Upgrading the Home Network

Every now and then I work from home, and unreel some gnarly Cat 4 (really) cable I bought from Homebase a long time ago so I can connect the work laptop. One directionless thought eventually lead to a couple of visits to the Maplin store by Liverpool Street and a lot of browsing for specifications, cataloguing the computing kit, reading reviews and a bit about Wi-Fi data protocols (I used to work in telecoms).

So the first thing to do is to get the connectivity capability of every bit of kit I have. (It would be the first thing if I was the kind of person who Did Things Properly, but I’m not, so it was about the middle thing I did.)

• The HG533 router has B/G/N wireless and has 4x100Mbs Ethernet ports and a USB 2 port.
• The NAS has a Gigabit ethernet interface.
• The Brother HL2250DN Laser has USB 2 and 100Mbs ethernet.
• The Canon MG7550 inkjet has B/G/N wireless, USB 2, NFC and 100Mbs ethernet
• The Apple kit has B/G/N/AC wireless, and the Macbook Air has Thunderbolt, which with an adapter provides Gigabit ethernet.
• The Samsung NP-R720 has on on-board B/G wireless, and 100Mbs ethernet.
• The Sony Blu-Ray BDP-760 has on board wireless, I’m guessing B/G given its age.
• The WD TV Live media player has 100Mbs LAN, and a USB port into which I can plug what I want. I have a wireless-N dongle at the moment.

I know what you’re thinking. Upgrade my internet connection. I’m supposed to be getting 8Mbs download on my ADSL, and Speedtest tells me I can about 7Mbs get on my Air over the wireless-N, so that’s not the problem. I don’t do online gaming or TV streaming. This is the problem: when I connected the Samsung with the LAN cable, the browser speeded up. Wait. What? (This is when all the work started to get done in earnest.) Wireless-G is supposed to be good for 54Mbs, though with all the wi-fi signalling overhead, that works out at about 20Mbs of user data. So in theory the wi-fi has capacity to spare. Using the LAN should not have improved the download times. Yet it did. Reading around, it turns out the HG533 is a couple of ariels short of a six-pack, and it was designed to a price. The router definitely needs an upgrade, as does the wireless on the Samsung.

My first thought was that the modem bit of the HG533 is okay, unless it’s really cold outside, when it can drop out now and again, so I would leave well enough alone. But, what if it packs up and I need another modem? Getting a modem that doesn’t come with a router attached is difficult, or rather, you buy a router and can opt for a free ADSL modem to be included. So I might be paying for the same thing twice. I could go on using the HG533, but who knows if a newer ADSL modem might not improve the performance? I’m on ADSL2+ and about 2km from the exchange and in theory could get up to 15Mbs download. In practice, I’m not so sure. The copper and distribution pole (yep, an old-fashioned distribution pole) outside my house survived the Great Storm of 1987. Talk-Talk tell me that I can upgrade my router at any time. It will cost me £79 and I will get their Super Router. You read the review. (I think Talk-Talk do this as a sneaky way of limiting the demand on their network.) So why don’t I get a top-end router with a free modem?

So that’s done. I feel like I dodged a bullet there. So now to the in-house network.

Wire-heads have a Cat 6 wired house with sockets in every room, but a) I’m not a wire-head, and b) that still means wires trailing from the skirting-board to the kit. I have enough wires with the hi-fi and TV / DVD kit, thank you. And, yes, I did spend a while online reading, and talking with a helpful assistant in Maplin, about Powerline. The mains wiring in my house was last touched in about 1987 or so. Some of it may be older than that. The fuse box has been updated, but not the wires. I’ll leave that alone. It’s a nice-sounding solution, but I bet it works better with modern wiring. So it's wireless for everything except the heftiest data transfers, when I’ll live with temporary trailing wires.

There are two rules for wireless: destroy any nearby wireless-B device; and make sure your kit all has the same capability. Otherwise the wireless network will run almost at the speed of the slowest protocol (not quite, but nearly). I can make an exception for the Canon and the Sony because if I'm doing colour printing or watching DVD’s I’m not likely to be doing anything else.

So upgrade the wireless router to something with Gigabit-ethenet and AE-capable, and get AC-capable dongles for the Toshiba and the WD TV Live. The Apple kit and the NAS can then run as intended. Leave the Canon to be wireless and leave the Brother on a LAN port where it is now. (Printer servers cost too much.) Get some nice new Cat 6 flat cable for the work laptop when I’m at home, and for big downloads or when I want to do fast transfers of data between the laptops and the NAS.

Which router? Think about what a router does: it sees an incoming packet of data, reads its destination and sends it to the relevant port (modem, LAN, USB or wireless device). It needs to do that so fast it’s waiting for the next packet to arrive. Or if it can’t, it needs a lot of memory for those packets to sit in to be dealt with. Otherwise the computers are going to be sending lots of “Nope, missed that, send again please” requests back. Those doesn’t slow down the network, but it sure as heck increases the time it takes for a useful data packet to arrive. So we want a fast processor and a chunk of fast RAM. And you think you’re going to get that for £30? Ummm, no. £30 will get you a decent bit of kit, but I doubt that the experience will be snappy. So it’s worth spending a bit extra on a decent spec. With that spec there are two big choices: Apple Airport Extreme, or Netgear / Linksys / Belkin / Billion / etc. I have Windows 7 and 10 computers, and the forums have too many people saying the Airport doesn’t always play nice. It’s also really expensive. So after going through some reviews, I’m looking at the Netgear R6250 and two Netgear AC-dongles.

What I've not listed is how many websites and Google queries it took to get all that information together. Did you know there was a website that listed all the BT local exchanges and their capabilities?

Part Two to follow.

Looking-Glass Liberals and The Extinction Burst

What we’re seeing is not fightback, resistance and protest. It’s two things: players who are hedging their bets to avoid alienating customers and activism groups, and the activists and snowflakes who are having the mother of all extinction bursts.



Liberals are moral progressives. They impose their beliefs on the People through legislation and media content. Some of those were needed (racial equality legislation, TUPE), some have turned out to be dubious (Divorce Reform), and some are simply bad (Angela’ Army). There’s a built-in obsolescence to the liberal programme: once they have imposed legal and cultural enlightenment on the society and economy, if not in the hearts and minds of the people, they’re done. Time to quit liberalising and go get a proper job. Said very few political movements ever. So having done the sensible stuff, those liberals who can’t get proper jobs go in search of even more recherché causes to foist on the People. In the end, they choose a cause too far, pass through the Looking-Glass, and the People become the enemy. Through the Looking Glass they can fight the causes of cultures and people who represent everything their parents professed to despise. Which is why we have female snowflakes wanting to import unskilled, unemployable men from a deeply misogynist culture who would put those very snowflakes in burkas and confine them to the kitchen. Because all the snowflakes despise now are the taxpayers with jobs and children they want to prepare for the world.

Once Liberalism passes through the Looking Glass, it attracts the dispossessed, the alienated, and many of the younger, disaffected people who can’t get jobs. Those people also hate the taxpayers. Communism never got a real grip in the UK because young people could get jobs, and they suspected correctly there was more to it than workers’ rights. Looking-Glass Liberalism has its following in the West today because there are a lot of young people who suspect that they will never benefit from participating in their economies, and who also suspect that they were not raised with the skills or temperament to participate advantageously. In which case, some of them will be quite happy to tear it all down. After all, what has post-modern Capitalism ever done for them?

Populism is in part a reaction to Liberalism Through The Looking Glass. It says “Enough!”. It says: “This is not your country” and much worse than that, it says “You are not Good People.” Populism is an existential identity threat to Looking Glass Liberals, who have no other source of self-identity and self-esteem than the craziness of their causes.

Populism appears when Liberalism passes through the Looking Glass, and has established itself as the dominant cultural and social doctrine of the Chattering Classes (media, PR, advertising, politics, diplomacy) and is the dominant mood of mainstream literature, film, theatre, comedy and art. As it wakes up, Populism says “This is not my beautiful country, this is not my beautiful culture, my god! What have I done?”.


And then it seeks to evict the squatters and bulldoze their camps. Metaphorically, and in the case of “The Jungle” at Calais, literally.

Business has to do its PR, recruiting, advertising and investor relations within the mainstream mood. It cannot afford an avant-garde moral appearance: it can only change sides when the new winner is clearly ahead and in sight of the finishing line. Until then, it has to go with the favourite. Right now, Looking Glass Liberalism still looks good. If you live in a large city. If you are well-paid and have marketable talents. The Tech giants don’t care about immigrants, only cheaper programmers for the commodity tasks. If they cared about human rights, they would not be outsourcing to China or Mexico. Taiwan is just about okay, and that’s why my Apple kit gets made. When keeping a supply of cheap(er) labour and cosying-up to the mainstream can be achieved by signing a motion deploring 90-day immigration bans, they will sign the motion. And when it doesn’t, it won’t. And unlike governments, corporations can spin on a sixpence. It takes five minutes to tell HR they don’t have to bother with LBGQT hires anymore. The Looking Glass Liberals know this, and they know they and their crazy causes are a cost, not a benefit, to most corporations and all taxpayers. But the corporations will be the last ones to turn, unless they are run by a Rupert Murdoch. Someone has to go first.

Until then, we have to live with the screeching of Looking-Glass Liberals and their fellow-travellers being thrown out of their place in society, culture and politics (they never had much of a place in the economy, except as recipients of other people’s taxes). And all the posturing idiots don’t seem to know that someone is taking names.


The ass-kicking will follow.

Molly Mogg's

January 2017 Review

Cold. Did anyone else notice it was cold in January? Even leaving the engine running and the heating on in the car at 06:15 didn’t get the frost of the windscreen. I had a massage to get rid of some tightness around my leg muscles and waist, and while I’m sure it’s co-incidence, I didn’t balance so well for a couple of weeks (!) but am okay now. The Gentle Dentist continues to pay her bills with my teeth, as I got a crown on one of upper teeth.

I read Sarah Bakewell’s At The Existentialist Cafe, Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train, Peter Cooke’s monograph on Gustav Moreau, the Phaidon book on Richard Prince, Jason L Riley’s Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks To Succeed, and Benjamin Markovitz’ You Don’t Have To Live Like This. I started a textbook on Artificial Intelligence as well.

I found a box set of the Antione Doinel films, saw The 400 Blows in December, Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board in January. I got through series Three of Angel, and polished off the last two episodes of Young Montalbano. In the cinema I saw La La Land at the Curzon, and, err, that’s it. I don’t need to see a film about Jackie Kennedy or a depressed man going back to his dysfunctional family in Manchester-by-the-Sea.

I’m clearly being hyper-vigilant, because I can hear even the slightest water drops from the guttering outside my usual bedroom, so I’ve moved into the back bedroom, where I used to sleep many years ago.

I’ve added legs to my training: extensions, curls and presses. Now if only I can lose a few kilos, I won’t feel that going up stairs is so much effort.

And finally I upgraded from my trusty old 3G iPhone 4S. I now have an iPhone SE. 4G and quicker. I’ve been working from home on Fridays, and it does make my weekends so much better. One less day of commuting at my age makes a difference.

Cathy O'Neill on Social Justice Algorithms

Dr Cathy O’Neill, aka mathbabe, a former Algebraic Geometer turned Wall Street Analyst turned Data Scientist / Activist, has a best-seller and has just been appointed a Bloomberg columnist. Her target is the algorithms used in complex decision-making…

Here’s her conclusion:

The irony is that algorithms, typically introduced to make decisions cleaner and more consistent, end up obfuscating important moral aspects and embedding difficult issues of inequality, privacy and justice. As a result, they don’t bypass much hard work. If we as a society want to make the best use of them, we'll have to grapple with the tough questions before applying algorithms -- particularly in an area as sensitive as the lives of our children.

Well, actually the social justice bit is not the most important issue here. First, something about “algorithms”.

Human judgement was first replaced by algorithms in bank lending and insurance. It turned out (apocryphal source) that human bank managers got it right 82% of the time, and the credit algorithms got it right 85% of the time. For even a small unsecured loans book of a billion pounds, generating £250m of new business a year, that three per cent ibuidls over a short time to a steady £7,500,000 a year of extra profit. More than enough to pay for a couple of dozen credit analysts, their computers and some SAS licenses.

Credit algorithms are brutal. No spare money at the end of the month after paying all your bills and feeding the family? Sorry, no loan. A couple of missed credit card, council tax or gas bills? Sorry, no loan either. A CCJ (County Court Judgement) issued to you at your address? Don’t let the door hit you on your way out. Before you mutter something about banks only lending to people who don’t need it, remember that the bank is lending your savings. You don’t want the bank to turn round and tell you your savings are gone because it was loaned to people who needed the money so bad they couldn’t pay it back - do you? OK. That’s clear then.

Most people can’t make their payments on time, or don’t have spare cash at the end of the month, are low-paid rather than irresponsible. People are low-paid because they don’t have the technical skills, education, or professional persona to earn better salaries. They may also lack the neuroses, character and moral defects, dysfunctions and ability to live without much social life that characterise many of the people who do earn in the top decile of salaries. But let’s not go there, and stick with the lack of education and social skills. Those, in the Grand British Narrative of the Left, are class- and culture-biased behaviours, which fortunately cut across race, creed and colour. In the Grand American Narrative of the Good People, it’s all about race, gender, religion, and economic status - because there is no "class system” in America. Cathy O’Neill is one of the Good People, so she’s concerned that the algorithms may have social injustice embedded in them.

Nobody gets too worked up about bank lending decisions because they are based on past financial behaviour and indicators. Those have an obvious relevance to a lending decision. However, what if the bank refused you because it picked up friends on your Facebook feed who were bad risks? Big Data says that in all sorts of ways we tend to act as our friends do, so it might seem relevant to see if we hang out with financial losers. Everyone lurves Big Data because smart and cool and computers. But how is this not the same as the local gossip saying that we shouldn’t lend to someone because she hangs out with losers? Did the banks hire all those PhD’s just to have them behave like the village busybody? (That’s my objection, not Dr O’Neill’s.)

When the decisions are about sentencing, parole, or taking children into the Social Services system, we would like the algorithms to be a lot better than the local gossip. And Good People want the algorithms to be socially-just as well. Here are the points O’Neill makes about a system called Approach to Understanding Risk Assessment (AURA) introduced in Los Angeles, to help identify children at risk.

The conclusions that algorithms draw depend crucially on the choice of target variable. Deaths are too rare to create discernible patterns, so modelers tend to depend on other indicators such as neighbor complaints or hospital records of multiple broken bones, which are much more common and hence easier to use. Yet these could produce very different scores for the same family, making otherwise safe environments look dangerous.

The quality and availability of data also matter. A community where members are reluctant to report child abuse, imagining it as a stigma or as a personal matter, might look much safer than it is. By contrast, a community that is consistently monitored by the state -- say, one whose inhabitants must provide information to obtain government benefits -- might display a lot more “risk factors.”

AURA, for example, uses contextual information like mental health records and age of parents to predict a child's vulnerability. It’s not hard to imagine that such factors are correlated to race and class, meaning that younger, poorer, and minority parents are more likely to get scored as higher-risk than older, richer parents, even if they’re treating their children similarly.

Her concern is that AURA will have too many false negatives, as the sneaky White People With Jobs stay off the radar. The result will be “unfair” treatment of the people who are correctly modelled. There’s a much bigger elephant in the room. AURA is an appalling model, as O’Neill describes:

In a test run on historical data, AURA correctly identified 171 children at the highest risk while giving the highest score to 3,829 relatively safe families. That’s a false positive rate of 95.6 percent. It doesn’t mean that all those families would have lost custody of their kids, but such scrutiny inevitably carries a human price -- one that would probably be unevenly distributed.

In other words, the next prediction from AURA is overwhelmingly likely to be wrong. Why? Do these people not know what they are doing? Well, I have tried using propensity modelling on a rare event, and got the same result: a horrible level of false positives. After checking my work and berating myself for a lack of creativity, I thought the issues over, and realised that this was caused by the rarity of the event and the nature of the facts I had to use. There is no hope of ever getting a decent predictor for an event as rare as child abuse. First, because it’s rare, and second, because it’s kept private, which is O’Neill’s second point in the quote. By contrast, defaulting in bank loans is a lot more common amongst borrowers than you might believe, and happens within a much smaller chunk of the population than “all parents”.

Propensity modelling started in direct marketing, and even models with much worse false positive rates can help improve profits by cutting down the number of mail shots. What’s good for junk mail is not acceptable for families. Propensity models of rare events are wholly unsuitable for sensitive issues around rare events, not because it "obfuscates important moral aspects and embeds difficult issues of inequality, privacy and justice”, but because the model will inevitably be awful.

That doesn’t mean Dr O’Neill needs to find a new line of work. Big Data research exercises are not expensive and in these kinds of cases a negative result can be valuable. Knowing that there is no group of reliable, accurate markers for child abuse can help dispel prejudice and old wives’ tales, challenge professional folk lore and force policy-makers to think about what they can and cannot achieve. Helping children who are found to be abused is and something a caring society should try to do. Claiming that you can prevent child abuse, when you know it can’t be reliably identified or predicted from publicly-availalble facts, is just irresponsible.

And all the Big Data in the world won’t overcome the cowardice that allowed child prostitution rings run by members of minority groups to operate for years, even though the police and social services knew about it. Which doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t do Big Data research, but it does mean that its issues need to be put in context and proportion.

The Telling Strangeness of Brexit

On the 23rd June 2016, the British people asked their Government to get them out of the EU. It was a non-binding referendum. If the Government didn’t like it, they could ignore it. After all, the French did in 2005: their rejection of the European Constiution was made to fade away like the morning mist.

But something strange happened. Everyone in the EU treated the British referendum as binding and final. The Liechtenstein Lush didn't call Cameron and say "You're going to fix this, right?" and go on his way with a smug, knowing grin. Nobody said "We must give the British time to come to understand what they might still do". Junk The Drunk did not behave like a statesman, but like a schoolboy who has finally got rid of the irritating kid in the class. The EU could not wait to be shot of the UK: they wanted Britain to trigger A50 then, in June 2016.

It was the British bien pensants who thought they could get round the referendum. Who thought that Parliament would debate, with the help of right-thinking mavens, the meaning of the vote and whether the British people had voted in thier best interests? Whether it would be the Right Thing to heed the vote and leave the EU, or whether they should set the result aside. It wasn't binding after all. Surely no-one would wrench them from the teat of EU subsidies and Erasmus scholarships?

The EU officials, the 27 heads of state, did no such thing. The British were leaving. End of story. They had it all worked out: they threw our clothes out of the window and changed the locks on the doors. The 28 became the 27 and they took schoolboy glee in excluding Britain from their meetings.

Snowflakes think of Brexit as a divorce, and saw the referendum as Daddy and the kids throwing another ultimatum at Mummy so she would quit drinking for a while. What Mummy EU was supposed to do, after a couple of months, was make a handful of serious concessions to Daddy, so everyone could go back to their dysfunctional family life again. This time Mummy shrugged and told Daddy to take the kids and spilt. That's what's upsetting the snowflakes: Mummy doesn't want them anymore. And maybe never had, for many years.

And it's all Daddy's fault that they found out. Mummy EU was a useful socialist counter-balance to the natural free-market, world-trading, worker-exploiting nature of much of British social and political culture. And now the snowflakes are stuck with life under Daddy: and because they know they don't deserve their grants and subsidies, they are scared Daddy will cut back. He will, but not as much as they think. Hence the wailing of the snowflakes, and their desperate signalling to Mummy EU that they love her still and will she please find a nice comfortable job for them somewhere? But Mummy doesn't love them, and hadn't done for a long time, and it hurts, hurts, hurts to find that out. Nasty Daddy!

Thrown into chaos, the Conservative Party huddled down to find a new leader. Then something strange happened again. Did they choose a clubbable Europhile with close relationships to the bureaucrats in Brussels, who might try to finesse the referendum? No. They chose a woman who had suffered six years at the Home Office being humiliated by the European Courts. They chose a leader who would not be accepted by the 27-Boys Club and who understands in her soul why the UK cannot not go on being over-ruled by a bunch of ideologically-motivated judges in Strasbourg.

Teresa May said "Brexit means Brexit" and to prove it in October the government said they would repeal the European Communities Act 1972. Brexit, it turns out, meant independence and sovereignty. The EU is such a totalitarian entity that everything else follows: if you don't accept its Courts and laws-out-of-thin-air, you can't dodge the 17% tax on shoes designed to protect the Italian shoe industry. Declare legal and political independence and you're back with WTO-based trade deals. Under the Most Favoured Nation rule, any concession the EU gives the UK, has to be given to every other WTO member. So Britain is effectively negotiating trade terms for most of the rest of the world. Those trade terms are the EU's raison d'etre, because it is there to protect the national interests of its members. Perhaps there are going to be more surprises in store: perhaps the EU will use the Brexit negotiations to change rules and tariffs it could not otherwise get past those twenty-seven sets of national interests.

This is a job for professionals who understand what's at stake. The rest of us can only cheer or jeer from the sidelines. In the meantime there will be a lot of posturing. Everyone will want to make it look like They Matter. Whereas they don’t. Not Nicola Sturgeon, not the MP for Lower Cokeatington. Angela Merkel and Victor Orban won’t matter much either. But they will all want to get their shots in. The saddest poseurs of all are the Remainers, deep in denial about the fact that the EU hasn’t wanted them for maybe a decade or more.

Those negotiations will be mostly sound and fury signifying nothing. Face-saving for EU bureaucrats. It’s got to look tough for the UK so that the minnows don’t think they can do it as well. I suspect the British team will play their part in maintaining the charade. I suspect that the professionals know most of the answers already.

When the memoirs are written we will find out that the professionals in the EU wanted the UK out, and the professionals in the UK wanted out of the EU. The catch was that there was no way of doing it that was politically acceptable. So when Nigel Farage turned up - a Euro MP who wanted out of Europe - and when UKIP got 13% of the votes in the 2015 Election, the game became playable. That’s the only explanation that makes sense of all the behaviour that looks so strange under the assumption that the EU and UK wanted to stay together.

Ten Rap Songs

There’s a lot of music I don’t pay much attention to: most nineteenth-century romanticism, Mozart symphonies, dixieland, chord-scale jazz, almost anything on ECM except Keith Jarrett, “avant-garde” jazz and classical music that goes plink-plonk, novelty songs and anything by this year’s, or any year’s, version of FKA Twigs. I’ve never quite managed to dismiss rap, even though I’ve only ever possessed two rap albums (Pain Is Love a while ago and Paid In Full more recently). Rap has moments, I just don’t want very many of them. A little goes a long way. Anyway, here are ten songs that I remember and play on You Tube more than once a year.