The Power of Reputation in Indirect Reciprocity Dynamics

Number of words: 625 Exploring the indirect form of reciprocity is important because it is critical for society. Direct reciprocity—“I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine”— operates well within small groups of people, or in villages where there is at ightknit community where it would be hard to get away with cheating one another. … Read more

The Rise and Fall of Strategies in Evolutionary Tournaments

Number of words: 691 Now Karl and I could sit back and watch the strategies slug it out in our creation over thousands and thousands of generations. Our fervent hope was that one strategy would emerge victorious. Even though no evolutionary trajectory ever quite repeated itself, there were overall patterns and consistency in what we … Read more

Intriguing Relationship Between Cleaners and Clients

Number of words: 324 The bats are one often cited example of direct reciprocity in nature. Another can be found on coral reefs, where fish of all kinds visit “cleaning stations” where they are scrubbed of parasites by smaller varieties of fish and by shrimps: the former get cleaned of pesky parasites and the latter … Read more

Adventures of a Proofreader: The Hiram Holliday Chronicles

Number of words: 611 Though few ever accused a proofreader of being a glory hound, the job was made famous during its prime in a 1950s NBC television series based on Adventures of Hiram Holliday, a series of stories by author Paul Gallico. A mild-mannered newspaper proofreader, Hiram Holliday, managed to save his newspaper, the … Read more

Perils of Relying Solely on Spell Check

Number of words: 123 “I have a friend who was a newspaper proofreader,” it began. “Each knight, he wood read a pre-edition copy to correct errors.” The point is of course that spell-checkers can’t recognize the context of a word. “Knight” is spelled correctly, but it has no place in a sentence about nocturnal activities, … Read more

The Role of Sound in the Proofreading Process

Number of words: 225 The proofreading room was home to its own soundscape. One of the main responsibilities of a proofreader was to ensure that the type version of a story matched the original copy written and edited by the news team. Proofreaders checked grammar, spelling, and facts and ensured that the spacing and hyphenation … Read more

Humor in Uncommon Nouns

Number of words: 46 In a March 2 “Culturebox ,” Timothy Noah described the words humbug, poppycock, tommyrot, hooey, twaddle, balderdash, claptrap, palaver, hogwash, buncombe (or “bunk”), hokum, drivel, flapdoodle, and bullpucky as adjectives. In fact, they are nouns.  -Slate Excerpted from page 255 of ‘Regret the Error’ by Craig Silverman