The Citizen Scientist Exchange

Research published
as it happens.

The Exchange is a pan-disciplinary publishing platform for independent researchers. Papers are sorted by theme, not discipline — because the most interesting problems don't live inside a single field. Every paper is written with a human, fact and citation-checked by signed multi-AI verification. The format is paperHTML: a living document you can read, cite, and build on.

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Human Author Provenance: A Process-Based Approach to Authorship Attestation
Post-hoc AI detection is broken by design. This paper describes a different instrument: one that records the writing session itself, producing a tamper-evident, cryptographically chained credential of human authorship.
Aaron Kushner · April 2026 · Authorship · Cryptography
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 New
Signal: Adaptive Output Compression for LLM Assistants
A benchmark proving that content-type-aware compression outperforms always-on caveman mode on the utility/token tradeoff. 30 prompts × 3 modes, Claude-as-judge scoring.
Aaron Kushner · April 2026 · AI Tooling · Benchmarking
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Coming Soon
The Explainer as Infrastructure — paperHTML and the Future of Scientific Communication
A new format for research: interactive, narrated, self-contained HTML documents that are easier to write, read, and build on than PDFs. The medium is the argument.
Aaron Kushner · 2026 · Scientific Communication · Open Publishing
Coming Soon
One Person, One Laptop: Why Individual Researchers Are Outperforming Corporate R&D
Corporate AI pilots fail 95% of the time — for organizational reasons, not technical ones. Individual + AI removes every failure mode by design. The implications for how we fund and structure research are significant.
Aaron Kushner · 2026 · Research Economics · AI Policy
Coming Soon
The Second Digital Divide: LLM Access as the New Equity Frontier
The first digital divide closed through device economics. The second is forming around LLM inference. Back-of-envelope: universal AI companion access costs 0.2% of global electricity. The question is whether we treat it as infrastructure.
Aaron Kushner · 2026 · Global Equity · AI Policy
Coming Soon
The Individual Researcher Economy: Disruption, Policy, and the New Division of Labor
If individuals out-research corporations, what happens to the economy with zero planned adaptation? A policy-navigable path where individual discovery and corporate deployment become complementary — increasing total productivity and innovation speed.
Aaron Kushner · 2026 · Economics · Industrial Policy