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Liverpool project in the running to win a National Lottery Award
LITHERLAND
Sports Park has been selected to battle it out with a host of other
Lottery funded projects to win a National Lottery Award, a £2000
prize and the chance to feature on national TV.
The Park is 1 of 10 projects nominated in the Best Sports Project
category of the Awards and people from Liverpool are being urged to
show their support by voting for it. Now entering their 4th
successful year, the Awards aim to recognise the difference that
Lottery-funded projects of all sizes make to local communities and
celebrate the achievements of the people behind them.
Litherland Sports Park (LSP) began as a project to improve school
sports facilities and a home for an athletics track. What was once a
disused wasteland and a hub of anti-social behaviour has been
transformed in to a multi-million pound sports and health complex,
with a massive positive impact on the local community. The
project team used Lottery funding to improve their sports
facilities, leading to a unique and complex cocktail of investment,
which has brought together 10 different funding streams and
partners. LSP is one of the 1st and most innovative schemes in
the country, housing cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation NHS
services, which were relocated from Aintree Hospital. It is home to
more than 25 sports clubs and a sports venue for over 30 schools, as
well as a real driving force for economic and social regeneration in
the area.
Alistair Robertson, spokesperson for the Sports Park, says:- "Litherland
Sports Park is a great example of what Lottery funding can do, and
we are thrilled to have reached this far in the National Lottery
Awards. We are really hoping the public support us and help us to
win an Award."
Public voting started on the 9 July and ends on the 3 of August. The
3 projects with the highest number of votes will go through to the
final. Winning projects will feature on a prime time show on BBC1,
and will win £2000 to be spent on their project.
To register your vote for the Litherland Sports Park call 0845 386
8130 or log on to
lotterygoodcauses.org.uk/awards.
Voting lines are open now and close at midday on Friday 3 August.
Since The National Lottery began in 1994, more than £20 billion has
been raised and over 250,000 grants given out across arts, sport,
heritage, charities, health, education and the environment.
The
National Lottery Awards recognise the hard work and dedication of
people who use Lottery funding to make a difference to communities
across the UK. |
The
Most Talked To Man In The Country Is…
WHO would you
imagine is the most in-demand man in Britain? England football
captain John Terry? School dinner hero Jamie Oliver? Prime Minister
Gordon Brown? They don’t come close. The answer is theatre
actor Jeremy Hancock. As the voice of automated rail enquiry service
TrainTracker, Jeremy gives advice to over 16,000 people per day on
taking the train.
“In the last 6 months the number of people using TrainTracker
has more than doubled, and we have just received our 10 millionth
caller. We believe that Jeremy must be the
most talked to man in the country.” says National Rail Enquiries Service (NRE) chief
executive Chris Scoggins.
Close to 450,000 people per month now call TrainTracker which uses
speech recognition technology to understand the journey requests
made by callers and give details of departures, arrivals and where
to change trains. Links to all the Train Company control centres
means the information people receive takes into account whether
trains are running on time.
“We have developed the technology so that TrainTracker can
tell you exactly how to make any journey on the national rail
network, whereas the previous version gave information on direct
journeys only. Importantly, it
does so in a way that makes it feel like you are talking to a human
being rather than being interrogated by a machine. Effectively TrainTracker has had a personality transplant.” says Chris Scoggins.
Chris believes the more human service as much as the increase in
information it can provide has produced the huge jump in
TrainTracker’s use. As part of the programme to redevelop
TrainTracker a large market research project was carried out to find
out how people actually ask for journey times, and what information
they will want. This has been taken into account in the language
TrainTracker uses when asking people questions and giving them
answers – for example it asks approximately when they would like to
travel as most journeys are not set in stone, and it automatically
gives details of more than one train as people want options of when
to travel.
Another advance has come from painstaking work to smooth the way
TrainTracker’s recorded information is linked together into answers
so that its responses avoid the jerky style associated with so many
speech recognition services.
“There have been articles in the press for years and years
claiming that speech recognition is coming of age, but it has never
really happened. I believe the
upgrades to TrainTracker mean it finally has and this system should
be seen as the proof of what can be achieved.” Chris
Scoggins |
