Lorraine Ribbons obituary
My wife, Lorraine Ribbons, who has died aged 72, worked for many years as a volunteer for the Association of Children with Heart Disorders (ACHD), visiting young people with heart conditions in hospitals, arranging for them to go on holidays and providing support.Two of her three children were born with heart conditions and that led her into volunteering from the late 1970s onwards, befriending and counselling other families in the same situation.A trained nurse, through the auspices of the ACHD she gained access to the cardiac wards of Edinburgh Sick Children’s hospital and was encouraged by the consultants there to roam around providing emotional and practical help.She also took it upon herself to arrange holidays and weekend breaks, setting up accommodation in the countryside, where they would take part in activities such as pony riding and archery.The holidays were often transformative for the youngsters, giving them a chance to be apart from their parents and to get up to the kind of high-spirited stuff that all teenagers like to be involved with – without someone breathing down their necks saying: “You can’t do that.
” Lorraine herself was a “can do” sort of person,Born in Oxford, she was the daughter of Humphrey Turner, a fighter pilot during the second world war, and his wife, Stephanie (nee Keller), a Swiss woman whom he had met after finding his way to safety in her homeland after being shot down,Brought up in Poole, Dorset, Lorraine went to Talbot Heath school, after which she trained as a nurse in Oxford,While nursing she met Robert Simpson, whom she married in 1976,They moved to Edinburgh, and, with the arrival of their first child she became a full-time mother.
When it turned out that two of their three sons had heart disorders, she soon became a volunteer with the ACHD, and with her nursing background was able to create her own role at the Edinburgh Sick Children’s hospital as she went along, remaining as a volunteer there until 2008.Later Lorraine also trained to become a marriage guidance counsellor, working for many years as a volunteer for Couple Counselling Lothian in Edinburgh and later becoming a supervisor.After she and Robert divorced in 2006 she and I met on a sponsored bike ride and married in 2010.A keen cyclist, Lorraine also had an adventurous spirit, and in 2011 joined her son, Andrew, on a leg of his motor trip from Carrickfergus to Cape Town on the journey from Hurghada in Egypt down to Nairobi, during the Arab spring.She is survived by me, her sons from her first marriage, Russell, Adrian and Andrew, and eight grandchildren.
AI facial recognition oversight lagging far behind technology, watchdogs warn
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How does live facial recognition work and how many UK police forces use it?
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UK ‘invention agency’ grants £50m of public money to US tech and venture capital firms
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Under a cloud: the growing resentment against the massive datacentres sprouting across Australian cities
Residents say AI factories with unknown environmental impacts are being rushed into development as proponents argue Australia must ride the data boom or be left behindFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastWhen West Footscray resident Sean Brown takes his 19-month-old boy to the park, their walk passes an imposing new building cheerily spruiked as “Australia’s largest hyperscale AI factory”, a datacentre called M3.He hates it: the construction noise from its constant expansion, the looming towers and the insistent background hum, the exhaust from the growing array of diesel generators that can help power the ranks of servers inside.And he worries what it represents for his young child’s future.“He is growing – neurologically, pulmonarily, physically – in the shadow of a facility whose cumulative environmental impact … has never been assessed,” Brown says.“They’re building something which is, frankly, terrible for the community
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