Latest news with #Purves
Scotsman
05-07-2025
- Scotsman
5-star campsite near Edinburgh named best in Scotland
A five-star campsite near Edinburgh has been named the best in the Scotland at this year's Scottish Hospitality Awards. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Drummohr Camping and Glamping Site in Musselburgh was awarded Camping Site of The Year at the black-tie event held in Glasgow on June 18. It comes after the popular site was voted Campsite of the Year in the Camping Awards 2024 and also named the best in Scotland by online travel agent Angie Purves, who is the site manager at Drummohr, said: 'We are absolutely delighted to have won this award which reflects the team's passion and dedication to creating a brilliant place for people to come and enjoy a holiday. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Drummohr Camping and Glamping Site is a 5-star holiday park with 12 luxury lodges, 21 glamping units and 126 pitches for camping 'The depth and range of the shortlisted businesses in these awards demonstrates the strength of tourism and hospitality in Scotland and we're very proud to be part of that. Working in the tourism industry, it's important to work closely with other local businesses in the sector and we actively promote nearby attractions, events and venues to our guests.' Ms Purves added: 'I think providing that extra level of service across everything we do is what makes Drummohr such a special place to visit.' Set across 10 acres near the shores of the Firth of Forth and just 10 miles from Edinburgh, Drummohr provides self-catering luxury lodges with hot tubs, glamping pods and en-suite bothies, and both grass and hard-standing pitches for touring and tents, all with electric. The family-friendly campsite also has themed wizard, adventure and fairy glamping pods, as well as family bothies and a large playground. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Dogs are welcome on the site which has its own scenic dog walk and dog-friendly accommodation, with up to two dogs welcomed on its tent and touring pitches free of charge. Its amenity blocks have underfloor heating, free no-push hot showers, family-friendly accessible bathrooms with baths, and heated indoor campers' kitchen and laundry. The top rated in Musselburgh site was awarded five stars by VisitScotland in 2023 following a £1m refurbishment by its owners WCF. For more information you can the Drummohr website or call them on 0131 665 6867.
Business Insider
30-06-2025
- Science
- Business Insider
AI is learning how animals talk to each other, and could someday help humans talk to animals
There are scientists out there who are using AI to understand the sounds dolphins make, and it could have some world-changing impacts. "I like to think that we will be able to talk to animals at some point," Drew Purves, the nature lead at Google DeepMind, said on a recent episode of the company's podcast. The AI research lab has already been working on this through DolphinGemma, which it calls a "large language model that uses dolphin audio to help scientists study how dolphins communicate." The project, conducted in collaboration with Georgia Tech researchers and the field research of the Wild Dolphin Project, aims to decode the signals dolphins use to communicate and generate sounds to communicate back. "It takes the sounds, separates them out, tokenizes them, and basically brings it into the world of large language modeling," Purves said. "That's an example of AI actively being used to study animal communication at a level we really couldn't do before." These types of large language models could have a substantial impact on the collective knowledge of the world, Purves said. "Most of what we're doing at the moment, as I mentioned, is filling known information gaps," he said. "Sometimes, you think that the real change can come, in the long run, from these, these moments of awakening, where people almost overnight can change their relationship with nature." Work like this has been underway for years. The Earth Species Project, a nonprofit founded in 2017, uses AI to decode non-human communication. Its flagship model, NatureLM-audio, is "the world's first large audio-language model for animal sounds" and aims to help researchers detect and classify species and even recognize the sounds of new species, according to its website. One of the things the nonprofit has already learned in its research is that many species of animals — elephants, gray parrots, marmosets — all have names for each other, Katie Zacarian, the cofounder and CEO of the Earth Species Project, said at the Axios AI+ SF Summit last year. The vision is to use its technology to "reconnect human beings with the rest of nature in a way that all the diversity of species can thrive and not just accelerate and exacerbate the existing challenges that we're faced with where we're extracting, we're taming, we're exploiting the rest of nature — that's not the goal here," Zacarian said. And when it's all said and done, humans may no longer be at the top of the animal kingdom. "We looked out at the universe and discovered that Earth was not the center," Aza Raskin, cofounder and president of the Earth Species Project, told Scientific American. "These tools are going to change the way that we see ourselves in relation to everything."
BBC News
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Today's Dr Who 'too sophisticated' for former star Peter Purves
A former Doctor Who star admitted he could not understand the stories in the current version of the BBC science-fiction Purves played Steven Taylor, a travelling companion of the very first Doctor, for a year from 86-year-old actor, who lives at Sibton in Suffolk, spoke to the BBC at the opening of a new Doctor Who exhibition at Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery, where he was the guest of honour on said the series had become "far too sophisticated for my simple brain", but believed its production values were now much higher, with far more money being spent, than had been the case when he was in the programme. Purves joined the cast of the hit children's show almost 60 years ago, first appearing in a serial called The Chase in June 1965. His character Steven was a stranded space pilot of the far future, who the original Doctor, played by William Hartnell, rescued and then shared several adventures with."We used to have stories that were very simple, you went from there to there, you had a cliffhanger at the end of an episode, the following week you picked up from there and went to another cliffhanger, then end of story, on to another one. "Very simple, very straightforward, very clear and easy for kids to understand."He said he stopped regularly watching the series in the early 1970s, when Jon Pertwee was the Doctor. Despite Pertwee being a friend of his, Purves did not enjoy the show's format of the period, with the Doctor having been exiled to Earth and many of the stories taking place in the south of England."I didn't like the serials then because it got embedded in England, which lots of people think is fabulous and great, it just wasn't for me. It had lost what Doctor Who was all about." The actor said he still kept track of the programme's cast changes to avoid any awkwardness with fellow guests at conventions."I try to make sure I know who's in it. If I turn up somewhere and there's someone I don't know, it could be quite embarrassing, particularly if they're a principal character."While almost all surviving episodes of Doctor Who from 1963 onwards are now available to watch on the BBC iPlayer, Purves is not convinced it necessarily opens up the productions from his era to new generations of young viewers."I remember being in America at a convention and a woman came up to me and said, 'I've been trying to get my son interested in the classics, but he won't watch it because he thinks the television's broken' because you've got these black-and-white pictures." Purves regularly fronted Doctor Who-related features when presenting the children's show Blue Peter from 1967 to 1978 but said he generally stayed away from Doctor Who conventions and events until the 1990s. He restored his connection to the series in that decade, when he began providing linking narration for audio releases of Doctor Who episodes from his time, which no longer exist in the archives, but for which the soundtracks survive recorded by fans at claiming not to be able to follow the programme's current style of storytelling, Purves told the crowd watching him cut the ribbon on the new exhibition that he was impressed by Doctor Who's longevity."It is a remarkable thing that a series could continue to hold an audience for so long. "And here I am – getting very old – and being able to talk about it 60 years after I first did it." Follow Peterborough news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
BBC News
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Doctor Who exhibition sees Peterborough museum hours extended
A museum is hoping that an unofficial exhibition dedicated to the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who will encourage more people to Museum and Art Gallery has extended its opening hours and will open on Sundays for its new exhibition called Adventures in Time and Hancock, the museum's heritage engagement manager, admitted that with local councils "looking hard at their budgets" there had been "questions in the press about opening hours"."Really this exhibition is an opportunity for people to use your local museum," she said. Guest of honour at the opening was former Doctor Who star Peter 86-year-old actor, who lives in Suffolk, starred in the series as Steven Taylor, a companion of the first incarnation of The Doctor, as played by William Hartnell, from 1965 to '66. Speaking to the crowd as he cut the ribbon, Purves said he understood the museum could be under threat, and he hoped the exhibition would "do something to make sure that it does stay open". He encouraged people to "spread the word"."These sort of facilities only exist for you, for us, so it's something which we must support," said Purves, who also presented the BBC's Blue Peter. Another visitor on the opening day with a close link to the timelord was composer Dominic Glynn. He provided music for Doctor Who in the 1980s, including creating a new version of its famous theme tune for the 1986 series – a job he admitted had made him "very nervous, as you would be, because it's a national institution and you mess with it at your peril".Glynn, 64, said the exhibition was "incredible... there is so much memorabilia from the last 60 years in this one place; it's absolutely stunning". Most of those attending the opening day were fans and viewers, rather than those who had worked on the series. Sarah Grossman, 43, had travelled from London and said she was impressed. Her favourite exhibit was a fake Mona Lisa prop from the 1979 story City of Death, co-written by Douglas Adams (who went on to write the BBC's Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy), "because it's one of my favourite serials".Amy Cuddeford, 28, said it was fun to see props both from when she watched the series as a child in 2005, and when her mother had watched it in the 1960s and 70s. Dominic Cuddeford, 23, also enjoyed seeing the props but was surprised to see how "basic" some of them appeared close-up, in contrast to how they were made to appear on-screen. "It puts more validation into what goes into it, and what goes on behind-the-scenes to make the show," he said. Many of the items on display had come from the collection of Derek Handley, who curated the exhibition. Some are originals as used on-screen, while others are replicas he explained the event had taken about a year to put together."There's not just myself that collects Doctor Who costumes and props," he said."There's loads of other fans, and we have them all stored individually in our houses, and the only time people see them is when someone comes round to our house."So it's wonderful to be able to gather like-minded people together who have got all these wonderful things, and then put them out on display so the public can see them." Follow Peterborough news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
Daily Mail
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Covid patrol cop stopped funeral that was 'too busy'
Police officers halted a burial and insisted on counting how many mourners were there because they thought the funeral breached strict Covid rules, an inquiry heard. Four officers brought the outdoors service to a halt, despite the pleas of undertakers, because they were informed there were more than the 20 allowed under coronavirus laws. It is the latest shocking revelation made to the Scottish Covid-19 Inquiry about the impact Nicola Sturgeon 's pandemic rules had on the lives of Scots. Yesterday, Lord Brailsford's inquiry was told that staff at some venues were counting how many people walked through the doors, blocking entry to anyone over the limit no matter how close they were to the deceased. The probe was also told how one family defied rules which banned them from singing, and how police were pulling over funeral staff to demand why they were outside. The inquiry, which has so far cost £34 million, is currently hearing evidence as to how the pandemic affected worship and life events. Tim Purves, the chief executive of William Purves Funeral Directors who transported Queen Elizabeth II from Balmoral to Edinburgh following her death, told of a service in the Borders which was brought to a halt by officers. He told the inquiry: 'We had a funeral that was taking place outside, it was a burial, and during the funeral service four police officers turned up in a car. 'They had been informed that there was more than 20 people attending this funeral, and the four police officers came up and stopped the funeral while they counted the people that were there. 'My funeral director, who was there, tried to plead with them to say: 'Look, you can stand back here and count. You can see there's less than 20..' But they insisted on doing this.' In his written statement he told how they 'went right up to the front, halting the burial' to check. And giving evidence yesterday he told how his colleague said to the four of them who arrived in a car together that despite this officers were 'more concerned about the fact that in the open air there might be more than 20 people'. Mr Purves said: 'It just felt at times the rules were taking over.' During the virus crisis, the Scottish Government introduced mandates about how many people could attend funerals as they tried to get to grips with rapidly rising case counts. But before they did venues would have to make up their own rules, and Mr Purves told how one cemetery made the decision to have only five people, including clergy and staff, which meant only two family members could attend. But, the inquiry heard, there were some which allowed much larger numbers. With the limit of 20 set, some venues would have staff count people as they walked in. Mr Purves said: 'When they reached the number 21 they sort of said: 'No, you're not coming in.' The difficulty was sometimes that person was actually a very close relative, and somebody else had actually gone in ahead of them. 'So there were times when we were having to go in and actually almost fish people back out and say: 'I'm really sorry, but this very close relative has to come in, so you need to come out.' One evening, the inquiry heard, rules were introduced with immediate effect banning singing at funerals. It meant staff had to call one mourning family, who had planned on signing hymns the next day, to tell them that while music can play nobody is allowed to sing. Mr Purves said: 'The response at the funeral was that many people still sang. Now, everybody was wearing facemasks, but there is no way of physically stopping people from singing when they were at the funeral. 'But while the music was playing, some people still sang.' Funeral directors were not classes as key workers, and two staff were pulled over by police in the middle of the night while travelling to remove a deceased person from the house to demand to know why they were outside. Police allowed them to continue their journey after being told of the circumstance.
