SIGNAL ARRAY / CAFE / RABBIT — R11 METHOD
How the instrument observes.
SIGNAL ARRAY is a bounded observatory for the visible English-language digital news environment. It estimates collective attention and portrayal inside a disclosed source universe. It does not claim to measure all human attention, determine truth by popularity, or issue an editorial verdict.
SIGNAL ARRAY
The instrument commissions a sealed rolling observation from a fixed, inspectable receiver panel. Articles are normalized, time-bounded, clustered into events, and preserved with source provenance. The resulting field describes what this observable universe attended to during the cycle—not the total internet, all languages, or an objective hierarchy of importance.
Attention authority and evidentiary authority are separate. A source may reveal that a narrative is receiving attention without becoming admissible evidence for an Event Frame, Verification, or RABBIT.
PRESS BAND
Twenty Core Press receivers are plotted individually using their genuine persisted 24-hour VADER tone reading. Each label retains its publisher, value, and link. A stale or unavailable source remains visible as unavailable and is never converted to zero.
Six Edge receivers are attention-only. The primary instrument shows them as one EDGE / ATTENTION cluster, without inventing an Edge sentiment average. Individual Edge availability remains in the complete 26-source register. Edge material cannot supply an Event Frame, Verification evidence, or a RABBIT root or destination.
VADER is a separate lexical tone instrument. It does not alter CAFE portrayal.
CAFE — Collective Attention Field Estimator
Articles form events before portrayal. Each eligible Event Frame receives eight independent scores: Order, Disorder, Science, Faith, Nature, Culture, Labor, and Play. Opposing poles are not zero-sum; both can be highly active at once.
Q is the event’s attention mass and p(e,k) is its commissioned portrayal activation at pole k. Paired connectors show field extent. The center overlay shows joint tension when both opposing poles are active. Stored full precision is preserved; public field values are formatted to one decimal.
WHAT MOVED THE FIELD
Movement is computed deterministically as Σk Qe × p(e,k). The four highest movement-ranked multi-pole events become WHAT MOVED THE FIELD. This does not change the eight independent pole values and does not depend on the public Brief or RABBIT assignment.
CAFE Brief — current commissioning amendment
The public CAFE Brief is implemented as a deterministic linked headline aggregate derived from commissioned Event Frames and representative Core reporting rather than generative prose.
Eligible unique events are ordered primarily by existing Movement. One representative genuine Core publisher headline and link is shown per conservative topic family, normally up to 12 and never more than 15. If fewer defensible unique linked events exist, the scan shows fewer. There is no generated summary beneath a headline and no public primary-event hierarchy.
Legacy generated Brief records remain preserved for audit and backwards compatibility, but a new observation does not require a prose-model call to complete.
Verification
Verification is triggered, bounded, claim-specific, and separate from portrayal. It evaluates factual assertions where consequence, dispute, bounded retrieval, and an explainable evidence chain justify a check. Edge evidence is ineligible.
Routine SUPPORTED or CORROBORATED results are silent by default in the public scan. DISPUTED, UNRESOLVED, and materially CONTRADICTED states remain visible. Evidence and source provenance remain persisted even when ordinary confirmation is not decorated publicly.
RABBIT — descents and public root diversity
RABBIT commissions eight pole-specific apertures after Verification. For each pole it ranks eligible Event Frames using unchanged CAFE contribution values. The current public-root amendment then solves one deterministic global assignment across all eight poles: each public aperture roots in the highest-contributing eligible Event Frame available under the global root-diversity constraint. One event or conservative topic family may occupy at most one public door. CAFE contribution math is unchanged.
The family rule is deliberately narrow: explicit canonical identity, persisted event/content identity, or exactly equivalent structured Event Frame subject-and-occurrence fields. Loose semantic resemblance does not merge unrelated stories. When eight distinct eligible families cannot be assigned, the affected public aperture set fails closed; it does not fabricate a root or reuse a topic.
Diversified descent planning
The planner selects three to six relevant modes and produces two to three distinct queries per mode. Available modes include historical precedent, mechanism, experiment, consequence, threshold, counterfactual, unexpected adjacent systems, human impact, and deep research/archive. Query provenance and source-class preferences are persisted.
Admission and revelation
Every admitted result must explain an evidence-backed bridge: root anchor → intermediate concept → candidate anchor. Connection, Source-Fitness, Specificity, and Explainability are mandatory hard gates. Incidental name overlap and same-occurrence restatements fail Connection.
Ranking gives revelation/information gain an explicit 20% weight, favors a useful middle conceptual distance, and applies a redundancy penalty of up to 45 points to same-story material. Revelation means useful new conceptual territory—not sensationalism. no_defensible_descent is legal only after relevant diversified modes and their required queries were actually attempted. The maximum depth is 13, and no result is forced.
History / calibration
The rolling field covers inclusive approximately −24 hours through NOW, requiring 25 hourly bucket targets. A genuine persisted completed observation may fill a target within ±30 minutes of the hourly schedule. Each plotted reading retains a distinct cycle identity.
Missing hours remain explicitly missing. The instrument never interpolates, replays, or synthesizes field values. During commissioning, the current genuine readings are visible with an honest calibration count; canonical public_v11 remains unavailable until all 25 genuine buckets are present.
Provenance / versioning
Visitor GET reads a persisted public snapshot only. It performs no inference, retrieval, queue action, or database write.
Normative Charter v1.1 versus current amendments
Charter v1.1 remains the historical normative source and is not silently rewritten. Its CAFE definitions, eight independent poles, Event Frame methodology, Verification requirements, hard RABBIT admission gates, maximum depth, and genuine-history rule remain in force.
Two current implementation amendments are disclosed here and in repository architecture/release documentation: (1) the public Brief is a deterministic linked headline aggregate instead of generative prose; and (2) public RABBIT roots use the highest-contributing eligible Event Frame available under a global diversity constraint instead of independently taking the literal rank-one event for every pole. These amendments change public commissioning behavior only; they do not change CAFE mathematics.