Overview
What this research program is and why it exists. The frame the rest of the work hangs on.
research / namesake
Namesake research
Intentional baby naming. Research is an empirical investigation of cultural diffusion: how names break out, what predicts spread, and where the predictability ceiling lives.
Why this matters
The portable claim — what this research lets you understand outside the surface domain.
Naming is the obvious-seeming domain. The research underneath it is cultural diffusion — how cultural objects spread, what predicts breakouts, and where the predictability ceiling lives. Findings extrapolate beyond names: 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. Names are the testbed because the corpus is dense and the temporal signal is clean. The implications travel.
Read first
The general-audience explainer is the entry point. Everything below is the drill-down.
General-audience explainer
General audienceThe diffusion findings, written for a general reader.
Read →Drill-down — full research surface
Seven-slot baseline. Forthcoming slots shown openly.
Methodology
How the work is done — instruments, protocols, the standards each report inherits.
Reports
The actual research findings — phased results, research-question briefs, applied analyses.
Cultural diffusion
cultural-diffusionHeadline cultural-diffusion findings.
Blockbuster paradox
cultural-diffusionWhy naming-event blockbusters do not always cause spread.
Moran's I report
cultural-diffusionSpatial autocorrelation results across the SSA-derived corpus.
Moderation tests
cultural-diffusionModeration analyses across diffusion variables.
Phase 5 — null model results
cultural-diffusionPhase 6 — phonetic spillover
cultural-diffusionPhase 7a — Granger causality
cultural-diffusionPhase 7b — Hawkes process fit
cultural-diffusionPhase 7c — Bass diffusion
cultural-diffusionPredictability ceiling
cultural-diffusionWhere the upper bound of name-spread prediction lives.
Variance decomposition
cultural-diffusion
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.
Pipeline
What is running, what is queued, what is forthcoming.