David Dawes

A young boy blows out candles on a cade, with other children in the background

We have recorded 529 laboratory-confirmed #Measles cases in England since January 2025, representing a significant increase driven by declining childhood vaccination rates.

Our data dashboard provides data on the total number of cases by week of onset: ukhsa-dashboard.data.gov.uk/vaccine-prev...

Want to know how High Speed 1 is doing or how effective the Video Games Tax Relief has been?

The government have set up an 'Evaluation Registry' which has over 1,750 evaluations on it.

Hours, days, weeks of fun.

evaluation-registry.cabinetoffice.gov.uk

How exciting - and a great opportunity to get involved!

I'd assumed this was a reference to Rumpole of the Bailey.

Time to update my cultural references?

The UK’s plan to genetically test all newborns sounds smart – until it creates patients who aren’t sick The promise and peril of sequencing every baby’s genome.

theconversation.com/the-uks-plan...

UK’s plan to genetically test all newborns sounds smart – until it creates patients who aren’t sick

- Risk ≠ certainty
- False positives
- Long term follow up (capacity)
- Truly informed consent
- Who owns my children's genome

& other unintended consequences

How to Break Down Silos and Collaborate Across Government Practical strategies to align goals, build trust, and work across boundaries

What blocks collaboration in government isn’t tech debt. It’s cultural debt jessicalynnmacleod.substack.com/p/how-to-bre...

A small but momentous change to the OpenPrescribing homepage this evening.

Hospital medicines data now OPEN for everyone

hospitals.openprescribing.net

Draft Disabled People’s Rights Plan | GOV.WALES We want your views on the draft Disabled People’s Rights Plan.

Find the Easy Read version of the Welsh Government Draft Disabled People’s Rights Plan Consultation here: gov.wales/draft-disabl... Share your views by 7 August, your voice matters! #DisabilityRights #Wales #EasyRead

I wrote up my experiment making an LLM/AI project for GOV.UK prototyping:

joelanman.com/posts/llm-ai...

Congratulations @bristolbrc.bsky.social on this fantastic resource! The play, Hard Evidence, and this subsequent How to guide were developed out of research led by CAPC colleague, Natalia Lewis, on mindfulness as an intervention for women with PTSD and history of #DomesticAbuse (The coMforT study).

For more of this, come to DataBites tomorrow.

I've literally just finished typing notes on a meeting with a "Local Gun Association" rep.

Government. Local government.

TfW are putting their trains on the blockchain (iOS only).

“Our subscription-based AI ticketing app...simplifies complex fare structures...the world’s first blockchain wallet for mobility, our goal is to make travel accessible, intuitive, and affordable for all.”

news.tfw.wales/news/tfw-lau...

Now that a new triumvirate of leaders (Jim Mackey, Penny Dash and Sam Jones, if confirmed as PS) have to rethink how to organise and manage the central team running the NHS, I have a suggestion for a book they should read...

Phew, well at least there's an unambiguous definition of biological sex that's clinically meaningful and broadly agreed.

Very fair - I need to get networking!

Thank you for putting this together! Is there space for me? I work with the FHIR team in NHS Cymru/Wales.

Were you thinking of sending your artificial intelligence helper to an online meeting with the European Commission?

Think again. The Commission banned AI agents from its online meetings.

pro.politico.eu/news/197231

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

Fourth National Laverbread Day celebrates Welsh delicacy A celebration of laverbread first held on April 14th 2022 is in its fourth year, with the national salute to seaweed receiving attention from WWF Cymru. Laverbread incorporates a type of edible seawee...

A celebration of laverbread first held on April 14th 2022 is in its fourth year, with the national salute to seaweed receiving attention from WWF Cymru

This is an inspiring and fascinating piece of data organisation, presentation, and visualisation.

Any idea if/how this will affect home nations differently?

Always makes me wonder in which language the initialism is a horrific slur.

"Sell our data" is an emotive response, admittedly. Perhaps it would have been better to say "use data as a commodity", which is distinct from using it as an enabler for improvement.

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#rstats

Not necessarily good news; again, Streeting's concern is how we can sell health data, not how we can use it within the NHS.

Perhaps more likely they accidentally flipped xᵢ and mᵢ

Look, even I can get my subscripts right on bsky

Homepage | European Alternatives We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.

I've used this to find some EU based tech product (including Thyme, the only good time tracking app I've found): european-alternatives.eu

Is there anything approaching a UK version?