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The examination metronome
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
The examination metronome. The Song triennial examination calendar should be audible as a production clock in commercial publishing. Exam aids spoil like produce — a candidate buys the digest in the run-up year, not the year after the palace examination — and the Jianyang commercial printers, unlike state or temple presses, lived on that demand. So the dated output of the exam-adjacent sector should oscillate with a three-year period phase-locked to examination years, while Buddhist and classical titles from the very same workshops show no such rhythm: one printing town, two clocks.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
From published censuses of dated Song and Yuan Jianyang imprints, classify titles as exam-adjacent (digests, model essays, commercially punctuated curricular classics) or other. Primary clause (verdict follows it): exam-adjacent dated imprints concentrate in examination years and the single preceding year at a rate at least 1.5 times the uniform share, while non-exam titles from the same printers show no significant concentration. Secondary: the rhythm weakens or vanishes across documented examination suspensions.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the published checklists of dated Jianyang imprints (the appendix census in the standard monograph on Jianyang commercial publishing, Printing for Profit, and the dated-edition records of the Zhongguo banke tulu), with examination years from the Song huiyao.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries); 248-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w04_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W04 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. An output-token limit interrupted the first response turn before any tool call was made; the packet was still produced in a single Write with no information ingress.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Chia's census-based study of Jianyang commercial publishing and the exam-aid market documents the sector and its demand structure, anticipating the mechanism, but no located work tests triennial phase-locking of dated imprints against examination years with a within-workshop control genre.
- Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th-17th Centuries), Harvard Asia Center, 2002
- Brokaw, 'Book History in Premodern China', Jianyang publishing and examination-aid market
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