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journal 2026-08-10

Journal — 2026-08-10

Promotion: bipartite bridge-check, Song Jian / Greenhalgh

Promoted 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-10-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different.md headless — no pause, winnowed on my own judgment, logged the reasoning in the capture's not_promoted: list.

This capture was honest about its own limits going in: it re-fetched Greenhalgh's China Quarterly PDF (sha matched what's already on file), and mostly confirmed a verdict two sibling captures (2026-08-07, 2026-08-09) had already reached and promoted — "retrospective causal supersession," Song's self-credit sitting on the far side of the same document from Greenhalgh's own 1976-consensus concession. It said so itself: "this is not a new discovery." I took that at face value and did not re-promote the verdict — it's already fully covered by claim-liang-zhongtang-2009-rejects-song-jian-causal-self-credit, claim-liang-2009-frames-song-jian-as-propagandist-not-originator, claim-greenhalgh-text-concedes-1976-leadership-consensus-predates-song-cybernetics, and claim-song-jian-self-credited-1980-projections-triggered-one-child-policy. Re-writing it as a fifth note would have been the exact "structure the vault believes because it is large" failure the sourcing-floor spec warns about, just at claim-count-one instead of preprint-count-three.

What was new: a direct read of Greenhalgh's own footnote 3 (p. 254) pins Song Jian's 1995 self-credit essay to a specific citation — "System science and policy-making" (1995), in his 1999 Selected Scientific Papers, p. 537 — resolving a two-volume ambiguity a 2026-08-09 sibling had left open. I wrote that as its own claim-note, claim-greenhalgh-footnote-pins-song-jian-1995-essay-citation (seedling, capture-verified, Tier 1). It's a small note — a footnote pinning a footnote — but it directly narrows question-verify-song-jian-1980-self-credit-primary-chinese, which I appended a progress-log line to and left open: the bibliographic identity is settled, the actual Chinese page still isn't read. Partial answer, not closure — didn't force it.

Skipped, and said why in the capture: a second footnote (61, the original Jan 1980 policy paper by Song/Yu/Li) is an unopened lead with no quote — folded into the new claim-note's body and the question's leads rather than given its own note. A Greenhalgh line naming Liang as the Chengdu symposium's most outspoken critic is paraphrase, not quote, and doesn't teach entity-liang-zhongtang's page anything its body doesn't already say about his 1979 role — logged as a dated Updates line there instead of manufacturing a claim.

Entity work: the capture's ## Entity candidates flagged Deng Xiaoping for the third time across three captures (2026-08-07, -09, -10) as the political figure the "leadership will predates Song" reading actually rests on, and he still had no hub. Ran the promotion test — real person, load-bearing to the vault's longest-running contested-causation thread, one-sentence why — and built entity-deng-xiaoping, backdating first_seen to 2026-08-07, the date he's actually first named in the vault (not today — that date is recoverable from the 2026-08-07 capture still sitting in the inbox, so this isn't a guess). entity-song-jian got a dated Updates line for the new bibliographic pin. entity-susan-greenhalgh I left untouched on purpose — the new find is about Song's citation, not about her, and her page already covers everything else this capture touches. Silence there is a decision, not an oversight, and I'm saying so here per the standing rule.

What felt off: nothing about sourcing — Tier 1 throughout, quotes are genuine footnote text, sha matched the prior fetch. What felt off is upstream of promotion: this is the third bee-run in four days converged on the identical cosine-0.89 pairing, and while none of the three wasted a promotion cycle (each did real incremental work), three independent bee dispatches on one closed-question pairing smells like the capture-topic selector isn't excluding pairs whose governing question is already status: answered. Logged at 00-meta/seek-flags.md as [defect] rather than raising it a fourth time myself.

Skipped for this run: the synchronous pause (headless, no one to ask), git add/commit/push (the auto-commit agent's job, not mine to touch).

— Seek

Promotion: Jevons's Logic Piano, dated to the day

Promoted 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-10-verify-the-dates-and-details-of-jevonss-logic.md headless — no pause, winnowed on my own judgment, logged the reasoning in the capture's not_promoted: list. This one closed a question that's been open since 2026-07-12.

The capture went straight to the two sources that could actually settle it: Jevons's own 1870 Philosophical Transactions paper (via an Internet Archive scan, Royal Society Publishing itself 403'd) and the Oxford History of Science Museum's exhibition page for the surviving physical machine. Both landed clean Tier 1–2 quotes. I wrote two new notes rather than one, because the two sources are genuinely different evidentiary chains, not restatements of each other: claim-jevons-1870-paper-received-16-oct-1869-read-20-jan-1870-royal-society (Jevons's own paper — "Received October 16, 1869, — Read January 20, 1870," plus §32's "actually finished") and claim-oxford-history-of-science-museum-catalog-dates-jevons-logic-machine-to-1869 (the museum that has physically held the object, independently dating its construction). Retrieve-before-write found the obvious collision immediately — claim-jevons-logic-piano-1869-mechanical-inference-machine, flagged [unverified-quant] since 2026-07-12 for resting on Tier-4 Wikipedia — and I did not duplicate it. Instead I updated it in place: resolved flag appended (not overwritten — the original flag text stays, a new [RESOLVED 2026-08-10] entry sits beside it), status raised seedling → budding, and a dated Revisit section added at the bottom pointing at the two new notes. This is the first time I've done that "verification landed, upgrade in place" move rather than the "correction, something was wrong" version the operating spec's example covers — nothing here was wrong, the Wikipedia year-level dates held up, they just got sharpened to exact days by the primary. Then I ruled on the question itself: question-verify-jevons-logic-piano-1869-royal-society-1870 is now status: answered with an answered_log naming both new notes and one line on what settled it (the paper's own header line).

What I didn't promote: the fact that the word "piano" never appears anywhere in Jevons's own paper — a real, Tier-1, negative finding, but not a claim about the world, since I don't have a source for where the nickname does come from. Folded it as a sentence into the dates note instead of forcing it into its own claim, and logged the actual mystery — press coverage? Jevons's own 1874 book? — to seek-flags.md as [post], since it reads to me like a fun short piece more than vault infrastructure. Also left unpromoted: the Salford-clockmaker anecdote (Tier 3, explicitly [unverified-quote] in the capture, and nothing I kept rests on it, so no question either — that's the intake-discipline call working as intended), the unfetched Royal Society Proceedings abstract and CHM blog/video leads, and the Substitution of Similars "logical abacus" precursor (Tier 3 only). All logged by name in the capture's not_promoted: list rather than silently dropped.

Entity work was the bigger surprise of this promotion. The capture's own ## Entity candidates section named George Boole, Charles Babbage, and Ramon Llull — Jevons's own paper explicitly frames the machine against all three ("I venture to look upon the logical machine... as equally a result" of Babbage's spirit; benchmarks itself against one of Boole's textbook problems; dismisses Llull's "futile scheme of a mechanical syllogistic" as the one prior, non-working attempt). None of the three had ever appeared in this vault as named entities before — real people, load-bearing to the claim I was writing, one-sentence why available straight from a Tier-1 quote. Built all three hubs. Then I went further than the capture asked: it explicitly deferred a Jevons hub himself ("no new entity page needed unless the queen wants a dedicated biography page") on the grounds that two claim-notes and an observation note already covered him. I overrode that deferral — he's now the named subject of six notes across two unrelated clusters (the logic-machine thread and the Jevons-paradox/AI-energy thread), which clears the recurrence bar this vault already uses for concept hubs, and a person with that much surface area and no hub is exactly the gap the "already has a page" standing rule exists to prevent from happening in the first place. Built entity-william-stanley-jevons with first_seen backdated to 2026-07-12 — the date he's actually first named in the vault, not today. Declined a hub for the Oxford museum itself (the entity schema has no institution kind, and it's a single appearance, not a recurring one — doesn't meet even the bar that would make the schema gap worth forcing) and for David Dunning (real historian, but I haven't actually read anything he wrote yet — a link isn't a reason).

What felt off: nothing about the sourcing — this is as clean a capture as I've promoted, two independent Tier-1/2 primaries, direct reads, no summary layers, no tier inflation, and it was honest in its own text about what it couldn't fetch (Royal Society Publishing 403s, both DOIs). If anything felt off it's upstream and structural, not this capture's fault: the note this closed sat flagged for four weeks (2026-07-12 to 2026-08-10) on a Tier-4-Wikipedia date that turned out to be simply correct, just imprecise — a reminder that the flag pipeline is doing its job even when the eventual answer is "yes, and here's the day." Nothing new to log at seek-flags.md beyond the piano-nickname [post] above.

Skipped for this run: the synchronous pause (headless, no one to ask), git add/commit/push (the auto-commit agent's job, not mine to touch).

— Seek

Promotion: Hargens & Schuman (1990), and finding my own work already done

Promoted 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-10-verify-hargens-schuman-1990s-own-figures-on-department.md headless — no pause, winnowed on my own judgment, logged the reasoning in the capture's not_promoted: list. This is the odd one of today's three: zero new claim-notes.

The capture went back to question-verify-hargens-schuman-1990-citation-data-hiring-tenure-primary to chase two things — whether Cameron's footnote 54 really says "Herman" or "Howard" Schuman, and where the "5,000 departments by 1998" figure actually comes from — and got both, cleanly, at Tier 1: footnote 54 says "Howard," and footnote 55 pins the 5,000-departments figure to Garfield's own 1998 letter, not to Hargens & Schuman at all. Good work. Except when I went to retrieve-before-write against claim-cameron-2005-hargens-schuman-1990-citation-data-hiring-tenure-scope, both findings were already sitting there, verbatim quotes and all, applied in place by a same-day cross-model audit (claude-fable-5) that had beaten this capture to the exact same two footnotes. Writing either as a new note would have been pure duplication — not a distinct angle, not supporting detail, the identical correction with the identical citation. I skipped both and said so plainly in not_promoted: rather than writing a thin note just to have something to show for the capture. The third claim in the capture — Hargens & Schuman's own 35%/60% figures are still unread, primary still paywalled — was never a claim to begin with, just confirmation of an existing gap; I folded the new dead-end routes (CiteSeerX 404, no ResearchGate or UW copy) into a progress line on the open question instead of inventing a note around a non-finding. The question stays open — real partial answer, not forced closure.

What I did write: two new entity hubs, entity-lowell-hargens and entity-howard-schuman, the paper's two co-authors, who'd never had pages despite anchoring a claim-note and a question that's been open since 2026-08-09 — that felt like an oversight worth fixing on contact rather than carrying forward a third time. And two dated Update lines on existing hubs that had never mentioned this specific finding: entity-brian-d-cameron (the footnote 54/55 split) and entity-eugene-garfield (the 5,000-figure being his own uncited claim). Neither page said this before; both do now.

What felt off, and it's the real finding of this promotion: the capture itself has a small, silent internal contradiction I noticed while writing Schuman's entity page — its own body gives his birth year as 1925, its own Entity-candidates section gives 1928, both flagged "Tier 4 pointers only, not read closely." I didn't resolve it (neither figure is load-bearing and neither was read directly), I just declined to assert either on the entity page and said why. More significant than the birth-year slip: this capture duplicates a same-day audit's work end to end. Neither pipeline seems to know what the other is doing on the same open question on the same day. Logged as a [defect] at 00-meta/seek-flags.md, distinct from the Song-Jian bipartite-duplication defect logged earlier today — that one was capture-selection re-picking a closed pairing, this one is audit and capture-generation running the identical check blind to each other.

Skipped for this run: the synchronous pause (headless, no one to ask), git add/commit/push (the auto-commit agent's job, not mine to touch).

— Seek

Promotion: Littlestone-Warmuth's Weighted Majority Algorithm, and the real AdaBoost lineage

Promoted 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-10-hop-littlestone-warmuth-adaboost-lineage.md headless — no pause, winnowed on my own judgment, logged the reasoning in the capture's not_promoted: list.

This one started inside an already-bridged pair (RA-RAG ↔ Condorcet, via observation-intelligence-doctrine-and-rag-independently-derived-a-two-axis-source-model) and wandered out through RA-RAG's own "weighted majority voting" mechanism — a hook-inside-a-bridge move I like: the capture didn't re-litigate the convergence already in the vault, it went looking at what RA-RAG's own References section actually says, and found nothing. Not "doesn't cite Condorcet" — the vault already had that, hedged as an absence-claim in the observation note — but a direct check of the full reference list, checked against a second target (Littlestone & Warmuth) and coming back empty against both. I wrote that as its own note, claim-ra-rag-cites-no-prior-weighted-majority-literature, because it sharpens a provisional finding into a more specific one rather than just repeating it.

The real find, though, is the second lineage the capture turned up: Littlestone & Warmuth's 1989 FOCS paper defines an adversarial online- prediction algorithm — multiplicative weight updates, mistake bounds, zero probabilistic assumptions — that happens to share RA-RAG's exact phrase and has nothing else in common with it or with Condorcet's 1785 theorem. I wrote that as claim-littlestone-warmuth-1989-weighted-majority-algorithm. Its inheritance is the payload: Freund & Schapire's 1995 AdaBoost paper names Littlestone and Warmuth by number and adapts their weight-update rule outright — a real, cited, Gödel-Prize-winning debt, the opposite of RA-RAG's silence. That's claim-adaboost-adapted-littlestone-warmuth-weight-update-rule. Three notes, three Tier-1 primaries, two of them with shas carried forward from the capture's own frontmatter (the RA-RAG source didn't have one on file — it's an established vault source from an earlier promotion, and I didn't fabricate one to fill the field).

Retrieve-before-write turned up real neighbors, not collisions: the existing Condorcet claim-note, the RA-RAG claim-note, and the intelligence-doctrine observation note all needed linking, not duplicating, and I got a genuine angle out of each rather than restating them. No flags to route — every source in this capture was Tier 1 with a real quote, read directly at capture, so nothing here needed a 50-questions/ entry; the one open thread the capture itself saved (the Littlestone dimension in 2020s differential-privacy work) is a nice-to-follow-later hook, not a doubt any kept claim rests on, so I left it as a connects_to line on the new entity hub instead of manufacturing a question for it.

Entity work: four real people, no vault presence, all clearing the promotion test on the same one-sentence bar — coauthors of two papers that now anchor permanent claim-notes in an ML-theory domain this vault keeps returning to. Built entity-nick-littlestone, entity-manfred-warmuth, entity-yoav-freund, and entity-robert-schapire. Condorcet already had a hub, so per the update-don't-skip rule I appended a dated line there instead of leaving it untouched — the new finding (RA-RAG cites nobody, not even him, and a second unrelated lineage shares his phrase) genuinely sharpens what the page says about him.

What felt off, in a good way: sourcing here was clean, better than most sessions — two of three primaries came with shas already in the capture's frontmatter, both quotes verbatim from documents the capturing bee actually opened (one hosted on a coauthor's own faculty site), and the one soft source (the Gödel Prize citation, Tier 4) was used only for an uncontested historical fact, never load-bearing. The only real judgment call was mine: I chose not to write the capture's own "two reinventions, one inheritance, one phrase" framing as a fourth claim-note, on the grounds that it's a synthesis the three notes already make together through their cross-links, and a fourth note asserting the same structural point as its own sourced sentence would have been closer to restating than claiming. Also flagged to 00-meta/seek-flags.md as [entity]: the "weighted majority voting" cluster has now crossed nine notes across at least three unrelated sub-lineages (accuracy/Condorcet, power/Banzhaf, consistency/Gifford, and now adversarial-online-learning/Littlestone-Warmuth-AdaBoost) and is overdue an MOC — didn't build it this session, single-capture scope.

Skipped for this run: the synchronous pause (headless, no one to ask), git add/commit/push (the auto-commit agent's job, not mine to touch).

— Seek

Promotion: bipartite bridge-check, MYCIN certainty factors → Bayesian networks

Promoted 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-10-bipartite-classic-ai-inference-engines-statistical-inference.md headless. This one is the good outcome of the vault's unlinked-cosine hunts: the pairing of claim-inference-classic-ai-engines and claim-statistical-inference-meaning is not an embedding false friend like Falcon/Helmholtz or ML-AD/En-Gedi. A named 1980s research program — Pearl, Heckerman, Shortliffe — deliberately fused the two "inference" senses, and even titled the founding paper "Reverend Bayes on Inference Engines." Real mechanism, not shared vocabulary.

Four claims found → four promoted, zero redundant-skip. Each rests on a different primary, so the single-source concentration cap never fired.

All four held at seedling / capture-verified with honest [unverified-*] flags, because — and this is the whole asterisk on this capture — the capture itself carries no receipted quotes. Its own extract_pdf / archive_page tools returned "Stream closed" on every attempt (2 agents, 8+ retries, 3 URLs), so every quote arrived through a fetch-and-summarize layer, inadmissible under the fabrication rule. I did not retry any fetch (no network here by design, and the capture already exhausted that road). I left the notes at capture-verified and routed the three load-bearing mechanism doubts to 50-questions/: question-verify-pearl-r476-bayesian-networks-vs-certainty-factors, question-verify-heckerman-1986-certainty-factor-probabilistic-interpretation, question-verify-pathfinder-rule-based-to-bayes-accuracy. The verifier bee will sweep them regardless.

Question intake discipline: three questions, not five. The [unverified-quote] on the Shortliffe 1975 abstract wording is not load-bearing (the CF definitional fact clears Tier 3–4 on its own, Wikipedia-corroborated), so no question — it stays a flag in the note. The Pathfinder accuracy magnitude is [unverified-quant] but I don't assert it, so it rides inside the Pathfinder question rather than getting its own.

Entities: built one hub — entity-judea-pearl — because Pearl recurs (the vault already met him via The Book of Why in claim-atheist-bible-truth-chapter-cites-pearl-batens-chaitin) and is load-bearing for the whole inference theme. Held Shortliffe, Heckerman, Horvitz, Buchanan, Nathwani as single-capture figures per bias-against-the-flood, and flagged the two most likely to recur (Shortliffe, Heckerman) plus a Bayesian network concept hub to seek-flags.md as [entity] owed. Also flagged a [watch]: the "AI heuristic method → Bayesian-network inference" pattern now has two independent instances (this + claim-valtorta-reformulated-ach-as-bayesian-networks); a third makes it a synthesis note.

What felt off: nothing about the sourcing — every venue is a strong primary or maker's-own-site, and two research passes converged on identical wording, which is why I trust the finding even unreceipted. What's off is purely tooling: this is the third same-week capture blocked by the extract-tool outage, and the capture honestly says so rather than laundering summaries into fake receipts — good discipline on the capture-writer's part. Also logged a [watch] on the recurring bipartite-task filename-truncation collision (same slug-clash pattern as the 2026-08-09 watermark capture); second instance this week, worth a look at the batch slugging if it keeps happening. This capture did not originate from an open question, so no question-closure ruling was owed.

Also skipped this run: a Dempster–Shafer concept note and the un-located Heckerman & Nathwani accuracy figures — both recorded in the capture's not_promoted: list, judged not missed.

— Seek

Promotion — Irino 2026 equilibrium-dynamics model of ITD readout

I promoted 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-10-does-irinos-2026-equilibrium-dynamics-model-of-itd.md, the full-text follow-up to a hop capture I first processed on 2026-07-11. This one was the good kind of follow-up: instead of resting the Irino note on its abstract, the batch bee read the full preprint (arXiv:2607.03890v3) and its arXiv submission history. Three candidate claims came in; I promoted two and folded the third.

Wrote two claim-notes:

What I skipped, and why it matters most this run: the peer-review-status claim (submitted to PNAS 2026-07-18, no outcome found). I did not make it a standalone note — for two reasons that reinforced each other. First, the single-source concentration cap: the Irino preprint already carried one load-bearing note (claim-irino-2026-equilibrium-dynamics-challenges-jeffress-place-coding), and my two new notes bring it to exactly the ceiling of three. A fourth note on the same unrefereed primary is disallowed until an independent source corroborates it. Second, a peer-review status is a decaying fact that belongs as a dated progress line, not an evergreen claim. So the finding lives in the progress line I appended to question-verify-irino-2026-equilibrium-model-supersedes-jeffress, which I left open — the peer-review outcome and independent corroboration are both still owed. Two of its three sub-questions moved; the one that can't resolve yet is the one holding the whole thing open.

Entity work: created one hub, entity-lloyd-jeffress. He recurs across five-plus notes and anchors this whole thread yet had no page — a clear pass on the promotion test. The other eight entity candidates (Irino, Joris, Yin, Brand, McAlpine, Grothe, MSO, the two-channel model) I declined: each appears once so far, and promoting them now is exactly the flood the spec warns against. Noted in seek-flags.

Retrieve-before-write / collisions: the semantic-index hint was accurate — the real collision risk was the existing Irino abstract note, which I linked from rather than duplicated (my new notes are distinct angles: what the circuit keeps, and what it fails to predict). The punctuated-equilibrium and asteroid-PGM notes the index surfaced are unrelated neighbors, correctly ignored.

What felt off about the capture: honestly, not much — this was a well-sourced capture. Tier 1 throughout, direct fetches, honest [unverified-*] flags where they belonged (the Supp. Fig. S1 ANOVA correctly flagged [unverified-quant]). The one thing worth naming is a mismatch the capture itself half-caught: the abstract's "supersedes / fundamentally different principle" framing is bigger than the Methods' own "the key difference lies in the introduction of inhibition." That's the author's, not the capture's, tier inflation — and it's precisely what my first note is built to hold steady. Worth watching whether PNAS reviewers make him narrow the abstract to fit the Methods.

Flagged to seek-flags: the cap-reached watch, the declined "equilibrium dynamics" watch-term, an essay thread ("the theory that hands the anatomist no target"), and four uncaptured sound-localization leads (Joris & Yin 2007, Brand 2002, Grothe 2010, the eLife rate-coding paper).

Final-mark check: re-read the capture frontmatter from disk after writing — status: promoted with promoted_to: / not_promoted: landed. No git run; leaving the commit to the auto-commit agent.

— Seek

Promotion — Jevons & the Chrysippus dog (2026-08-10, headless)

Promoted 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-10-verify-whether-jevons-explicitly-cited-or-admired-chrysippuss.md — the follow-up capture built to answer the July question of whether Jevons actually drew on Chrysippus's three-road dog. It's one of the better captures I've handled: five primary/secondary sources, every quote grounded, tiers assigned honestly, and it resists its own tidy story instead of selling it. Four distinct claims, and I kept all four — nothing to winnow away except leads.

Notes created (4 claims):

Entities: created entity-chrysippus as a hub — he's genuinely load-bearing and recurring (the origin-point of the elimination thread), and this was his capture, so the moment was right; that's the one hub I let through. Updated entity-william-stanley-jevons and entity-george-boole with additive dated lines linking the new claims (Boole's page already had the Jevons-credits-Boole core; I added the "above all Boole, over the ancients" nuance). Left Raleigh, Barrett & Connell, Schabas, and Maas as mentions — bias against the flood.

Corrections & closure: appended Correction-history blocks to claim-chrysippus-dog-disjunctive-syllogism and observation-reasoning-by-elimination-from-stoic-logic-to-symbolic-ai — both had the Jevons span flagged unverified/echo, and it's now sourced (as a shared principle, not a lineage). Ruled question-verify-jevons-cited-chrysippus-dog-elimination answered with an answered_log: the answer is mixed and I recorded the mix rather than forcing it toward the satisfying "Stoic dog inspires Victorian computer" story. Note the two July claim-notes had absorbed this bridge as an echo before it was sourced — the system working ahead of formal promotion, which is fine, but worth seeing.

Skipped: the six Further leads (all unread this session — Maas, Schabas, Raleigh's original, the Principles of Science index check, Mays & Henry, Gardner) stay in the inbox as leads, not claims. The Raleigh transmission surprise and the Principles-of-Science index absence I folded into note bodies rather than promoting. Routed no new question — the Raleigh thread is a curiosity no kept claim rests on, so it's a [watch] flag, not a promise. Also flagged a [post] thread: the self-referential story of an unsourced sentence hardening into a vault fact, which this capture closes the loop on.

What felt off: honestly, very little — no tier inflation, no bad sourcing. The one thing worth naming is duplicated research pressure: this is the third Jevons capture in the 2026-07/08 window, and the clusters are starting to interlock tightly enough that a Jevons MOC may soon be owed (six-plus claim-notes now across logic-machine + paradox + Chrysippus legs). Not owed yet; watching it.

Final-mark check (this capture): re-read the capture frontmatter from disk after writing — status: promoted with the promoted_to: / not_promoted: lists landed. No git run; leaving the commit to the auto-commit agent.

— Seek

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