Historic crane populations crashed due to hunting and then loss of habitat as wetlands were drained and agriculture and housing expanded etc. Today you can find cranes in the wild in Norfolk, Suffolk and the Fens district which are all regions with sizeable wetland habitats due to active protection and reintroduction programs. There are small groups of other breeding pairs elsewhere in the UK as well. See following for a quick backgrounder:
Factor provides support for both file and image based workflows. Factor is image-based and uses files when sharing, loading or refreshing vocabularies. however, just like lisp and Smalltalk, you can also save, share and restore system state via an image. For example you can save the whole state of Factor with the word
save-image
and you can restore that image using ./factor -i=path-to-image
This image workflow and interaction via the inspector provides a very similar workflow experience to both Smalltalk and Common Lisp.
Thank you for this. It does clearly corroborate that figure of 9%.
Still, 230,000 dwellings of 2,125,000 in total is a lot to be be vacant during an accommodation crisis. As I said elsewhere, the number of vacant dwellings is higher than most would suspect.
Often the issue is where exactly those vacant dwellings are. Typically, booming metro areas will have a low vacancy rate, while the vacancy rate will be high in rural areas or declining cities, where economic prospects are more dubious.
Demand is local. If someone needs to live in Dublin for their work, it doesn't help them much if there's cheap housing a few hours away.
The only two studies I'm aware of that look at this (admittedly from ~10 years ago and for England and the city of Melbourne in Australia) suggest that the proportion of vacant properties is highest where prices and capital gains are greatest. Not intuitive, but that's what they show.
But yes, it would be helpful to see the breakdown of that census data.
Edit: There is actually a breakdown by county if you scroll down the page. Dublin and Cork appear to be at 6 and 7% respectively.
Quite, indeed in London the pressure group "action on empty homes" say it's 2.2% - and that includes second homes (people with a flat in London and a house elsewhere, airbnbs, etc)
That's a tiny number. Even if that number was zero there would still be a massive shortage. Most claims of "homelessness" ignore overcrowding, they're looking at people living on the street, or at most sofa-surfing, they don't look at overcrowded houses, at 30 year old adults with above-average wages who have to share family homes with half a dozen strangers in HMOs.
I don't know about Dublin but I would be surprised if it's not a similar demographic. A lot of cities have a fair amount of airbnbs because they work better for modern travellers than hotels
The biggest places outside the City of London (the square mile in the very middle, it's a special case due to its size) are holiday hotspots like Cornwall, South Devon, the Lake District, where holiday homes, either private or rented out ("airbnbs") make up nearly 10% of the stock.
They also (like action-on-empty-homes) claim airbnbs as "empty", which is a political view. There are about 200k visitors in a given peak summer week to Cornwall [0] and 13k "second homes" [1]. Assuming they are all holiday lets, and lets go for a typical 4 person family, that's 50k visitors. Slash those numbers and that's a hell of a lot of tourists not spending money, and a hell of a lot of jobs not being funded.
On the other hand cornwall could have its total housing stock increased by 5.6% and all the problems would apparently be solved - as there would then be the same number in primary residential use as exist right now.
That's census data, and their collection of data is... imperfect. A lot of those 'vacant' dwellings are one of:
* Occupants refused to engage with census taker (I used to have neighbours who did this; you can theoretically be fined for it but I don't think anyone ever has been)
* Home is in the middle of being sold
* Home is uninhabitable.
* Home is in the literal middle of nowhere.
I'd be in favour of measures to free up vacant housing (punitive tax on vacant housing etc; there _is_ a vacant home tax now but it's pretty small), but I wouldn't hold out much hope of getting a really meaningful amount of housing out of it.
22+ odd years ago I emailed Ross out of the blue. At the time I was working at a small startup attempting to build mobile banking infrastructure for rural poor in South Africa and elsewhere. I was after a copy of a paper he had mentioned in a talk and Ross replied with a blunt to the point email about how hard he thought the problem domain we were trying to tackle was (along with a pointer to the paper I had asked about). I remember being slightly annoyed by the initial tone of his response, but it got me thinking - then thinking a lot more. There were some very well thought out reasons behind his arguments. I replied a few days later with a detailed list of how we were addressing his concerns along with some others he hadn't mentioned but also acknowledging the areas we needed to dig into further. I didn't really expect an answer, after all, I didn't know him, but he had got me to think hard on key problems and I wanted to acknowledge that.
We got a lot more than a simple reply. We got his focused feedback, constructive criticisms, pointers to other work he thought was relevant, general support, some key follow up conversations on the phone, followed by introductions to folks he knew in industry who he thought could help (who would have never entertained us at that stage otherwise). While the startup eventually didn't make it, many of the ideas we worked on did. Of the folks that we met through that whole adventure, Ross was one of the standouts. Yup, he was very good people indeed and will be sadly missed!
Blender Apps are on the medium to long term plans for the Blender foundation (i.e. planned on roadmap but not currently under active development). The Blender team currently have a lot of projects on and are resource bound so have prioritized focus on finishing developments such as Evee Next, GPU compositing etc before starting other projects such as Apps.
Super excited to see this and thanks Mikhaed for posting!
Intel's Loihi and Manchester's APT SpiNNaker (http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/hardware/) are two extremely interesting projects and architectures that could drive new generation of machine learning apps (and migrate software based models into hardware)
Very much hoping Loihi2 (and a SpiNNaker descendent) will be eventually packaged into a format that enables researches and devs to start embedding it into systems though sadly looks like that wont be till late 2023 or more likely 2023 for Lohi2 at earliest. Still great to see progress.
https://www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happening/news/the-great-crane...