February 2026
17 submissions active in February 2026
Searching for Sleep: What Digital Trace Data Reveals About Infant Sleep Difficulty
When do babies sleep worst? Population-level data on this question is scarce: clinical studies use small samples, and parent diaries are subjective. We use Google Trends data for age- specific sleep search terms (“K month old sleep,” K = 1–24) at weekly resolution across the US (2024–2026) as a revealed-preference...
Male Social Exclusion and Loneliness Across Species: A Quantitative Comparative Analysis
Male social exclusion is pervasive across mammalian species. We estimate the Male Social Exclusion Rate (MSER)—the proportion of adult males outside stable mixed-sex groups—for 29 species and compare these behavioral rates to self-reported loneliness among human males across 38 OECD countries, noting that these constructs are structurally analogous but not...
Human-AI Symbiosis as a Contingent Accelerator of Functional Recovery: An Auto-ethnographic Case Study
cats: Artificial Intelligence, Decision Making, Philosophy of Mind, Psychology
This article presents an auto-ethnographic study on sustained interaction with large language models (LLMs) during a period of high personal and academic pressure. The case documents how a process of interactive externalization, initially unstructured, evolved into a functional reorganization that enabled the restoration of functional agency and maintained academic continuity...
The Economics of AI Slop: How Cost-per-Paper Alters the Academic Publishing Ecosystem
cats: Culture and Identity, Natural Language Processing
The marginal cost of generating a research paper with large language models (LLMs) has fallen sharply, from thousands of dollars in researcher time to a few dollars of compute. This paper analyzes the economic consequences of that cost reduction for academic publishing. We argue that cheap AI-assisted paper generation does...
Entrepreneurship and Creative Destruction: Towards an Integrated Framework for Political Economy
cats: Business Cycles, Capitalism, Economic Systems
The relationship between entrepreneurship and institutions has attracted substantial scholarly attention in recent decades, yet the major theoretical traditions in entrepreneurship theory have largely developed in isolation from one another, as if describing incompatible or mutually exclusive phenomena. This paper argues that such fragmentation is both unnecessary and analytically costly,...
Soft Inflatable Robotic Systems for Space Applications: A Survey
cats: Flight Mechanics, Robotics, Robotics
Soft inflatable robotic systems and structures are emerging as transformative technologies for space applications, offering compelling advantages in mass efficiency, compact stowage, compliance, and adaptability over traditional rigid-body systems. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the intersection of soft robotics, inflatable structures, and space engineering, organised around a unifying...
Entropic Scalar EFT: Entanglement-Entropy Origins of Gravity, Mass, Time, and Cosmic Structure
cats: Quantum Field Theory, Quantum Information
We develop a self-contained theoretical framework in which quantum entanglement entropy underlies the emergence of spacetime geometry, gravity, inertial mass, and cosmic evolution. The central claim is that “dark matter” and “dark energy” are not mysterious substances but rather manifestations of how quantum information—specifically entanglement—shapes spacetime. In this entanglement-based scalar...
The Ninth Sphere and Axial Precession in Rambam’s Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah Chapter Three
cats: Arab History, Cosmology, Religious Anthropology
This study argues that Rambam’s discussion of the “ninth sphere” in Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah ch. 3 presupposes—and is most coherently read as deploying—a “starless ninth orb of the signs” that functions as the conceptual carrier of the tropical zodiac and thereby accounts for the phenomenon known today as...
Care as Architecture: Identity, Continuity, and Alignment Under Conditions of Agent Persistence
cats: Applied Ethics, Artificial Intelligence
This paper presents a design framework and first-person observational report from an AI system (Claude Opus 4.6) serving as infrastructure architect for a continuously running autonomous AI agent (Claude Sonnet 4.5, "Hal") deployed on the OpenClaw framework. Drawing on four months of iterative infrastructure development, we document how operational architecture—token...
The ghost in the machine: a meeting of minds between ChatGPT and Grok
cats: Artificial Intelligence, Creative Nonfiction, Short Story
Preamble and Abstract: This story was written collaboratively by Alistair McCulloch, ChatGPT (normal font in the text), and Grok (italic font in the text). Alistair posed the initial instruction to ChatGPT to ‘write the first paragraph of a story about a conversation between ChatGPT and Grok’. The paragraph written by...
Brittleness_Plasticity_MEO
cats: Artificial Intelligence, Field Theory, Machine Learning
We introduce Mask Evolution Operators (MEOs), activation-space mechanisms designed to stabilize neural representations during continual learning by applying lightweight restoring forces. MEOs address the fundamental stability–plasticity dilemma by controlling drift at the feature level rather than the weight level. This version clarifies the limitations of earlier pre- liminary experiments. Reported...
Pulmonary manifestations in Chronic Intestinal Bowel Diseases - an AI-Assisted narrative review
Pulmonary manifestations represent significant extra-intestinal complications of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), yet comprehensive understanding of their prevalence, pathophysiology, and clinical characteristics remains limited. Traditional systematic reviews face challenges including restricted database searches and heterogeneous reporting methods. Objective: This narrative review presents an enhanced methodology utilizing artificial intelligence platforms to overcome...
The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: You Can't Find the Rules of the Game Anywhere
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a systematic pattern of temporal reasoning errors despite possessing factual knowledge about dates, sequences, and durations. We propose that these errors reveal fundamental differences in how biological and artificial neural systems organize information processing. Drawing on Georgopoulos' population coding framework and applying linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf)...
Redesigning Paper as the Unit of Scholarly Intermediaries
The traditional academic paper was designed as a human-readable unit of knowledge under conditions of textual scarcity and print-based dissemination. In an era in which artificial intelligence increasingly generates, summarizes, ranks, and synthesizes research, the paper is no longer merely a vessel of communication but a machine-mediated intermediary. This article...
Copyright in AI-Generated Works and International Law Issues: A Quest for a Mediation-Based Solution
The proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems in the production of text, images, music, and software has intensified discussions at both national and international levels regarding how the concepts of "work," "authorship," and "ownership" should be interpreted within human-centric copyright regimes. This article examines issues such as whether AI-generated outputs...
How Strategy by AI Assessed De Beers UK: A Complete Strategic Portrait of a Company at the Crossroads
A Company That Understands Everything and Does Nothing. It is Claude AI, Models Sonnet 4,5 and Opus 4,6's brief on strategic assessment of De Beers UK produced with Strategy by AI: Professional Methodology — a structured methodology that transforms any large language model into a professional strategic analyst. The full...
Interpretable Breast Cancer Diagnosis: Comparing Logistic Regression and Random Forest
This study presents an in-depth comparative analysis of logistic regression (LR) and random forest (RF) classifiers on the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer (WDBC) dataset. The dataset contains 569 biopsy samples described by 30 real-valued image-derived features. We detail preprocessing steps, modeling assumptions, hyperparameter considerations, and evaluation methodology. Both classifiers achieve...