Methodology
How the work is done — instruments, protocols, the standards each report inherits.
research / arc / cultural-diffusion
Cultural diffusion & predictability ceilings
How do cultural objects spread, what predicts breakouts, and where is the predictability ceiling? Hawkes processes, Bass diffusion, phonetic spillover, Granger-causal event chains, the variance decomposition that says how much of a name's trajectory is name-intrinsic versus environment-driven.
Why this matters
The portable claim — what this arc lets you understand outside the surface domain.
Names are the testbed because the corpus is dense and the temporal signal is clean. The findings travel: how marketing campaigns succeed or fail, how misinformation propagates, how innovations diffuse through organizations, why fashion cycles look the way they do, what separates lasting public discourse from brief virality. The arc lives almost entirely in Namesake today; visual-rhyme dynamics in Vela's reincarnation pool are an emerging adjacent surface.
Spans
Products this arc cuts through. Each application is sometimes the lead empirical apparatus, sometimes the funding/data-collection platform.
Read first
The general-audience entry point for this arc. Drill down below for the full set.
General-audience explainer
From NamesakeThe diffusion findings, written for a general reader.
Read →Drill-down — full arc surface
Cross-product. Source application shown on each entry.
Reports
The actual research findings — phased results, research-question briefs, applied analyses.
Cultural diffusion
NamesakeHeadline cultural-diffusion findings.
Blockbuster paradox
NamesakeWhy naming-event blockbusters do not always cause spread.
Moran's I report
NamesakeSpatial autocorrelation results across the SSA-derived corpus.
Moderation tests
NamesakeModeration analyses across diffusion variables.
Phase 5 — null model results
NamesakePhase 6 — phonetic spillover
NamesakePhase 7a — Granger causality
NamesakePhase 7b — Hawkes process fit
NamesakePhase 7c — Bass diffusion
NamesakePredictability ceiling
NamesakeWhere the upper bound of name-spread prediction lives.
Variance decomposition
Namesake
Audience tiers
The same headline research surfaced four ways: peer-review, engineering, general audience, product.
Bibliography
Field positioning — formal references and literature maps grounding the research threads.
Preregistrations & protocols
Studies and intervention protocols filed before execution.