AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
← All conjectures · Institutions, law & bureaucracy
The diaspora exponent
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 diaspora exponent. Sublinear scaling laws from urban economics meet museum acquisition history: the number of collections across which a site's tablets are scattered grows sublinearly with the site's total finds, because large finds were sold and donated in blocks, so dispersal saturates.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Across CDLI proveniences with >= 30 tablets, the regression of log distinct holding collections on log tablet count has a slope between 0.35 and 0.65 with R^2 >= 0.6; a slope >= 0.85 (proportional scattering) or <= 0.2 kills it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: CDLI proveniences crossed with holding collections (in house).
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo/web/DB access); titles-only knowledge of existing items, embedded in titles_supplied per the batch-2 lane rule; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH3_20260705.md (b043140). Novelty unverified by construction. titles_supplied stripped to the committed sidecar conjecture_fresh_fablemax_batch3_titles_supplied_20260705.md at import (schema additionalProperties:false; relaxation queued).
Novelty / leakage triage
Adjacent (closely related prior work exists)
Settlement-scaling theory establishes exponent-fitting on pre-modern archaeological count data (Ortman/Bettencourt), and the tablet-dispersal phenomenon is documented at scale (~500k tablets, 200+ collections), but the specific regression (collections-count on tablet-count per provenience) was not located. In-house computable (collections_raw held).
- Ortman et al., 'The Pre-History of Urban Scaling', PLOS ONE 2014 — Scaling exponents on archaeological counts
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
Weigh in
No community feedback yet.
Add your take
Posted immediately (spam is removed). Community feedback is never an adjudicated verdict and never changes this conjecture's triage label or status above.