Paul Taylor

Thomas Laqueur writes (LRB, 29 July) that a medical textbook becomes obsolete within five years. In fact the information in a textbook may be out of date long before the book is published. The routine use of streptokinase in myocardial infarction, for example, began to be advised in textbooks in 1987, 13 years after an analysis of the published clinical trials would have revealed clear and compelling...

Since it is impossible to say how many people should go to university, the Government's target of 50 per cent of all those between 18 and 30 must have been selected for its electoral appeal, Stefan Collini tells us (LRB, 6 November). His tone is accusatory, as if this were a cynical ploy, but given the general tone of its other policies, that the Government should base its appeal to the electorate...

Most readers who enjoyed A.W. Moore's brisk demonstration that an arithmetisation of meta-mathematics produces provably unprovable propositions (LRB, 22 July) will have heard of Kurt Gödel, and some will recognise this as the work for which Gödel is famous. Without any mention of Gödel's theorem, however, Moore's article seems incomplete.

David Runciman’s account of the injection of choice into the NHS doesn’t mention ‘Choose and Book’, a project intended to transform the process of allocating outpatient appointments. Instead of being put on a waiting list and subsequently given a date for an appointment, patients will be able to book appointments with the help of their GP, through a call centre or via the web. Not only will...

In a future development that Tim Berners-Lee calls the Semantic Web, search engines will reason about a page’s contents, rather than relying on bibliometrics as they do at present. Currently, web pages are marked up with html tags that tell a browser how to display them. Tags in the Semantic Web will indicate what a site is about and be drawn from ‘ontologies’, specifications of the concepts...