Case kinds — What kind of thing a CASE is, beside how much of it is fact (standing). The two are orthogonal (ADR-042).
Specimen — a real instance, artefact, event or kind of thing, examined as it is.
62 of 191 CASE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| CASE-007 | CoreWeave: a climate-concerned workforce building fossil-powered datacenters | The owner’s case at U13: employees largely concerned about climate, a company whose datacenters, sited where energy is cheap, induce fossil fuel demand. Replaced by the fictional CASE-025 at the owner’s suggestion (U15). | Superseded — by CASE-025 |
| CASE-010 | Henley’s rendering of Villon, “Booze and the blowens cop the lot” | W. E. Henley’s rendering of a Villon ballade into nineteenth-century English thieves’ slang, refrain “Booze and the blowens cop the lot” (U3). Already a radical translation, and deliberately opaque. The source of the manuscript’s refrain family (§1, §10). | Active |
| CASE-011 | Hofstadter’s mother’s translation | A rendering of Marot that broke most of the formal constraints and that Hofstadter came to judge perhaps the best. Refutes fidelity as a count of preserved constraints (A4). Absent from the manuscript. | Active |
| CASE-014 v2 | Microsoft, as the philosophical target | The real corporation the first framing asked about. Committed to as a recurring touchstone (A205) and then silently dropped from the drafts; retired here by status rather than left as a promise nobody kept. | Deferred |
| CASE-015 | The telephone game | The owner’s case at U20: a message passed along a chain stays recognizable while drifting. Shows similarity, not equivalence, as the working notion, and opened the serial-reconstruction line (A50, outline v4’s running case B, the manuscript’s §8 and Case II). | Active |
| CASE-016 | The Dual State: normative and prerogative authority in National Socialist Germany | Fraenkel’s analysis: ordinary legal norms kept governing large domains while a prerogative order held authority over whether they bound at all. Used for one structural point only. | Active |
| CASE-019 | ”Hug from Doug” | A rendering of Marot that puts the translator’s name in the slot where Marot put his own. Wrong as a historical translation, right as a relation. The exchange’s first statement of relational invariance (A4). | Active |
| CASE-024 | A coral reef | The owner’s second holobiont direction (U30): a reef as a coordinated ecological whole. Its job changed four times in the exchange; filed once so that each change is visible. | Active |
| CASE-028 | Stability AI: well-intentioned founders, near-total churn, generic successor | The owner’s case at U12: a company founded by researchers and open-source developers that churned almost its whole staff in a year and became a generic corporate entity. Replaced by the fictional CASE-006. | Superseded — by CASE-006 |
| CASE-031 | Marot’s “A une Damoyselle malade” and Hofstadter’s translations of it | A sixteenth-century get-well poem whose content is trivial and whose form is everything, translated dozens of ways by Hofstadter and others. The exchange’s founding case, and the manuscript’s opening one (§1). | Active |
| CASE-038 v2 | TV Tropes: a community-curated catalogue of narrative tropes and their instances, such as the Gilligan Cut | The owner proposed it at U44 as a reference case. A155 read a trope as a relational pattern recognized across changes of characters, medium and wording, and pointed to Gala et al.’s dataset as a large set of instances already annotated. A191 §8 added five manipulations of one trope, the Gilligan Cut. v7 (A178) makes it Study B, and A218 keeps it as Study 5. The first time the thing turns up in the record. The catalogue is documented; the experiments on it are proposals. | Active |
| CASE-041 v2 | FID and Projected GANs: one ImageNet-trained probe family used both to train a generator and to evaluate it | The owner pointed to FID at U50 and proposed FID with Projected GANs as a paired case study at U51. A184 framed the pair: FID evaluates a distribution through probes, and Projected GANs learn one under pressure from probes. The anthology’s readings supply the fact the exchange lacked. The Projected GAN discriminator is ImageNet-trained, FID’s features are ImageNet class evidence, and Kynkäänniemi et al. show that such a generator can match FID while doing worse in an independent feature space and with human judges. | Active |
| CASE-042 v2 | Collaborative filtering and topic models: latent relational structure recovered from interaction matrices, up to gauge, or uniquely under anchor conditions | Proposed as a laboratory by the owner at U57 and conceded as prior art after the owner’s U58. Collaborative filtering recovers a user–item matrix’s predicted relations with latent coordinates fixed only up to an invertible change; topic models recover individual topics only under nonnegativity plus separability or anchor-word conditions. It shows that recovery is possible and limited, not that a recovered component is a communicative kind. | Active |
| CASE-046 v2 | A partner-dancing couple, lindy hop, tango or salsa, while they dance | The owner’s case (2026-10-11). Two social dancers improvise together. The lead proposes through the frame, the follow interprets and adds styling, and each corrects for the other’s balance and timing. Neither alone decides where the next step lands. Used to ask what the pair is while dancing, and only after that whether it is a self. | Active |
| CASE-047 | Gut microbes and the host’s hunger and mood: a lower-level collective that can drive the person | The owner’s example (2026-10-11). The human gut microbiome is a community of other organisms inside the person. Through metabolites, mimics of host appetite peptides, the immune system and the vagus, it can change hunger and affect: robustly in rodents, modestly and inconsistently in humans so far. Documented, with the evidence graded in LIT-903 and LIT-915. Used as the case of drive from a lower level that is itself a collective. | Active |
| CASE-052 | Stokely Carmichael’s two speaking styles, kept apart by audience and collapsed by broadcast | As boyd (2008) reports it after Meyrowitz (1985: 43): the civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael used very different rhetorical styles with black and with white audiences. While the audiences were separate the two styles did not conflict. Television and radio put both audiences in front of one speech, there was no neutral style, and his choice of one alienated the other audience. The roles did not change. The cover did. | Active |
| CASE-054 v2 | Joking relationships: one kind among the Crow and in Africa with no route between them, descended between Crow and Hidatsa, and a transported tale beside them | Radcliffe-Brown defined the joking relationship as one comparative kind and placed the Crow joking-relative and Dogon and Thonga joking in it; no historical route joins the Crow to West or South-East Africa. Lowie records the same institution among the Hidatsa, a division of the Crow’s parent tribe, and Tehrani’s phylogeny confirms an Ibo “Little Red Riding Hood” as an oral translation of the European tale. Kind without transport, kind with descent, and a transport, on documented material, for CLAIM-210. Partial: independence is a fact of geography no source states, and the kind is an analyst’s. | Active |
| CASE-056 v2 | J. B. Phillips’s “hearty handshake all round” for Paul’s “holy kiss”, and Nida’s judgement that it keeps the greeting | Phillips renders all five New Testament “holy kiss” directives (Romans 16:16 and four parallels) as handshakes, which changes what the congregation is told to do; Nida (1964, p. 160) holds this up as equivalent effect, and the UBS handbooks call it a brave attempt. The documented case for the necessity half of CLAIM-061, on expert judgement rather than reader evidence. The same handbooks document the sufficiency half: where kissing is amorous, a literal “kiss” changes the act. | Active |
| CASE-058 | FactBank’s source-relative factuality labels and Kiesling et al.’s stance-triangle annotation: one stance construct annotated reliably, the interpersonal ones not | FactBank labels one event’s factuality separately for each source that reports it, so a proposition held fixed gets different commitment labels by source, and trained annotators agree at κ = 0.82. Kiesling et al. annotate Du Bois’s stance triangle in Reddit threads, including an investment dimension defined as the split of animator from principal, and reach only α = 0.40 to 0.57, with investment and alignment below 0.4 outside one community. Together they bracket an answer to QUESTION-076: commitment relative to a source is annotatable when defined by tests, interpersonal stance only moderately. | Active |
| CASE-059 | Tatiana’s letter in Eugene Onegin III: вы to ты and back, lost in Kline and half kept in Spalding | Tatiana’s letter to Onegin opens with the formal вы, breaks into the intimate ты at “я твоя”, and returns to вы in its last lines; only the pronouns mark the moves. Kline (2009) has “you” throughout, so neither move is in the English; Spalding (1881) switches to “thou” and never returns. A documented candidate for the half of a change of cover in which the source decides a relational question that a rendering makes undecidable. The texts are attested and the loss is visible; native attestation is thin and there is no evidence on English readers. | Active |
| CASE-061 v2 | Wonder-working power: one hymn phrase in a national address, heard as faith by those who sing it and as boilerplate by others | In the State of the Union of 28 January 2003 George W. Bush said “there’s power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people”, lifting the refrain of an 1899 gospel hymn verbatim. Churchgoers who knew the hymn heard the power of Christ; others heard boilerplate; an experiment with an ingroup and a religiously diverse outgroup measured the split. The same-wording variant of CASE-064, illustrating CLAIM-224 without translation. | Active |
| CASE-063 | The English localization of Ace Attorney: a Japanese courtroom game moved to an alternate Los Angeles, with “textually accurate” set against “emotionally accurate” by its localizer | Capcom’s Gyakuten Saiban (2001) became Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (2005) by moving the courtroom from Japan to Los Angeles. Its second localizer, Janet Hsu, names two fidelity targets in print, “textually accurate” against “emotionally accurate”, and states the correspondence of situations she works to, an alternate Los Angeles where the California Alien Land Law of 1913 “was never passed”. The first, Alexander O. Smith, states the criterion for re-performance. The reception is contested on record. No reader has been asked a report question and a re-performance question about the same lines. | Active |
| CASE-064 | Lindsey Stone’s Arlington photograph: one post, taken by friends as a tasteless in-joke and by strangers as contempt | In 2012 Lindsey Stone posed at Arlington National Cemetery mock-shouting and giving the finger beside a “Silence And Respect” sign, part of a running joke of photos that disobeyed signs. Friends who knew the joke called it tasteless; four weeks later strangers read the same post as contempt for the war dead, and she lost her job. A change of audience with no translation and the token unchanged, illustrating CLAIM-224. Partial: the token is a photograph, not wording. | Active |
| CASE-066 | Dolly’s slip into ты in Anna Karenina I.4, and three English translations that carry it three ways | In Anna Karenina I.4 Dolly says one sentence to Stiva with ты amid вы, and the narrator says so. English has no live T/V pronoun. Dole (1886) keeps the Russian word and glosses it; Garnett (1901) adds “Stiva”; the Maudes (1918) add “our children”. The later two add words not in the Russian to carry the relation. Tolstoy himself says вы and its dictionary equivalent vous differ in coldness. A documented instance of the compensation mechanism; the evidence on what readers recover is translators’ and the author’s, not readers’. | Active |
| CASE-067 | The reception of Deborah Smith’s The Vegetarian: the Booker judges’ task, the Korean critics’ task, and one critic’s two verdicts | Deborah Smith’s English version of Han Kang’s 채식주의자 won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, while Korean critics published lists of errors and charged it with embellishment. Each side’s task is stated in print: the judges evaluate “the finished English-language work on their own terms”, while assessment in Korea “does usually involve comparison”. Charse Yun perceives what both sides perceive and gives two verdicts by changing task. Part of the split is access, not weight: some errors are invisible to readers without Korean. | Active |
| CASE-069 v2 | Labov’s recorded sounding sessions: ritual insult turning personal, with the same exchange shape and a different act | Labov’s team taped sounding among Harlem peer groups. Boot answers David’s taunt with a remark “related to A-5 in exactly the way that one sound is related to another”, yet both are taken as personal insults: denied, objected to, wept over. Labov’s rule puts the difference in a further relation, the shared knowledge before an audience that the proposition is untrue. A documented, non-institutional case for CLAIM-151 in which the act follows a relation among the parties, and for CLAIM-138, since the exchange relations alone match and the acts still differ. | Active |
| CASE-072 | Hafez’s “Shirazi Turk” in English: one ungendered beloved rendered as a maid, as God and as a boy | The opening of Hafez’s ghazal 3 names a beloved, “that Shirazi Turk”, whose sex and nature the Persian leaves open. English forces a choice at the first possessive. Jones (1771) and Bell (1897) make the beloved a maid, Clarke (1891) makes it God, and Davis (2012) makes it a boy, and Davis says in print that his choice is arbitrary. A documented instance of the half of a change of cover in which the rendering decides what the source left open. The disagreement on the source is among translators and scholars; no reader agreement has been measured. | Active |
| CASE-073 | The Kia Provo: one concept-car name, a blank coinage to the motor press and taken as honouring the IRA in Northern Ireland | In March 2013 Kia showed a concept car at Geneva named the Provo, “from the word ‘provoke’”. The motor press found no meaning in the name; in Northern Ireland, where “Provo” names a member of the Provisional IRA, six MPs said it “has caused deep offence”. Kia said it meant no offence, and withdrew the name for the UK and Ireland. One name, the speaker’s intention fixed and declared, a new audience, and an unintended reading taken up and acted on: the accidental, verbal variant of CASE-064, illustrating CLAIM-224. | Active |
| CASE-074 v2 | Twitch Plays Pokémon in democracy mode, with the running tally shown while the votes come in | The crowd of CASE-075 in democracy mode. Each move is the button that collects the most votes in a short window, and the running tally is shown while the votes arrive, so the current majority can sway the votes still coming. The owner judges it a better demonstration of a population with drift-diffusion decision dynamics than anarchy mode. Showing the tally adds feedback, and feedback moves the dynamics toward winner-take-all. | Active |
| CASE-075 | Twitch Plays Pokémon in anarchy mode: one avatar steered through the map by the running aggregate of a crowd’s inputs | In February 2014 a stream let everyone in its chat play one copy of Pokémon Red at once, with every typed button press executed in turn. The owner offers its navigation as a working approximation of an agent made of a population whose decisions follow drift-diffusion dynamics. The crowd’s direction reorganizes continuously and is not switched. The record holds no source for the case yet. | Active |
| CASE-079 | r/place: a shared pixel canvas on which each Reddit user could place one pixel at a time under a cooldown, and communities coordinated off the canvas to build, defend and overwrite images | The owner proposed it at U8 of the 2026-10-13 exchange: “every user can modify a single pixel once, and different subreddits coordinated to present certain images or even warred amongst each other over regions of the canvas”. Reddit ran it in 2017, 2022 and 2023, and released the 2022 placement log. A8 read it as the exchange’s two canvases made visible: the pixels as the meaning canvas, the plans, templates and alliances off the canvas as the influence canvas. First time the thing turns up in the record. The event and the data are documented. The readings of them are proposals. | Active |
| CASE-085 | The medication in the ambulance: a drug the EMT knew was stocked could not be found during a resuscitation, the paramedic changed the request, and afterwards said “If I can’t find it, it isn’t there” | The owner’s own experience as an EMT-B on an ALS unit, told at U16. It illustrates CLAIM-296 and is the source of TERM-055. Stipulated, not documented: the event is real, and the only source is the owner’s retrospective account, which a reader cannot check. | Active |
| CASE-098 v2 | A long rivalry between two teams outlives every player, owner and supporter who first carried it: new fans inherit the antagonism, its history and its practices before they know why the game matters | From U2 of the exchange of 2026-10-16 on sports fandom (the owner’s list of subcases). A2’s reading: a mature rivalry is “a reproduced intercollective relation”, carried by families, media and fan culture, that can survive the replacement of everyone on both sides. Stipulated: the record has no study of a particular rivalry. It shows a relation with its own continuity; it does not show that the relation is a system, an agent, or constitutive of either fandom. | Active |
| CASE-100 v2 | A fan redub of an X-Men cartoon, circulated online in 2006, put “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” into X-Men: The Last Stand three months later | The owner’s case at U7 of the exchange of 2026-10-16, offered as a fandom “making something happen”. Two fans made the parody; many people spread it for their own reasons; the film’s makers put its line in at a reshoot. A7: an effect on an outside institution with no collective intention and no procedure behind it. Documented as to the sequence; the route by which the parody reached the decision, and whether the spreaders were X-Men fans or the internet at large, is not. | Active |
| CASE-102 v2 | A college program stays good, or bad, at a sport for decades while its whole roster turns over every four or five years | The owner’s case, U3 of the exchange of 2026-10-16: “the team composition experiences extremely fast churn, and yet in spite of this real world ship-of-theseus situation, teams often maintain standing on similar timescales as professional teams (if not longer)”. A3: it separates the persistence of a collective’s identity from the persistence of its capacities, and the second needs a mechanism that regenerates them in each new population. Stipulated: the record holds no data on program persistence. The proposed test is residual persistence of performance across seasons with no player overlap. | Active |
| CASE-103 v2 | A fanbase keeps a reputation, for hostility or loyalty or knowledge, after the behaviour that earned it has changed, and outsiders and members both act on it | From U2 of the exchange of 2026-10-16. A2 separated three things that vary independently: many members have the trait; others believe the fanbase has it; that belief shapes how the fanbase behaves. A reputation belongs to a fanbase through its relations with audiences, and it can enter the process that produces its own evidence. It is a case for regulative attribution (THEORY-137, QUESTION-049) beyond mental states. Stipulated; it shows no particular reputation was self-fulfilling. | Active |
| CASE-104 | A fanbase is said to hate its owner or general manager, though it has no procedure for forming a view, some fans approve of the person, and nobody has counted | From U2 of the exchange of 2026-10-16. A2 separated four things the sentence could report: a statistical aggregate of dislike, a shared emotional orientation, a norm of opposition that a loyal fan is expected to meet, and a corporate judgment such as a supporters’ trust demanding resignation. A fanbase can have the second and third without the fourth, and a vocal minority can set a public stance most members privately reject. The case for QUESTION-119. Stipulated. | Active |
| CASE-105 | The Washington Senators: the original club became the Minnesota Twins in 1961, an expansion club took its name in Washington and became the Texas Rangers in 1972, and the Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals in 2005, so franchise, city and supporters each have a different successor | The owner’s subcase at U2 of the exchange of 2026-10-16, “the team formerly known as the washington senators”. A2 corrected the framing: the name belonged to two franchises, and the city’s present team descends from a third. A league can designate the successor franchise; it cannot designate the successor fandom. The lineages are documented; how supporters actually distributed their loyalties is not, and the case does not show that a fandom’s identity branched. | Active |
| CASE-107 | Locked-in syndrome: consciousness preserved with anarthria and quadriplegia; in the classic form, vertical eye movement and blinking remain and carry communication, and in the completely locked-in state no motor channel remains | The owner’s case, U2 of the exchange of 2026-10-16: “a lucid human who struggles with locked-in syndrome”. It separates lucid judgement from limb and speech action. In the classic form it does not separate judgement from action as active inference defines it, since the eye movements it spares are that theory’s model action. The completely locked-in state is the real test, and there any evidence of lucidity has to come through a channel that is itself an action. Visceromotor regulation and Damasio’s internal “as if body loop” survive paralysis, so the case never removes every contingency between intention and outcome. | Active |
| CASE-121 | One melody from a 1951 gospel record to a 2005 Katrina protest song: “I’ve Got a Savior”, “I Got a Woman”, “Gold Digger” and “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People”, each link a different relation, the message turned at every step | Boyle’s chain in The Public Domain, ch. 6 (LIT-1301). The Bailey Gospel Singers’ “I’ve Got a Savior” (c. 1951), reworded by Ray Charles as “I Got a Woman” (1955), re-sung by Jamie Foxx as the licensed hook of Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” (2005), looped from that recording by The Legendary K.O. for a Katrina protest song. The melody and phrase pattern carry through; the object of praise turns from a saviour to a generous woman, a mercenary one, then a president’s indifference. Each link is a different relation: rewording, licensed re-performance, sampling. The received origin story was wrong, and the melody found the real source. | Active |
| CASE-122 | Warhol’s Orange Prince, licensed to Condé Nast in 2016 from a 1981 Goldsmith photograph: the Supreme Court judged the use by its purpose and the dissent by its meaning, and the same cover came out a substitute on one test and a new work on the other | Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith (2023), read in NOTE-1019. The experts agreed Warhol’s silkscreen changed the photograph’s meaning, from Prince’s private identity to his public image. The majority held that this did not matter for the use at issue: a magazine cover illustrating a story about Prince serves substantially the photograph’s own purpose, and new meaning counts only as evidence of a different purpose. The dissent measured what the copier added. One rendering, two measures of what it changed, two verdicts. | Active |
| CASE-127 v2 | United 173 and Crew Resource Management: a crew whose concern about the fuel did not reach the captain as a demand to act, and the training that followed, which asked for participative captains and assertive crews | The owner’s case at U25 of the exchange of 2026-10-22: “the history underlying the evolution of Crew Resource Management”. A cockpit had the information and lacked the organization to make it govern. The reform changed the organization of authority, not its holder. Not shown: that CRM caused the later fall in accidents, which the case does not test. | Active |
| CASE-130 v2 | Gracie jiu-jitsu against luta livre: two Brazilian grappling traditions whose contests were fought over the rules as well as under them, and whose matches placed them in a racial hierarchy as well as ranking them by results | The owner’s case at U35 of the exchange of 2026-10-22: contemporaneous, geographically related schools of martial arts vying for regional, ideological, demographic and physical dominance. A35 and A36 took the Gracie–luta livre rivalry, from Penglase (LIT-1391). It is the record’s first martial-arts material. Not shown: which tradition was technically better, which the case is evidence against asking in general; and the historical particulars, which are the replies’ summary of an unread source. | Active |
| CASE-131 | The graph that asserted an inference nobody made: filing one claim as supporting another made the record’s link fixer write that the other rested on it, and the record answered by adding a relation | The record’s own history, as A18 of the exchange of 2026-10-22 read it at the owner’s prompting (U18): “the pre-existing representation didn’t merely omit information; it positively misrepresented an inference”. It is a move the grammar could not hold, caught and answered by amending the grammar. Not shown: that such moves are always caught. | Active |
| CASE-133 v2 | American party realignment: each major party kept its name and organizational continuity across the twentieth century while its coalition and its stance on civil rights changed, and the change began in state parties, unions and constituencies before it reached national leaders | The owner’s case at U29 and U30 of the exchange of 2026-10-22, in the replies’ corrected form. A party is a carrier; its coalition and character can change while the carrier persists, and an orientation can move between carriers. Not shown: that the parties swapped perspectives, or that any present party continues a historical one’s character, which are the owner’s U29 framings the replies declined. | Active |
| CASE-135 v2 | The Brookhollow Apartments fire, Wichita, 2023: a mayday after a stair roof collapses on two companies opens a second emergency inside a search for a trapped resident, and an independent review finds an unorganized rescue effort without finding that it changed the outcome | The owner’s class of case, a fireground mayday inside an escalating response organized under the National Incident Management System (U23 of the exchange of 2026-10-22); A23 and A24’s instance. It is the record’s first real multi-regime emergency, beside the fictional Northstar (CASE-023). It shows two regimes, rescue of a member and the original mission, needing to be held at once, and a review that recommends change. Not shown: that the department’s safety culture changed, or what the review’s recommendations were, since the report was not read. | Active |
| CASE-137 v2 | Clive Wearing: a musician left by encephalitis with almost no memory of his past and none of the last minutes, who still plays, sight-reads and conducts, keeps his attachment to his wife, and writes over and over that he has just become conscious for the first time | The owner’s case, proposed at U26 of the exchange of 2026-10-22 (“if we haven’t already examined the case of Clive Wearing, that might be another good addition”). The record had no amnesia case. It separates skill and short-horizon organization, which persist, from autobiographical continuity and experienced ownership of one’s past, which do not. Not shown by it: that the unity of his present experience is an illusion, or that his denials of past consciousness are evidence of its absence. | Active |
| CASE-138 v2 | Challenger to Columbia: NASA corrected its launch decisions and its safety organization after 1986, and the Columbia board found in 2003 that related organizational failure mechanisms had recurred, while its lessons-learned system was little used in between | The owner’s case at U25 of the exchange of 2026-10-22: NASA’s mechanisms for documenting and learning from mistakes, with Challenger as the classic example. The record already reads the Columbia board’s account (THEORY-140, from LIT-734). This case files the history around it: a warning whose standing changed as it moved, a correction made in the rules, and a capacity not maintained. Not shown: why the correction decayed, which THEORY-140 explains and this case only displays. | Active |
| CASE-139 | Chinese martial traditions through the Cultural Revolution: practices restricted, teachers persecuted and teaching driven underground, then after 1978 a reconstruction of Shaolin martial arts through heritage policy and tourism in which local practitioners and authorized institutions dispute who carries the tradition | The owner’s case at U37 of the branch of the exchange of 2026-10-22: the “(various) perspectival interruption(s) caused by the Chinese Cultural Revolution”, near the record’s martial-arts material (CASE-130). A case family, not one example: skills that survived in bodies while teaching became dangerous; practices that persisted under a different organization of authority; survival in marginal carriers; and a reconstruction that became a source of authenticity. Not shown: what was continuous and what was rebuilt, which is the question it raises. | Active |
| CASE-143 v2 | Franklin’s borrowed book: Benjamin Franklin, opposed by a new member of the Pennsylvania Assembly when he stood again as its clerk, asked to borrow a rare book from him rather than courting him, returned it with thanks, and found the man civil and later a friend | The owner’s U1 of the exchange of 2026-10-22, “Ben Franklin Effect Explained”, read at U2 as a “perspectival invitation”. Documented in Franklin’s Autobiography (LIT-1402; the passage was read in the Project Gutenberg text on 2026-10-23), and the origin of the “Ben Franklin effect”, that doing someone a favour can increase liking for them, tested by Jecker and Landy (LIT-1419). The standing is the anecdote’s, as Franklin told it; the reading is the exchange’s. | Active |
| CASE-151 | Wells Fargo’s Community Bank, 2002–2016: unauthorized and unwanted accounts that the board’s own investigation traced to the sales model, the performance management that enforced it and a decentralized structure, while signals of the harm reached people who could not act on them | The Wells Fargo sales-practices episode, as reported by the bank’s independent directors (2017; LIT-1425, read in NOTE-1095). The report finds the root cause in the Community Bank’s sales culture and performance management, sustained by a decentralized structure that deferred to the business line. It finds that leadership blamed individual employees, and that the signals of harm were held by investigators, regional leaders and control functions without authority to act, or filtered before reaching the board. It also names and sanctions individuals. Not shown: intent, the absence of individual culpability, or anything beyond the company’s own account of itself. | Active |
| CASE-167 v2 | The nitroplast: UCYN-A, a streamlined nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium in a marine alga, whose division is coupled to the host’s and which imports host-encoded proteins, reclassified as an early-stage organelle in 2024 | Candidatus Atelocyanobacterium thalassa (UCYN-A), a metabolically streamlined nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium known as an endosymbiont of a marine alga, is integrated into the alga’s cell architecture and organellar division and imports proteins encoded by the algal genome. Coale et al. call it an early-stage organelle, the nitroplast (LIT-1562). Used as the case where the line between endosymbiont and organelle is drawn by stated criteria. | Proposed |
| CASE-168 v2 | Monocercomonoides: a eukaryote that lost its mitochondrion entirely after the organelle’s essential jobs were removed in steps, its Fe–S cluster assembly taken over by a bacterial-type SUF system that its relatives share and its glycine cleavage system lost, and kept canonical eukaryotic complexity | The oxymonad Monocercomonoides lacks all hallmark mitochondrial proteins; its mitochondrial iron–sulfur cluster pathway was replaced by a cytosolic SUF system taken from bacteria, and the loss was secondary (LIT-1567). Its genome otherwise shows canonical eukaryotic complexity (LIT-1574). Used as the negative control: loss of function dissolving an integrated compartment, not deepening dependence on it. | Proposed |
| CASE-169 v3 | The Chagossians, 1965 to now: a people expelled from the Chagos Archipelago between 1967 and 1973 for the Diego Garcia base, dispersed to Mauritius, the Seychelles and Britain, whose practices, kinship and political organization continued or arose in exile while sovereignty over the islands was settled between states | The owner’s case, U1–U3 of the exchange of 2026-10-26, “About the Chagossians”. Britain separated the archipelago from Mauritius in 1965, expelled its inhabitants by 1973 for a US base on Diego Garcia, and the islanders’ descendants live dispersed across three countries. The ICJ advised in 2019 that decolonization was incomplete; a UK–Mauritius treaty of 2025 would cede sovereignty and keep the base. A case in which territorial community, cultural transmission, political agency and the claims of the displaced, ordinarily bundled, were pulled apart by identifiable decisions. Not shown: that the Chagossians are one persisting agent, or which practices survived; the sources are registered unread. | Active |
| CASE-170 | The East Wing of the White House, 2025–2026: the wing demolished for a ballroom before the legal challenge to the project was decided, so that the remedy still available was to stop new construction, not to keep the old building | The owner’s case, U7 of the exchange of 2026-10-26: “the destruction of the East Wing of the white house and the courts throwing out the legal challenge to it”. The object of review was destroyed before review concluded, so preserving it left the set of remedies, and the project under way became part of the argument for continuing it. A7 corrected the owner’s premise: as it reported, the challenge was not dismissed on the merits but its injunction was stayed. Not shown: that the demolition was unlawful, or that the security concerns were pretextual; the court history is the exchange’s. | Active |
| CASE-171 v3 | Mealybugs, Tremblaya and Moranella: a bacterium inside a bacterium inside an insect, amino-acid pathways patched together from three genomes and genes transferred from other bacteria, and an inner symbiont replaced several times while the transferred genes stayed | In the mealybug Planococcus citri, Moranella lives inside Tremblaya. Essential amino-acid pathways need gene products from both bacteria and the insect (LIT-1565). At least 22 genes the insect acquired from other bacteria, none from Tremblaya, fill symbiont gaps (LIT-1569), and the inner symbiont has been replaced several times across mealybugs while those genes persisted (LIT-1572). Used as the case where function is distributed across nested boundaries and constituent lineages turn over. | Proposed |
| CASE-172 v2 | Federal science and education in the United States, 2025–2026: grants cancelled, frozen and in part reinstated, staff departures, advisory committees ended and research programs suspended, so that funding, organization and scientific capacity could be restored, or not, separately | The owner’s case, U4 of the exchange of 2026-10-26: “the full breadth of the harms incurred by the actions of the DOGE project, and the trump administration’s broader assault on the scientific research and education establishment”. A4 drew ten dimensions of harm and the question it took as central: “Suppose a grant is canceled and later reinstated. What, precisely, has been restored?” A case of a resource restored without the organization it supported, and of capacity lost without output falling. Not shown: the size of any loss. Every figure is the exchange’s, from reports this filing has not read. | Active |
| CASE-173 v3 | Aphids and Buchnera: an obligate nutritional symbiosis in which neither partner reproduces alone, and the symbiont’s genome reduced to a seventh of E. coli’s | Buchnera lives in aphid bacteriocytes and is passed from mother to egg. Its 641-kb genome keeps the pathways for the amino acids its host needs and has lost most else (LIT-1596); its genes evolve fast and A+T-biased under Muller’s ratchet (LIT-1573). The record’s reading of Wilson and Barker reports Godfrey-Smith placing the pair as both an organism and a Darwinian individual (NOTE-114). Used as the case of high mutual dependence and high reproductive cohesion reached through reduction, with no gene transfer to the host reported in the works it rests on. | Proposed |
| CASE-174 v2 | Paulinella chromatophora: a photosynthetic organelle in the making, from an endosymbiosis independent of the plastids’, its genome reduced to about a third of its coding capacity, and hundreds of host proteins imported into it, most encoded by the host’s own genes rather than transferred from the symbiont | The amoeba Paulinella chromatophora’s chromatophores descend from a cyanobacterium taken up about 60 million years ago, independently of the plastids. Their genome kept 26% of a free-living relative’s genes and lacks essential pathways (LIT-1621). Genes transferred to the nucleus make proteins that are imported into the chromatophores (LIT-1557), and import is reviewed across systems in LIT-1560. Used as the case where host control emerges by gene transfer and import. | Proposed |
| CASE-175 v3 | CECOT, 2025: people removed from the United States into Salvadoran custody despite court orders, the US saying it could not bring them back and El Salvador’s president that he could not send them, until coordinated transfers out showed the two governments together could | The owner’s case, U7 of the exchange of 2026-10-26: “the DOJ ignoring court orders not to deport people to CECOT, then claiming they didn’t have the authority to bring them back, while CECOT claimed they didn’t have the authority to send them back”. Physical custody, the control that selected and could release, and the duty to correct were held in different places, and each government’s statement of what it alone could not do was offered as if it settled what could be done. Not shown: whether any official was in contempt, or intent; the later proceedings are the exchange’s. | Active |
| CASE-176 v2 | The United States Institute of Peace, 2025–2026: its board removed and its building entered by DOGE staff with police assistance before any court ruled, nearly all staff dismissed, a district court’s judgment that the takeover was unlawful stayed on appeal, and the institution renamed while its legal identity continued | The owner’s case, U5 and U6 of the exchange of 2026-10-26: “examine the case of the US Institute for Peace through the lens of our framework”, then “the involvement of the DC metropolitan police and FBI, and the judge’s concern regarding the potential for police instigated violence in their ruling on whether or not to grant a TRO”. Name, building and legal entity continued; staff, programs, leadership and partner relations did not. And enforcement settled who held the building before any court settled who held the authority. Not shown: what was lost for good, or the legal outcome, which is pending. | Active |
| CASE-177 v2 | Hodgkinia in cicadas: one endosymbiont splitting into two to dozens of interdependent lineages, with near-complementary gene sets, idiosyncratic fragmentation in Magicicada, and hosts transmitting up to six times as many cells to keep every lineage | In some Tettigades cicadas, the endosymbiont Hodgkinia split into two cell lineages with almost perfectly complementary gene sets, the functionality of one (LIT-1563), and it has done so at least six times in the genus (LIT-1586). In Magicicada it fragmented into twenty or more genomic circles per species (LIT-1612, LIT-1602). Hosts compensate by transmitting more cells to each egg (LIT-1590). Used as the case where dependence and the number of parts grow with no new collective function, and the host pays. | Proposed |