Paper A v3.18.3: address codex GPT-5.5 round-17 self-comparing review findings

Codex round-17 (paper/codex_review_gpt55_v3_18_2.md) re-audited v3.18.2 and
flagged three new issues introduced by the v3.18.2 edits themselves plus
items it had partially RESOLVED but not fully cleaned up. Verdict still
Minor Revision; this commit closes the new findings.

- Fix Appendix B provenance paths: replace four fabricated paths
  (formal_statistical/*, deloitte_distribution/*, pdf_level/*, ablation/*)
  with the actual artifact paths verified in the local report tree.
- Acknowledge that the report tree is at /Volumes/NV2/PDF-Processing/...
  and reviewers should rebase to their own report root rather than rely on
  absolute paths.
- Remove residual "single dominant mechanism" wording from Methodology
  III-H (third primary evidence sentence) and Discussion V-C.
- Fix Methodology III-H Hartigan dip-test parenthetical: "p = 0.17 at
  n >= 10 signatures" wrongly attached the accountant-level filter to the
  signature-level dip; corrected to "p = 0.17, N = 60,448 Firm A
  signatures".
- Soften Introduction Firm A motivation: replace "widely recognized
  within the audit profession as making substantial use of non-hand-signing
  for the majority of its certifying partners" with a methodology-first
  framing that defers to the image evidence reported in the paper.
- Soften Methodology III-H "widely held within the audit profession"
  wording (kept as motivation, marked clearly as non-load-bearing in the
  next sentence).
- Reconcile 55,921 vs 55,922 Firm A cosine-only counts in Section IV-H.2:
  document explicitly that the one-record drift comes from successive DB
  snapshots used to materialize Table IX vs the new script-28 artifact;
  no rate at two decimal places is affected.
- Rebuild Paper_A_IEEE_Access_Draft_v3.docx.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

paper/paper_a_methodology_v3.md

@@ -143,7 +143,7 @@ The intra-report consistency analysis in Section IV-G.3 is a firm-level homogene
 A distinctive aspect of our methodology is the use of Firm A---a major Big-4 accounting firm in Taiwan---as an empirical calibration reference.
 Rather than treating Firm A as a synthetic or laboratory positive control, we treat it as a naturally occurring *replication-dominated population*: a CPA population whose aggregate signing behavior is dominated by non-hand-signing but is not a pure positive class.
 
-Practitioner knowledge motivated treating Firm A as a candidate calibration reference: it is widely held within the audit profession that the firm reproduces a stored signature image for the majority of certifying partners---originally via administrative stamping workflows and later via firm-level electronic signing systems---while not ruling out that a minority of partners may continue to hand-sign some or all of their reports.
+Practitioner knowledge motivated treating Firm A as a candidate calibration reference: the firm is understood within the audit profession to reproduce a stored signature image for the majority of certifying partners---originally via administrative stamping workflows and later via firm-level electronic signing systems---while not ruling out that a minority of partners may continue to hand-sign some or all of their reports.
 This practitioner background is *non-load-bearing* in our analysis: the evidentiary basis used in this paper is the observable image evidence reported below---byte-identical same-CPA pairs, the Firm A per-signature similarity distribution, partner-ranking concentration, and intra-report consistency---which does not depend on any claim about signing practice beyond what the audit-report images themselves show.
 
 We establish Firm A's replication-dominated status through two primary independent quantitative analyses plus a third strand comprising three complementary checks, each of which can be reproduced from the public audit-report corpus alone:
@@ -151,7 +151,7 @@ We establish Firm A's replication-dominated status through two primary independe
 First, *automated byte-level pair analysis* (Section IV-F.1; reproduced by `signature_analysis/28_byte_identity_decomposition.py` with output in `reports/byte_identity_decomp/byte_identity_decomposition.json`) identifies 145 Firm A signatures that are byte-identical to at least one other same-CPA signature from a different audit report, distributed across 50 distinct Firm A partners (of 180 registered); 35 of these byte-identical matches span different fiscal years.
 Byte-identity implies pixel-identity by construction, and independent hand-signing cannot produce pixel-identical images across distinct reports---these pairs therefore establish image reuse as a concrete, threshold-free phenomenon within Firm A and confirm that replication is widespread (50 of 180 registered partners) rather than confined to a handful of CPAs.
 
-Second, *signature-level distributional evidence*: Firm A's per-signature best-match cosine distribution is unimodal with a long left tail (Hartigan dip test $p = 0.17$ at $n \geq 10$ signatures; Section IV-D), consistent with a single dominant mechanism (non-hand-signing) plus residual within-firm heterogeneity rather than two cleanly separated mechanisms.
+Second, *signature-level distributional evidence*: Firm A's per-signature best-match cosine distribution fails to reject unimodality (Hartigan dip test $p = 0.17$, $N = 60{,}448$ Firm A signatures; Section IV-D) and exhibits a long left tail, consistent with a dominant high-similarity regime plus residual within-firm heterogeneity rather than two cleanly separated mechanisms.
 92.5% of Firm A's per-signature best-match cosine similarities exceed 0.95 and the remaining 7.5% form the long left tail (we do not disaggregate partner-level mechanism here; see Section III-G for the scope of claims).
 The unimodal-long-tail shape, not the precise 92.5/7.5 split, is the structural evidence: it predicts that Firm A is replication-dominated rather than a clean two-class population, and a noise-only explanation of the left tail would predict a shrinking share as scan/PDF technology matured over 2013--2023, which is not what we observe (Section IV-G.1).