competitive pricing, so the binding variable is sunk cost, not concentration.


Context Collapse

The communication condition in which multiple audiences with irreconcilable norms are co-present in one channel, so a single utterance cannot satisfy all at once — a structural failure of the channel, not the speaker's judgment.


Context-Dependent Memory

The finding that recall improves when the retrieval context matches the encoding context — because incidental cues are bound into the trace and retrieval probability tracks cue overlap, so a mismatch produces a cue deficit rather than lost content.


Continental Drift

Treat continents as bodies with a trajectory rather than fixed addresses — rigid lithospheric plates carried centimetres a year by a mantle engine, whose convergent, divergent, and transform boundaries account for Earth's large-scale surface structures.


Contraindication

Flag the sparse patient conditions under which a normally-indicated treatment becomes inadvisable, by naming the specific context in which its risk-benefit balance flips sign.


Controlled Descriptor

Substitute one governed preferred term from a maintained vocabulary for whatever words a resource used, so every resource on a topic retrieves through the same descriptor regardless of the author's surface phrasing.


Convergence Failure

The disaster-management pathology in which uncoordinated pro-social inflows — volunteers, donations, inquiries — arrive faster than incident command can absorb, consuming the same coordination bandwidth the primary hazard needs and triggering a second disaster.


Coolidge Effect

The finding that a sexually satiated male mammal, refractory with a familiar partner, resumes copulation when given a novel one — revealing the apparent satiety as partner-specific habituation of the reward response, not a generic exhaustion of reproductive capacity.


Cooper's Law

The empirical trajectory by which the number of simultaneous radio conversations supportable in a given spectrum at a given location has doubled roughly every 30 months for a century, driven chiefly by spatial reuse — so capacity is grown by densification, not by acquiring bandwidth.


Cope's Rule

The macroevolutionary generalization that animal lineages tend to increase in body size over geological time — a trend that may reflect active directional selection for bigness or passive diffusion away from a minimum-size floor, distinguishable only by the shape of the size distribution, not its mean.


Item (Copy)

Promote the single physical or digital copy to a first-class bibliographic entity at the bottom of the Work–Expression–Manifestation–Item ladder, so copy-specific data and operations attach to one instance rather than the shared edition.


Coral Bleaching

Read a whitening reef as the host coral's active, threshold-triggered expulsion of its energy-supplying algal symbionts — a dose-dependent rupture with a bounded reversibility window, not a mortality count.


Core Vocabulary

The small set of 150–400 high-frequency, syntactically generative words that account for roughly 80% of everyday communication across all topics — grounding a core-first architecture that places these words for immediate access and teaches them before topic-bound nouns.


Correction Burial

The editorial pathology in which a correction reaches a systematically smaller audience than the error it repairs — the original ran at high amplitude, the correction at low — so the public belief record stays unrepaired even though a correction was formally issued.


Corrections Policy

An institution's standing rule to acknowledge errors in its public claims through visible, dated, attributed corrections that preserve the original — converting an unverifiable edit history into a reconstructible, auditable claim-trajectory.


Counterpoint

Write several voices that are each a complete, independent melody while every vertical slice they form is also defensible harmony — a dual demand a catalogue of local voice-leading rules turns into beat-by-beat checks.


Courtesy Bias

The questioner-directed tendency of respondents to shift reported answers toward what this immediate asker appears to want — inflating positives and suppressing negatives, scaling with status asymmetry and politeness norms, and correctable only by removing the questioner.


Covariate-Shift Blind Spot

The deployment failure in which a model's input distribution P(X) drifts outside its training support while P(Y|X) holds — and goes undetected because monitoring watches lagging outcome metrics instead of the immediately-available input signal.


Crab Mentality

Diagnose in-group sabotage of a member who rises above the shared baseline by the cost-without-gain signature — a voluntarily costly leveling act yielding no individual gain — which reveals asymmetric relative-position concern under identity threat rather than competition.


Crespi Effect

Read operant behavior after a reward change as a discrepancy-driven transient rather than an absolute-value response: animals shifted up overshoot same-reward controls (elation) and animals shifted down undershoot them (depression), calibrated to the signed gap between delivery and a recalibrating expectation.


Cross-Docking

The distribution practice of unloading, re-sorting by destination, and reloading inbound freight straight onto outbound vehicles with zero dwell — casting the facility as a sorter rather than a warehouse, governed by schedule synchronization rather than inventory level.


Cross Elasticity of Demand

The unit-free ratio of the percentage change in one good's quantity demanded to the percentage change in another good's price — whose sign classifies goods as substitutes, complements, or independent and whose magnitude ranks how tightly they constrain each other's prices.


Cross-listed Classification

Assign a bridging work several classifications at once — one focal primary plus any number of secondaries — so it stays findable from every domain it spans, without forcing a single arbitrary home or minting a hybrid category.


Cross-Race Effect

Explain why people recognize own-group faces better than other-group faces by exposure-tuned encoding granularity — a system trained densely on one face category individuates it finely and codes sparse categories coarsely, driven by training statistics, not biology.


Cross-reference Relation

Connect two controlled-vocabulary entries with a typed directed half-edge drawn from a small closed inventory (USE, UF, BT, NT, RT, SA), each carrying a stipulated direction, symmetry, inverse-pairing obligation, and system action — turning a flat term list into a maintainable navigable graph.


Cross-Site Scripting

Insert attacker-supplied bytes into a server's output so the victim's browser executes them under the trusted site's origin, arising when content is written into a sink without encoding for the context it lands in.


Crossing the Chasm

Geoffrey Moore's refinement of the diffusion curve: adoption stalls at a structural gap between early adopters and the early majority because the two populations differ in kind — so a product must be re-architected and reference-backed, not just re-marketed, to cross.


Crowding In

The macroeconomic pattern in which public expenditure raises rather than displaces private investment — the sign reversal of crowding out — obtained when the economy has slack and the public input complements private activity, through a demand channel or a complementarity channel.


Cryptographic Hash Function

Turn an arbitrarily large input into a short fixed-length digest that acts as a tamper-evident proxy for it, using three computational-hardness properties — preimage, second-preimage, and collision resistance — so anyone can verify content or bind a commitment but no one can forge or invert it.


Crystal Lattice

The infinite, translationally periodic arrangement of a crystalline solid — a few-atom unit cell tiled by three lattice vectors — whose symmetry, drawn from a finite catalog of space groups, deductively fixes which physical properties are allowed and which forbidden.


Culmination Surprise

The operational failure of advancing past the culminating point — where sustaining capacity falls below what forward momentum requires — without recognising it, so the surprise lives entirely in the recognition gap between real culmination and its discovery.


Cultivation Theory

Explain how sustained cumulative exposure to a biased symbolic environment slowly calibrates a heavy viewer's background estimates of social facts toward the statistics depicted on screen rather than the statistics of the world they actually inhabit.


Cumulative Dose

Locate biological harm or benefit in the time-integral of an exposure stream rather than any single event, so a course of individually safe doses can still cross a threshold on the running stock — which reducing the present rate cannot undo.


Curse Of Knowledge

Holding knowledge systematically degrades an agent's ability to simulate the perspective of an agent who lacks it.


Customer-Discovery Theater

Diagnose fake product discovery by the single structural test of whether the inquiry is permitted to change the plan — the tell being a long track record of discovery that has never killed or redirected a roadmap.


Customs-Clearance Delay

The cross-border failure mode in which a physically ready shipment is held immobile because a sovereign clearance authority has not yet issued the release token — a permission-gate bottleneck immune to transport remedies, with queueing dynamics and a linear-then-catastrophic cost.


Data Access Service

Catalog a live, queryable endpoint as a first-class typed object — distinct from a static download — so discovery can tell 'query the current state' from 'pull a snapshot' and read the access terms off the record.


Data Card

Attach a fixed-schema documentation artifact to a dataset at its publication boundary — recording motivation, composition, recommended and out-of-scope uses, consent, and known limitations — so a consumer meets the dataset's boundary conditions at the same moment as the data.


Data Class

Flag an object-oriented class that holds fields with getters and setters but no domain methods as a symptom that its behavior migrated outward into consumers, then resolve the verdict with one role question — should this class enforce its own invariants?


Data Extraction Through Prompting

The AI-security failure mode in which an adversary crafts inputs that make a deployed language model emit private content — training text, system prompts, retrieved documents — by exploiting the legitimate inference interface, whose breadth exceeds the access-control envelope around the data.


Data Lineage

Recording, for every data element, the complete sequence of sources, transformations, and movements that produced it — as edges in a queryable dependency graph — so audit questions become forward and backward traversals rather than forensic reconstruction.


Data Poisoning Attack

The adversarial-ML failure mode where an attacker corrupts training inputs so the model learns an attacker-chosen behaviour — an upstream contamination that runtime defenses are structurally powerless against and that clean benchmark accuracy cannot detect.


Dead Zone

Collapse the nutrient-bloom-decomposition-stratification cascade into one measurable state variable — the hypoxic volume — that maps where bottom-water oxygen has fallen below the threshold most aquatic life can survive.


Debt Overhang

The condition where existing senior debt is so large that a new project's upside flows first to old creditors, so the residual claimant rationally declines even positive-NPV investment — the cure being to reorder the payoff cascade until the needed party can capture enough to participate.


Declared Equivalence Mapping

An explicit, authoritative, versioned assertion that two concepts from different vocabularies are interchangeable for stated purposes — collapsing a cross-scheme distinction to zero for consumers who trust the declaration rather than re-verifying at use-time.


Declinism

Believe the past was better and the future will be worse — even against the measured data — via a self-reinforcing loop of rosy retrospection on the past, negativity- and recency-weighted evaluation of the present, and naive extrapolation forward.


Decorum

Fit a discourse's style, content, and manner to the convergence of audience, occasion, subject matter, and speaker's role — so a mismatch on any single axis breaks the communicative contract even when the propositions are unimpeachable.


Decoy Effect

Add a third option that is worse than one existing choice on every dimension but not strictly worse than the other, and preferences shift toward the option that dominates the decoy — even though the decoy itself is never chosen.


Default Effect

Shift the distribution of choices without changing any option by flipping which alternative is preselected as the no-action outcome, because a stack of retention mechanisms makes people disproportionately keep whatever the default is.


Default Mode Network

Name the medial-brain ensemble that stays active during rest and self-focused thought but is coherently suppressed during outward tasks, so rest becomes a structured mode of cognition rather than an inert baseline.


Defensible Space

Configure a built environment — sightlines, threshold cues, a public-to-private zone hierarchy — so each shared space reads as an ownable territory attached to a small resident group, recruiting cheap recognition-based surveillance in place of paid policing.


Deflation

A sustained, broad-based fall in the general price level whose policy-critical content is the debt-deflation spiral — falling prices raise the real burden of fixed nominal debts, forcing distress selling and spending cuts that push prices down further when the monetary stabiliser is bounded.


Deliberative Rhetoric

The Aristotelian genre of public speech that advises a deciding body on future action by weighing expected advantage against harm — classified by aim and temporal orientation, not surface form, and carrying a distinct forecast-under-uncertainty proof-burden.


Delivery (in Rhetoric)

The fifth canon of classical rhetoric: the embodied execution of a prepared speech — voice, gesture, posture, gaze, pacing, pause — held apart as separately evaluable from content, on the claim that the same words well or badly delivered are effectively different speeches.


Demand Shaping

The supply-chain practice of applying pricing, promotion, substitution, and channel levers to the consumer side of a capacity mismatch — moving realized demand toward feasible supply rather than scaling supply to meet it — by steering the marginal consumer's selection.


Demobilization

The planned, owned closing phase of a deployment in which every committed resource is released in dependency-aware waves, reconciled, and formally signed off — activated before full control is reached, while coordination capacity is still high.


Dendritic Integration

Treat a single neuron not as a weighted-sum threshold unit but as a small layered nonlinear network, where synaptic inputs are combined nonlinearly within individual dendritic branches — depending on where they sit and how clustered they are — before summing at the soma.


Density Current

A fluid or fluidized mixture propagates through or beneath an ambient medium because a density contrast converts gravitational potential into a directed intrusion with a moving front and a stratified interface.


Dependency Hell

The pathological state where a project's transitive dependency closure holds mutually incompatible version constraints, turning installation into an NP-complete constraint-satisfaction problem that no edge-level patch can resolve.


Deposit Concentration Risk

Judge a bank's funding fragility by the correlation-adjusted effective depositor count rather than the headline number — coupled depositors collapse toward one bet, voiding the law-of-large-numbers smoothing a large base seems to guarantee.


Deposition

The process by which material carried by a transporting medium is laid down where the medium's carrying capacity falls below its load — coarsest and densest first — so the deposit's geometry records the energy history of the transport that ended there.


Derivative

The limit of a difference quotient, f′(x) = lim_{h→0}[f(x+h)−f(x)]/h, that turns 'rate of change at a single point' into a defined object — simultaneously the tangent slope, the best local linear approximation, and the output's sensitivity to an infinitesimal input nudge.


Development Section

The middle division of sonata form, between exposition and recapitulation, whose job is to transform already-heard themes — fragmenting, sequencing, modulating through distant keys, combining them contrapuntally — to manufacture the instability that makes the home-key return feel necessary.


Dialogism

Read meaning as assembled from the intersection of prior voices any word already carries, so even an apparent monologue is mapped as a meeting-place of endorsed, parodied, and contested voices rather than a single speaker's verdict.


Dictator Game

An experimental protocol where one participant unilaterally splits an endowment with a powerless recipient — by stripping away every strategic lever, it forces any positive transfer onto the non-strategic ledger, so its lattice of single-bit variants decomposes the sources of pro-social behaviour.


Diderot Effect

Explain a run of purchases as a single induced restructuring, in which one item falling outside your existing ensemble resets the reference standard and triggers a cascade of upgrades until coherence is restored at a costlier tier.


Diegesis

The bounded, internally coherent story-world of a narrative — with its own characters, objects, and rules — held distinct from the artifact that constructs it and the audience that encounters it, so an element is diegetic if a character can access it and non-diegetic if addressed to the audience alone.


Diegetic Level

A ranked layer of narration fixed by the narrator's position relative to the story-world, so that truth, knowledge, and accountability attach to a level index and do not cross a level boundary unless the work explicitly upgrades the claim.


Difference-in-Differences

Estimate a causal effect from observational data by subtracting the control group's before-after change from the treatment group's, netting out time-invariant unit confounders and common time trends — valid only if parallel trends holds.


Differential equation

A mathematical equation relating an unknown function to its own derivatives, encoding the law that a quantity's rate of change depends on its current state — so specifying the local rule plus initial or boundary conditions fixes the entire trajectory.


Digital signature

Bind a specific message to a specific private-key holder with a short string anyone can check against the public key, confining all remaining trust to one question — does this public key authentically belong to its claimed principal?


Direct Manipulation

Let a user control a system by physically acting on a continuously visible representation of the objects — dragging, resizing, pointing — with reversible actions and sub-100ms feedback, rather than issuing symbolic commands that name objects indirectly.


Discourse

Treat a topic's talk as a regime — a vocabulary, roster of recognised speakers, admissibility rules, and precedent history — that governs which utterances are sayable, hearable, and consequential, rather than as the sum of what was said.


Discoverability

Measure the degree to which a system's actions and features can be located through perception and exploration alone — a property of the artifact, not the user — separating capability from findable capability and locating unfound features as a design defect.


Discoverability Failure

Diagnose why a working feature goes unused: the capability exists and functions perfectly, but no signal on any surface the user samples announces it, so the user's option set is bounded by the visible interface and the feature is operationally nonexistent.


Dislocation

A one-dimensional line defect in a crystal that carries plastic deformation by sweeping across a slip plane one atomic row at a time, letting a metal yield at stresses two to four orders of magnitude below what shearing the whole lattice at once would require.


Disposition Effect

Explain why investors sell winners too early and cling to losers: the purchase price is a reference point, so gains sit in the concave risk-averse domain of the prospect-theory value function and losses in the convex risk-seeking one, measured as the PGR minus PLR gap.


Dissent

The publicly registered disagreement of a member inside a body against its own established position, accepted at asymmetric personal cost — a costly signal that serves as the institution's error-correction channel across time.


Distinction Bias

Overweight attribute differences between options evaluated side by side relative to the weight those differences carry when each option is met alone, so preferences formed at the point of choice (joint mode) overpredict the utility actually experienced in use (separate mode).


Distraction

The involuntary capture of an agent's scarce attention by a salient secondary stimulus that wins a bottleneck competition against the primary task by its own salience rather than the agent's intent, imposing a performance cost plus recovery time.


Distribution Form

Catalog one logical dataset as many typed delivery artifacts — CSV, JSON, Parquet, Shapefile — each declaring its own media type, size, and checksum while identity and descriptive metadata stay fixed at the dataset.


Distributional Blind Spot

The region of a model's input space inadequately sampled during development into which the deployed model still makes confident predictions — extrapolations whose error is unknown, indistinguishable in confidence from in-distribution outputs.


Divergence Zone

A geophysical-fluid pattern in which surface material flows apart, opening a deficit that mass conservation forces to be filled by inflow from an adjacent reservoir — so the consequence is set not by the separation but by the replacement reservoir's properties.


DLL Hell

The failure mode where programs share dynamic libraries through one global single-version-wins namespace, so an unrelated install overwrites a version another program depends on and silently breaks it — cured by breaking the single-version-wins invariant.


Dollar Auction

Mechanize the escalation trap with one rule change — the second-highest bidder also pays and gets nothing — so that backward induction makes each additional bid locally rational and rational players escalate past the prize's value.


Dollo's Law

The evolutionary generalization that a complex trait once lost is overwhelmingly unlikely to re-evolve in identical form, because the genetic-developmental scaffolding that built it pseudogenizes faster than selection can reassemble it.


Dominant Strategy

An action that yields a payoff at least as high as any alternative regardless of what opponents choose, so the player needs no model of the others — a belief-free best response that makes the strategic problem collapse to a row-by-row dominance check on the payoff matrix.


Dominated Strategy

Rule out an action that yields a lower payoff than some alternative for every possible profile of opponents' actions — a belief-free test requiring no model of the opponent, licensing iterated elimination and the dominant-strategy robustness that mechanism design targets.


Door-in-the-Face Technique

A sequential compliance strategy in which a requester first makes a large request expected to be refused, then retreats to a smaller one — the target actually wanted — obtaining higher compliance than the small request cold, chiefly through reciprocal concession and perceptual contrast.


Double Coincidence of Wants

The two-sided matching requirement that makes direct barter expensive — each trader must simultaneously hold what the other wants and want what the other holds — whose probability falls as goods diversify, motivating a commonly accepted medium that splits each two-sided match into two one-sided sell-then-buy problems.


Double Marginalization

Explain why a chain of firms each holding pricing power ends up charging more and selling less than a single integrated firm would, because each node adds its markup while ignoring the demand-shrinking externality that markup imposes on the other node's profit base.


Downs–Thomson Paradox

The transport result that equilibrium car travel time is set not by road capacity but by the quality of the parallel transit alternative — because expanding roads bleeds ridership, degrades patronage-elastic transit service, and pushes riders back until the road re-congests.


Downwelling

The oceanographic process by which surface fluid converges and sinks under mass conservation, carrying heat, oxygen, and carbon into the interior — the paired complement of upwelling, splitting into gentle gyre subduction and rapid deep convection.


Dual-process Theory

Models cognition as the interaction of a fast, automatic, associative process (System 1) supplying default responses and a slow, effortful, rule-based process (System 2) selectively recruited to endorse or override them under conflict, novelty, or stakes.


Dunbar's Number

Cap the working set of warm, mutually-tracked social bonds an individual can hold at roughly 150, because pairwise-relationship tracking scales as O(N-squared) against a fixed neocortical budget, with nested inner shells at ~5, ~15, and ~50.


Duration Neglect

The judgment bias in which the length of a bounded experience contributes negligible weight to its retrospective evaluation, which is instead built from a representative peak and the final moments (the peak-end rule) — so remembered utility systematically diverges from the integral of what was lived.


Dutch Disease

Trace how a boom in one tradable sector hollows out the others by running a foreign-exchange windfall through two channels — a spending effect that appreciates the real exchange rate and a resource-movement effect that bids up factor costs — so that headline GDP rises while non-booming tradables de-industrialize.


Easterlin Paradox

Reconcile the puzzle that richer people report more happiness at any moment yet national well-being stays flat as real income multiplies over decades — by recognising the cross-sectional gradient reflects relative income against a moving reference, not absolute income.


Ecological Correlation

A correlation computed on aggregated group-level units that need not equal — and can reverse the sign of — the individual-level correlation, so it warrants no claim about the individuals inside the groups.


Ecological Footprint

Translate a population's heterogeneous demands on nature into a single common unit — biologically productive area in global hectares — so total demand can be summed and compared against the biocapacity actually available as a budget constraint.


Ecological Inference Problem

Recover individual-level joint distributions from group-level marginal totals, a many-to-one inverse problem where the data alone only pin the answer to the Duncan-Davis bounds and any tighter estimate rests on an explicit, contestable identifying assumption.


Ecological Trap

The situation where an organism's evolved decision rule keeps following a once-reliable cue whose correlation with fitness has been severed by recent change, so the unchanged rule now reliably steers it toward a low-fitness or lethal outcome it actively prefers.


Economic Growth Model

Represent an economy's long-run output path as a closed dynamic system of productive stocks, accumulation and depreciation, production returns, population or labor, and technology, so assumptions determine whether growth converges, balances on a knife-edge, or sustains itself endogenously.


Economic Order Quantity

Find the replenishment batch size minimizing total cost by summing a per-event ordering cost that falls with batch size and a per-unit-time holding cost that rises with it, giving a U-shaped curve whose flat-bottomed optimum is √(2DK/h).


Ecosystem Mismatch

Explain why a technically sound innovation stalls on deployment not by a flaw in the artifact but by the absence of one specific complementary asset its operating context tacitly required — leaving it complete-but-functionally-blocked.


Ecosystem Services

The ecological-economics framework that disaggregates the diffuse good a natural system does into four non-fungible categories of benefit flow, each with a beneficiary and a proxy value, so an off-ledger bundle enters land-use decisions and single-service optimization is exposed as a trade-off.


Edgeworth Paradox

Show that Bertrand's price-equals-marginal-cost result collapses once firms face capacity constraints below total demand: no pure-strategy equilibrium exists and prices cycle endlessly between the competitive floor and monopoly ceiling.


Editorial Blind Spot

The region of stories a news organisation's structure — its beats, bureaus, source networks, staff, rhythms, and metrics — renders constitutively invisible, not chosen against but never entering its sample of potential stories at all.


Effectuation

Act under genuine uncertainty by starting from the means in hand and making small affordable-loss commitments with self-selected stakeholders, letting the goal co-evolve from those commitments rather than selecting means to serve a fixed goal.


Efficacy

Separate the maximum effect a drug can produce at its target under full engagement (the ceiling, E_max) from the dose needed to approach it (potency, EC50), rooting that ceiling in the agent's intrinsic activity so a ceiling problem cannot be fixed by escalation.


Effort Justification

After personally expending meaningful effort to attain or create an outcome, a self-evaluating agent raises that outcome's attributed value to reconcile the cost of the effort with the belief that the pursuit was worthwhile.


Effusive Eruption

The volcanic discharge mode in which magma reaches the surface and flows as lava rather than fragmenting — set by the fork of whether the expanding gas phase escapes the melt or shatters it, governed by volatile budget, viscosity, and degassing efficiency.


Egocentric Bias

Trace a family of social-judgment miscalibrations to one asymmetry — the self's mental contents are available by default while other minds must be inferred at cost — so the self serves as an anchor from which adjustment is systematically insufficient.


Einstellung Effect

Diagnose a skilled solver's failure on a near-surface variant not as missing knowledge but as retrieval-driven blocking — the first-cued familiar method is retrieved, judged adequate, and halts search before a simpler dominating alternative is ever compared.


Ekman Pumping

Link the pattern of surface wind to vertical motion in the ocean interior: it is the curl of the wind stress, not its strength, that drives water down (anticyclonic) or up (cyclonic) at the base of the Ekman layer via w_E = curl(τ/ρf).


Ekman Transport

Predict where sustained wind drives ocean water by deflecting the net depth-integrated flux 90° from the wind — right in the Northern Hemisphere, left in the Southern — set by the balance of wind stress against the Coriolis force, magnitude τ/(ρf).


El Farol Bar Problem

The congestion model in which each agent independently decides whether to attend a capacity-limited bar, enjoyable only if uncrowded — so any prediction rule shared by all self-destructs, and the system resolves only through heterogeneous inductive predictors rather than convergence.


Elaboration Likelihood

Predict the route by which a persuasive message changes attitudes from the recipient's motivation and ability — a central route scrutinising argument quality when both are high, a peripheral route riding surface cues otherwise — with central-route attitudes proving far more durable.


Elaborative Encoding

At learning time, bind new material to multiple meaningful relations in an existing knowledge structure so the resulting memory trace can later be reached through more retrieval paths than a surface-only encoding.


Elimination Pathway

Classify a drug or toxin by the dominant biochemical route through which the body removes it — hepatic metabolism, renal excretion, or a minor exit — so that clearance rate, interaction risks, and toxicity failure modes can be read off the route rather than memorized per substance.


ELIZA Effect

The tendency of users to attribute understanding, intention, and inner states to a system that produces only fluent, context-appropriate conversational output — a cheap default Theory-of-Mind inference that fires once output crosses a coherence threshold and persists even when the mechanism is known.


Ellsberg Paradox

Show that people prefer betting on a known-composition urn over an ambiguous one of equal expected value on both colors at once — a pattern no single subjective probability can rationalize — proving ambiguity is a separately priced dimension of uncertainty distinct from risk.


Embargo

Distribute information in advance to a credentialed recipient set who agree to withhold publication until a shared release time, collapsing everyone's head start to zero — enforced by exclusion from future distributions, not by law.


Emotional Response

The coordinated four-stage reaction an affective agent produces when a stimulus is appraised as significant for its goals: appraisal triggers a bundled physiological-expressive-motivational package that then biases subsequent attention, memory, and choice.


Empty State Design

The UI practice of deliberately designing the zero-content view — treating it as a first-class state with a fixed four-slot template (message, intentionality cue, call-to-action, optional sample) rather than whatever the populated layout degrades to.


Empty-State Failure

The interface condition in which a view has no content and provides no scaffolding for the absence — no explanation of the cause, no disambiguation among the possible causes (new, filtered, permission, loading, error), and no next action — so the user, left to infer meaning from nothing, typically concludes wrongly that the system is broken or gated.


Encryption

Transform a plaintext under a key into a ciphertext from which the message cannot be feasibly recovered without the decryption key — a computational asymmetry gated by a secret, so confidentiality depends only on who holds the key rather than on the channel.


End-of-History Illusion

Explain why people at any age acknowledge large past-decade change yet forecast far less future change — an asymmetry in which vivid episodic contrasts underwrite recall while the future self, lacking any episodic record, is built by minimal edits to the present self.


End-to-End Principle

The architectural rule that a function whose correctness criterion can only be discharged with knowledge at the communication endpoints should live at the endpoints, not the intermediate nodes — so any in-network implementation is at best a performance optimization the endpoints must still back up.


Endogeneity

The condition in which a regressor is correlated with a model's error term — through confounding, simultaneity, or measurement error — so OLS coefficients are biased and inconsistent for the causal effect, collapsing the coefficient's causal reading while leaving its predictive one intact.


Endogenous Growth Theory

The class of models that make long-run growth an output of the economy's own agents and incentives rather than an exogenous parameter — the non-rivalry of knowledge generating aggregate increasing returns that escape diminishing-returns convergence and turn R&D and IP policy into growth levers.


Endowment Effect

Explain why the same person prices the same good higher once they own it — willingness-to-accept running two-to-five times willingness-to-pay — by acquisition shifting the reference point to include the good, so parting with it registers as a loss that loss aversion over-weights.


Enemy release hypothesis

Explain why an introduced species surges abroad not as intrinsic superiority but as the loss of co-evolved specialist enemies — herbivores, parasites, pathogens that tracked its density at home and failed to cross the range boundary.


Engel curve

Read a good's economic character — normal or inferior, necessity or luxury — off the slope and curvature of a single schedule that plots its consumption against household income while holding all prices fixed.


Ensemble Coding

Extract a statistical summary of a set of items in parallel — faster than any individual item can be encoded — and treat that summary as the default percept of the group.


Entrepreneurial Bricolage

The practice of building ventures by recombining the materials, skills, and slack already within reach — treating the existing inventory as the fixed input and accepting a working-but-imperfect solution rather than waiting for the textbook configuration.


Entrepreneurial Discovery

Explain how markets correct their own disequilibria — alert agents perceive profit gaps that others overlook and are not yet in anyone's search space, act on them, and thereby arbitrage the gaps away, an endogenous error-correction no central planner could replicate.


Entry Term Alias

Curate a non-preferred surface form — synonym, abbreviation, colloquialism, superseded name — as a silent, non-indexing bridge that routes many-to-one to a canonical descriptor, so users arrive at one place however they name the concept.


Environmental Justice

Evaluate an environmental decision by mapping who bears its harms and who reaps its benefits across a socially-partitioned population, then judging that distribution against distributive, procedural, and recognition standards of justice.


Environmental Kuznets curve

The hypothesis that environmental degradation follows an inverted-U against per-capita income — rising as a poor economy industrializes, peaking at middle income, then falling as richer populations buy cleaner technique — holding only for local, internalized pollutants, not global-commons ones.


Enzyme Induction

The phenomenon in which a xenobiotic binds a nuclear receptor and raises transcription of specific metabolizing enzymes, enlarging the catalytic pool over days so it clears itself and every co-substrate sharing those isoforms faster.


Enzyme Inhibition

A small molecule slows an enzyme by occupying or distorting its catalytic site, and the binding mode it uses fixes how reversible, surmountable, and durable the block will be.


Epideictic Rhetoric

The classical genre of present-occasion discourse whose work is to praise or blame — displaying and reaffirming a community's shared values before a witnessing audience, thereby manufacturing the value premises that deliberative and forensic argument later draw upon.


Epiphany

A discrete moment in which an unsolved problem suddenly reorganizes in the mind so the answer is manifest — not the acquisition of a new fact but a restructuring of the framing through which fixed facts are read, arriving abruptly across an impasse and seeming obvious in hindsight.


Equity premium puzzle

Confront one number against one model — the ~6-point historical equity premium against what a consumption-CAPM with plausible risk aversion can rationalize — and read the order-of-magnitude miss as indicting a load-bearing assumption in an enumerable stack.


Error-Message Opacity

Diagnose the post-failure interface defect where a system correctly detects and announces a fault but the message omits the repair-supporting content — cause, context, next action, escalation — so the user is told they are stuck without being told how to get unstuck.


Establishment and Transfer of Command

Maintain one unambiguous incident-commander role across an emergency by declaring assumption of command, transferring it only on explicit acknowledgment after a structured state briefing, so authority and operational state survive every handoff intact.


Estuarine Circulation

The density-driven two-layer counterflow where a river meets the sea — light fresh water flows seaward on top while dense salt water intrudes landward along the bed, its regime set by the ratio of river buoyancy to tidal stirring.


Estuarine Turbidity Maximum

A persistent zone of anomalously high suspended sediment near the head of salt intrusion in an estuary, sustained by a closed recirculation loop — landward near-bed advection, salt-induced flocculation, and tidal resuspension — rather than a passive deposit.


Estuary

The semi-enclosed coastal water body where river discharge meets tidal ocean water, producing a sustained salinity gradient — the master organising variable — along which habitats, species, and biogeochemical processes distribute, with the river-versus-tide forcing balance and residence time setting its class and productivity.


Etymological fallacy

Treat a word's historical origin as binding on its present meaning, mistaking a fact about language history for a fact about how today's speakers actually use the word.


Evacuation

The coordinated removal of people or high-value assets from a zone an incoming hazard will sweep, staged under time pressure over a finite egress network — the structural dual of containment (leave the hazard, move the protected).


Evacuation Shadow

The phenomenon in which people outside the official evacuation zone choose to evacuate anyway, overloading routes and shelters planned only for the targeted population — because a permeable signal reaches beyond the boundary and each household acts on its own risk calculus.


Evasion Attack

Craft inputs that fall on the benign side of a deployed classifier's learned decision boundary while preserving their malicious payload — exploiting the gap between the boundary and the true concept it was meant to represent, so near-perfect test accuracy coexists with near-zero robustness under attack.


Exaggerated Expectation

Lift the expectation-realization gap out as a third measurable quantity carrying a stable sign — so a forecaster's systematic, directional miss across a class of events is diagnosed as a defect in the forecasting machinery, not random noise.


Exception Management

Run high-volume normal items on a streamlined standard path and deliberately divert off-plan items onto a separate specialist channel, while feeding the diversion rate back upstream to fix the normal flow when it climbs.


Excessive Data Exposure

An API endpoint returns more fields than the caller's role requires, trusting a client-side filter to hide the surplus — but the unfiltered payload is already on the wire, so the surplus must be stripped at the producer via role-scoped projection.


Excludability

Classify a good by whether non-payers can feasibly be kept from consuming it, and cross that with rivalry to place it in the four-cell Samuelsonian map — private, club, common-pool, public — each cell carrying its own provision pathology and remedy.


Expectancy Disconfirmation

Compare perceived performance with a prior expectation and use the signed discrepancy—positive, zero, or negative—as a primary input to satisfaction, so the same performance can be evaluated differently when its reference changes.


Explosive Eruption

Explain and forecast a volcanic eruption through two threshold forks — will volatile-rich viscous magma fragment across the brittle-ductile transition (explosive versus effusive), and if so will the column stay buoyant or collapse — each routing to a distinct hazard regime.


Expressive Language

The clinical category for the output side of language — selecting, assembling, retrieving, and producing a decodable message — held apart from receptive comprehension because the two channels dissociate, and the discrepancy between them, not a composite score, drives intervention.


External Validity

The warrant by which an effect estimated in one study setting can be expected to hold in a target setting outside it — holding conditional on every effect-modifying feature that differs between the two being matched or adjusted.


Face Management

Do the moment-by-moment interactional work of protecting both parties' public self-image against face-threatening acts, selecting a redress strategy from an ordered ladder whose rung is set by the social distance, relative power, and imposition size of the act.