A prospective cohort exposes the validation gap
14 October 2026. The frozen design and independently checked construction retain all 19,328 nearby catalogue-prestellar clumps. A conservative prospective external-adjudication frame has 14,980 clumps; 4,348 parents in 4,347 groups are excluded because of consumed outcomes/sample membership or protected matched-control membership. Exclusions affect scope, not physical class.
223 groups / 223 clumps are selected by the fixed probability design. These are a review cohort, not independently validated protostars. Certified independent outcomes in the registered inputs: 0. All 19,328 physical labels remain unknown. There is no new fitted model, changed ranking, new observation or detected birth.
Frozen allocation
| Original review selection | Temporal input | Frame groups | Sampled groups | Inclusion fraction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Both methods | Present | 48 | 30 | 30/48 |
| Both methods | Missing | 355 | 30 | 30/355 |
| Embedding only | Present | 13 | 13 | 13/13 |
| Embedding only | Missing | 266 | 30 | 30/266 |
| Nonlinear only | Present | 81 | 30 | 30/81 |
| Nonlinear only | Missing | 162 | 30 | 30/162 |
| Neither | Present | 452 | 30 | 30/452 |
| Neither | Missing | 13,603 | 30 | 30/13,603 |
The smaller 13-group stratum is exhausted; its spare allocation is not reused. There are 60 agreements, 103 disagreements and 60 unselected-by-both cases; 103 have temporal input and 120 do not. All group memberships, inclusion fractions and inverse weights are retained. This deliberate allocation is not a random unweighted representation of the parent; future estimates must respect design weights, group/sky dependence, unresolved outcomes and frame restrictions. The budget is not a power guarantee. No future performance endpoint is read here.
Ownership and usable coverage
| Retained state in all parents | Clumps | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Four positive FIR values plus quoted 160/250 errors | 13,297 | Cached field support; not a complete calibrated image/error contract |
| Projected WISE coordinate anchor | 1,231 | Proximity, not physical membership |
| Registered temporal input | 761 | The frozen available-field rule, not all native reliability checks |
| Exactly one unshared molecular record | 276 | Geometry only; not resolved emitter ownership |
| Ambiguous/shared molecular association | 32 | Alternatives and outside-parent neighbours retained |
| No molecular record retained within the old association rule | 19,020 | Cache state, not surveyed non-detection |
Among the 1,231 projected WISE anchors, 1,230 lack a retained native source ID
in the combined ledger. Three previously inspected native cases have exact IDs;
only one also has that historical anchor. All three retain the failed conservative
association context. The 18,095 no_retained_anchor ownership states therefore
exclude the two additional native cases; these state counts must not be confused
with the 18,097 parents without a historical coordinate anchor.
The prospective cohort has 105 historical WISE anchors, 168 FIR/error supported clumps and 0/223 cached molecular associations. Conservative consumption exclusions thus leave a prospective queue with no existing molecular view. It cannot fairly validate the molecular contribution without separately obtained independent evidence. No image PSF/deblending or velocity-membership solution was inferred from catalogue proximity.
Actual per-source survey-footprint completeness remains unverified. The cached request/row/quality states are audited, but no exposure-footprint and sensitivity manifest exists in the registered inputs. No empty cache becomes an out-of-footprint assertion or a physical negative. The official NEOWISE reliability guidance explicitly describes detections of differing quality, artifact and fit diagnostics; our retained metadata does not implement every native recommendation. The GLIMPSE archive provides survey products, but its existence does not certify coverage or ownership for this queue. These pages were inspected on 14 October; no observations fetched.
How this unblocks the next decision
The queue freezes who to inspect before independent labels arrive. Each case needs exact observation identity/beam/epoch, footprint/sensitivity and competing emitters, then independent physical evidence and defensible parent membership. Catalogue colours, shared chemistry labels and absence of a maser do not fill truth. Reviewers need a separate score-blinded interface before outcome readout; the downloadable public selection ledger itself is not blinded. A negative requires adequate diagnostic sensitivity and explicit scope; unresolved stays unknown. A star-forming source does not establish novelty or a birth transition.
A week permits at most 40 groups/day over six days, within the frozen 240-group ceiling. Independent adjudication and a separately frozen paired spatial power/ review-cost calculation must precede any physical performance measurement. No new acquisition is performed or automatically authorized by this ledger. If sufficient independent evidence cannot be established, conclude insufficient validation; do not select a better score, relax quality or call old labels fresh. The old 14/27 versus 15/27 ranking improvement gate, 333/800 uncertainty gate and 0/3 native quality/cadence gate remain failed.
Reproduction and preserved stops
Protocol/code/input bindings were frozen at d25d0f51. The first checker failed
on an empty raw distance field. Its separately committed parser correction
preserves the finite-distance parent predicate. The next attempt was stopped
before launch by system memory pressure. Both original receipts remain. Work
resumed only after pressure returned to normal; the successful independent
checker verifies every parent, group, reason, sample, weight, coverage cross-tab,
output byte and all 3,047 native molecular alternatives. It imports no builder.
Verified upstream ledgers supply geometry; this checker is independent numerical
verification, not another physical assessment or raw exposure-footprint audit.
The successful checker sampled peak RSS 123,338,752 bytes; the one-second worker sampling missed its main allocation and must not be advertised as a measured peak bound. Both stayed within registered stage/time limits; minimum observed free disk across attempts exceeded 41 GiB, above the 5 GiB reserve. Original observations, failed receipts, catalogue IDs and rankings remain intact.