Good advice is beyond all price, but what if it comes from a machine?

SOAP: What Is It and What Is It Good For?

Patrick Thompson is Director of Architecture at Rogue Wave Software, where he has been involved with SOAP bridging products and in exploring the uses of SOAP and XML protocols for the past year and a half. He is on the W3C XML Protocols working group and is involved in the OMG ́s CORBA/SOAP mapping work. He regularly speaks at industry conferences and is coauthor of the popular book The Elements...

Screening Mammography: What Good Is It and How Can We Know If It Works?

JNCI | Editorials 1039 © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is prope...

If MIAVR is so good, why aren't we all doing it? A UK perspective

Background Minimally invasive aortic valve replacement (MIAVR) was first described in 1996 as an alternative to median sternotomy for AVR. Its uptake has been sporadic in cardiac surgery units in the UK. It remains unclear and somewhat controversial whether it has superior patient outcomes over conventional sternotomy. This survey aims to explore the reason for the low uptake by consultant surg...

What if all truth is context-dependent?

This paper argues that truth is by nature context-dependent – that no truth can be applied regardless of context. I call this “strong contextualism”. Some objections to this are considered and rejected, principally: that there are universal truths given to us by physics, logic and mathematics; and that claiming “no truths are universal” is self-defeating. Two “models” of truth are suggested to ...

What is episodic memory if it is a natural kind?