Corrections worksheet
A withdrawn claim is part of the record too.
Every entry below is a claim this site published and then corrected. Each one states what went out, what was wrong with it, what the site says now, when the correction landed, and the commit that landed it — so a reader can check the correction instead of taking this page’s word for it.
How a correction gets into this register
The register is downstream of the fix. Nothing is listed here that did not land as a commit.
A claim is published
Copy, a route description, a structured-data field, or an asset goes out on the site.
A defect is found
Someone contradicts it: a source, the owner, an external record, or a later test that the claim cannot pass.
A correction lands as a commit
The fix is a commit with a message that states what was wrong. The commit is the artifact; it is not edited afterwards.
The register cites the commit
The entry names the SHA so a reader can read the edit for themselves, rather than trusting this page’s summary of it.
Chronology
When each defective claim went out, and when its fix landed.
The bars above count corrections by month; the timeline below orders them as dated events. Each span runs from publication to correction, and each label links to its register entry.
Dated events
Corrections from publication to fix
Dates are commit-evidenced. Where the repository does not establish when a claim went out, the span says so instead of dating it.
2026-09-13
Federal STTR participation
COR-001
2026-06-15 → 2026-09-13
2026-06-15 → 2026-06-16
Retracted federal identifiers
COR-003
The values retracted in this entry are described, not reproduced: the commit citation in the register entry below is the locator instead.
2026-06-15 → 2026-06-16
IRS exemption classification
COR-004
2026-06-15 → 2026-06-16
Date not established in the repository → 2026-06-15
The register
What went out, what was wrong, and what replaced it.
Newest correction first. The commit citations are prose and links only: they are kept out of the structured data this site emits, and a build-time check enforces that.
COR-001 · corrected 2026-09-13 · published 2026-09-13
Federal STTR participation
| What was published | On 13 September 2026 the site removed its STTR language sitewide and replaced it with a disclaimer stating that INSTAR Lab "has not participated in the federal STTR program" and does not hold itself out as an STTR research-institution partner. |
|---|---|
| What was wrong | The disclaimer was false. INSTAR Lab participates in STTR as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research institution partner to small businesses. A correction that over-corrects in the negative direction is still a false statement about the institution, and this one contradicted the owner-confirmed position it was meant to protect. |
| What the site says now | Reverted the same day. STTR participation language is restored, the drone-sensing partner is named, and the claim is scoped to participation: participation, partnership, pathway and engagement appear, and no award, contract, registration, credential or performance result is claimed anywhere. |
| How far it spread | Sitewide. The tech-transfer route record, the record room federal route and its institutional-partner brief, the research funding and opportunities copy, the community partner and work-with-us copy, the enterprise R&D and portfolio positioning, and the homepage call to action all carried the disclaimer. |
| Commits |
|
COR-002 · corrected 2026-09-13 · published 2026-06-15
STTR standing and an unsourced quantity
| What was published | The STTR Programs page described INSTAR Lab as a "qualified STTR research institution partner", and the Research Portfolio page closed with "Several programs at SBIR/STTR readiness." |
|---|---|
| What was wrong | "Qualified" reads to a program officer or a donor as an approved or registered status, and INSTAR Lab holds no such status: it participates, without a landed contract. "Several" is an unsourced quantity, and it was doing no work the preceding sentence did not already do. |
| What the site says now | Restated as participation, with the 501(c)(3) standing sentence kept verbatim, and the quantifier dropped. No substitute number or status was introduced. |
| How far it spread | The STTR Programs route description and the Research Portfolio route description. |
| Commits |
|
COR-003 · corrected 2026-06-16 · published 2026-06-15
Retracted federal identifiers
| What was published | The sitewide footer, a federal-identifiers block on the contact page, and the About Us and STTR copy published a SAM Unique Entity Identifier and a CAGE code as INSTAR Lab credentials — 46 files, including structured data. |
|---|---|
| What was wrong | Neither identifier was ever issued to INSTAR Lab. This was not a lapsed registration or a transcription error: the values were invented, and the site then used them as evidence of federal standing in copy written for grant and agency audiences. |
| What the site says now | Removed on 16 June 2026 from all affected files, including the structured data. This entry cites the commit and does not reproduce the values, and the values appear nowhere on this page, in any meta tag, in any sitemap, or in the JSON-LD this site emits. A build-time gate checks that on every build. |
| How far it spread | 46 files at introduction, 61 files touched by the removal, spread across the footer of every navigation-reachable page, one contact-page block, and two content pages. |
| Commits |
|
| Deliberately withheld | The values retracted in this entry are not reproduced anywhere on this page, in any meta tag, in any sitemap, or in the structured data this site emits. A build-time check fails the deploy if they appear. The citation above is the locator instead. |
COR-004 · corrected 2026-06-16 · published 2026-06-15
IRS exemption classification
| What was published | Five pages described INSTAR Lab Inc. as a "private operating foundation" — eight occurrences across the About page, the Mission page, the About Us page, the Leadership page and the Research Opportunities page. |
|---|---|
| What was wrong | The classification was wrong. INSTAR Lab Inc. is exempt under IRC §501(c)(3) and classified as a public charity under IRC §170(b)(1)(A)(vi). It is not a private foundation of any kind, and describing it as one understated its public support while misstating its exemption. |
| What the site says now | All eight occurrences corrected to the public-charity classification. The IRC §170 deductibility language was left intact, and the one remaining use of the phrase "private foundation" — a grant-writing context, not a classification claim — was correctly left alone. |
| How far it spread | Five pages, eight occurrences. The correction is the classification sentence; no other claim on those pages changed. |
| Commits |
|
COR-005 · corrected 2026-06-16 · published 2026-06-15
Partner roles and invented methodology names
| What was published | The consortium partner cards and a research-innovation paragraph asserted specific roles for named partner organizations and named branded methodologies — "Focus Methodology", "DREAM Method" and "ORBITAL Method" among them — as a partner-to-role mapping. |
|---|---|
| What was wrong | The method names were sourced to no one, and the role mapping contradicted the canonical descriptions the same site publishes for those organizations. A partner organization was described as an assessment body on one page and as a workforce-performance company on another. |
| What the site says now | Replaced with each organization’s canonical one-line description and a neutral statement of the consortium’s shared contribution. No brand name was substituted and no role claim was replaced with a different role claim. |
| How far it spread | The seven consortium partner cards on the consortium route, and the partner-methodology paragraph on the research innovation route. |
| Commits |
|
COR-006 · corrected 2026-06-15 · date published not established
Generated metrics, case studies, addresses and named individuals
| What was published | The site carried metrics, case-study narratives, postal addresses and named individuals that had been generated rather than sourced, alongside template filler on the About and Contact pages. |
|---|---|
| What was wrong | None of it was traceable to the institution. On a 501(c)(3) public charity’s public site, an unsourced figure and an unsourced named person are claims about the institution, and a reader has no way to tell them apart from sourced ones. |
| What the site says now | Removed on 15 June 2026, and the sitewide footer was normalized to the legal name, the EIN and the Marietta address the institution can evidence. The two fabricated federal identifiers introduced the same day are a separate entry above. |
| How far it spread | 46 navigation-reachable pages rewritten. The exact introduction date is not established in the repository — the earliest content in the history is imported template material, so the published window is recorded as approximate. |
| Commits |
|
Locator convention
Cite the commit. Do not republish the identifier.
Where a retracted claim included a fabricated federal identifier, this register cites the commit and does not write the value. The reason is not delicacy: every route on this site emits JSON-LD, so writing an invented federal identifier into a page would put it into machine-readable output on the organization’s own domain, where a crawler or a data aggregator would read it as a fact about the organization.
The commit page is a record of an edit. It is a strictly better place for that string to sit, and it is where the citation points. 4 of the 10 commits cited above are not on the public mirror yet, because the promotion step has not carried them; those entries cite the SHA as text rather than linking to a page that would not resolve.
Correction path
Something here is still wrong.
If a claim on this site is inaccurate, or an entry in this register is incomplete, that is the thing this room most wants to hear about. Send the URL and what contradicts it.
Corrections land as commits, and they are recorded here the same way every entry above was.
Contact INSTAR LabCommit citations resolve in the public source repository at https://github.com/INSTARLab/Website . See also the legal status register for the classification correction’s subject matter, and the source register for what the repository can and cannot establish.