Latest news with #BenGoldacre
Daily Mirror
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
UK's most divisive seaside town as Brits can't decide if it's beautiful or bleak
Consumer rights magazine Which? has surveyed 3,800 members of the British public to find out what is the overall best seaside town, with Bamburgh in Northumberland hitting the topspot again A 'unique' coastal spot that is variously loved and loathed has been named one of the best seaside towns in the country. Dungeness in Kent has been named the seventh-best beach town in the UK in Which?'s annual survey of the British public. The consumer organisation surveyed more than 3,800 people about their experiences of UK seaside destinations and their opinions on beaches, scenery, food and drink offerings, accommodation, tourist attractions, and value for money. The elevation of Dungeness into the top ten is a major scoop for the Kentish settlement, which languished in 35th place last year. Not everyone is a major fan of Dungeness. It is a curious place long haunted by rumours that it is technically the UK's only desert—something that the Met Office has previously confirmed is pure myth. You'd be forgiven for believing the lie, given the way random shacks, homes and cafs stretch out across the shingled headland. It is a place that feels like it should be the setting for an American Western dystopian flick, rather than somewhere that sits on the south coast of England. Bikers whizz along the roads that wind through its flat, marshland extremities; a constant breeze ruffles the pampas grass; wildfowl bleat mournfully. To add to the end-of-days feel of the place, boats filled with asylum seekers regularly make land here. Inarguably, the bleak jewel in the Dungeness crown is its twin nuclear power plants, which once whipped a patch of nearby sea into a whirlpool but have lain dormant and decommissioned for the past 19 years. The unique feel of the place has been best captured by artist, filmmaker, gay rights activist, and gardener Derek Jarman, who turned his home into Prospect Cottage—a point of pilgrimage for his fans and those who love the way he carefully manicured the garden into a concentrated miniature form of Dungeness. But not everyone is a fan. In fact, many are left cold by Dungeness' charms. "Bleak is an understatement," one detractor of the place recently wrote on Reddit. Another added: "Bleak to Dungeness is like 'a wee bit cold' in Antarctica. The missus loved it though…" A third wrote: "I find it dismal down there. Old nuclear power station for a view." Others love Dungeness and how different it feels from other parts of the UK. The science writer Ben Goldacre recalled his experience of riding through Dungeness on the small railway that takes day-trippers down the coastline. "The Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway has a strange, dreamlike existence, on the border between fantasy and reality. You leave toytown in a cute miniature train, surrounded by excited children. But Disney, this is not. Suddenly you're riding through real life: past clothes lines, collapsing breezeblock walls, an abandoned washing machine in a back garden, chuffing along behind a miniature steam train. Finally, you're ferried across a beautiful, windswept shingle peninsula, spotted with railway carriage houses and abandoned shipping containers. Then you are delivered to the foot of a nuclear power station," Ben wrote. "This meeting of toy train sets and grim industrial purpose is what makes the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway so perfect." Top 20 Bamburgh: 84% Beer: 80% Portmeirion: 79% Saint David's: 79% Sidmouth: 79% Tynemouth: 79% Dungeness: 78% Tenby: 78% Aldeburgh: 77% Wells-Next-The-Sea: 77% Whitby: 77% Lynmouth: 76% Nairn: 76% Saint Andrews: 76% St Mawes: 76% Swanage: 76% Broadstairs: 75% Bude: 75% Lyme Regis: 75% Robin Hood's Bay: 75% Bottom 20 Ilfracombe: 55% Littlehampton: 54% Mablethorpe: 54% Ramsgate: 54% Skegness: 54% Fishguard: 53% Barton on sea: 52% Cleethorpes: 52% Lowestoft: 52% New Brighton: 52% Ayr: 51% Great Yarmouth: 50% Weston-super-Mare: 49% Blackpool: 48% Burnham-on-Sea: 46% Fleetwood: 46% Southend-on-Sea: 43% Clacton-on-Sea: 42% Bangor: 38% Bognor Regis: 36%
Yahoo
20-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
'Transformative' investment for health data project
Millions of medical records held by GP surgeries are to be securely analysed for the effectiveness of psychological therapies used for anxiety and depression. The University of Oxford's OpenSAFELY project has tools that allow researchers to investigate medical files without seeing patients' data or it leaving the NHS. The Wellcome Trust has awarded the scheme £7m to analyse talking therapies, such as counselling and guided self-help, and £10m to create new techniques to access secure data securely. Project leader Prof Ben Goldacre said the investment "will be transformative". The project was established during the pandemic and analysed tens of millions of people's data, giving insights into who was most likely to die from Covid and which groups were missing out on vaccines. Building on the existing collaboration between the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science and NHS England, the project will analyse outcome data from patients who have used the talking therapies service. Outcome data is collected from 98% of people who have a course of treatment. OpenSAFELY said incorporating this data into its platform would help answer "many vital questions about mental health treatment", including how talking therapies affect long-term health outcomes and the best way to deliver services. The funding will enable researchers for the first time to analyse the anonymised mental health data in a highly secure setting. Prof Goldacre, who is also director of the Bennett Institute and who originally trained in psychiatry, said all the data "stays inside the computers" that GP practices themselves have chosen to store patient records. "But we've also done something really important and different about how researchers and analysts write their code to prepare and analyse the data. "They never need to interact directly with raw patient records at national scale. "Instead, the OpenSAFELY platform gives them randomly generated dummy data which ... is just good enough for them to write and to test their code is able to work. "They press a button inside the system and the code gets sent off into the machine that contains the real patient records, but automated and entirely at arm's length,... and then they get back their tables, their graph, their statistical results." He added that "radical steps" had also been taken to ensure it was "completely open and transparent". Prof Goldacre said the investment "will be transformative". "This has the potential to fundamentally change how we deliver mental health care to patients in the NHS. "In addition, the £10m data infrastructure investment will allow us to drive better use of data across the whole research community." Prof David Clark, one of the architects of NHS Talking Therapies programme and a clinical advisor to NHS England, said the research infrastructure came "at a crucial time for overstretched mental health services". You can follow BBC Oxfordshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram. Private firm to take over talking therapy service 'I want others to access the therapy that helped me' Talking therapies set to move from NHS to private OpenSAFELY Wellcome
BBC News
20-02-2025
- Health
- BBC News
National health data scheme awarded 'transformative' £17m funding
Millions of medical records held by GP surgeries are to be securely analysed for the effectiveness of psychological therapies used for anxiety and depression. The University of Oxford's OpenSAFELY project has tools that allow researchers to investigate medical files without seeing patient's data or it leaving the NHS. The scheme has now been awarded £17m to analyse talking therapies, including counselling and guided leader Prof Ben Goldacre said the investment "will be transformative". The project was established during the pandemic and analysed tens of millions of people's data, giving insights into who was most likely to die from Covid and which groups were missing out on vaccines. Building on the existing collaboration between the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science and NHS England, the project will analyse outcome data from patients who have used the talking therapies data is collected from 98% of people who have a course of said incorporating this data into its platform would help answer "many vital questions about mental health treatment", including how talking therapies affect long-term health outcomes and the best way to deliver funding awards of £7m and £10m from the Wellcome Trust, which supports research into life, health and wellbeing, will enable researchers for the first time to analyse the anonymised data in a highly secure Goldacre, who is also director of the Bennett Institute and who originally trained in psychiatry, said all the data "stays inside the computers" that GP practices themselves have chosen to store patient records."But we've also done something really important and different about how researchers and analysts write their code to prepare and analyse the data. "They never need to interact directly with raw patient records at national scale. "Instead, the OpenSAFELY platform gives them randomly generated dummy data which ... is just good enough for them to write and to test their code is able to work."They press a button inside the system and the code gets sent off into the machine that contains the real patient records, but automated and entirely at arm's length,... and then they get back their tables, their graph, their statistical results."He added that "radical steps" had also been taken to ensure it was "completely open and transparent". Prof Goldacre said the investment "will be transformative". "This has the potential to fundamentally change how we deliver mental health care to patients in the NHS. "In addition, the £10m data infrastructure investment will allow us to drive better use of data across the whole research community."Prof David Clark, one of the architects of NHS Talking Therapies programme and a clinical advisor to NHS England, said the research infrastructure came "at a crucial time for overstretched mental health services". As part of the mental health project, OpenSAFELY and NHS England will also explore new mechanisms for data linkage, where datasets are minimised before moving between NHS England controlled data centres. You can follow BBC Oxfordshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
