Ralph Loop 2026-03-16: Eventful Scan Handoff

Change

Improved PRD 001 handoff quality by exposing ranked eventful scan observations in the research-state path.

Why

research/latest_state.json already carried top_scan_tickers, but that only showed the first ticker returned per category slice. Ralph still had to infer which observations were actually the most eventful.

That weakens eventful observation quality because category leaders are not the same thing as highest-signal observations.

What changed

1. research/continuous_loop.py now writes top_eventful_scan_rows into research/latest_state.json.
2. The new field is deduplicated by ticker and ranked by descending eventful_score.
3. research/status.py and research/discord_status.py now surface that ranked eventful scan view.
4. research/status.py also has a compatibility fallback that rebuilds eventful rows from legacy top_scan_tickers and top_eventful_scores when available.
5. research/README.md documents the new handoff field.

Validation

1. pytest -q tests/test_research_status.py - result: 6 passed in 0.17s
2. python3 -m research.status - confirmed the status command still renders successfully against the current stored snapshot
3. python3 -m research.discord_status - confirmed the Discord summary still renders successfully

Notes

The current checked-in research/latest_state.json predates this new field, so the ranked eventful scan line will start appearing after the next continuous-loop write. The code path is in place now.