KDE 4 comes along and, finally, is about ready for day to day use. Many improvements, some drawbacks, but on balance I’m now ready to use it in anger for real work. The KDE 4 konsole is quite nice. And it even pretends that it can do something similar to quadkonsole. Which it can only very very slightly.

So us KDE 3 quadkonsolers demand that quadkonsole run under KDE 4! And so it does…. read on.

Well, it does with a little jiggery-pokery. Here’s an overview of the steps to follow, performed on an install of Kubuntu 8.10 (updated from 8.04) I’ve not detailed every last URL and command - email me if you get stuck:

• Get the code tarball from Simon’s page (link above)
• Unzip/untar. Running “configure”, though, will fail miserably.
• The configure fails since the KDE 3 development libs are missing.
• apt-get install kdelibs4-dev
• This installs the dev libs for KDE 3 and deinstalls various dev libs for KDE 4
• You should now be able to configure, make, make install no problem.
• quadkonsole will not yet run, though.
• First, undo the damage from above: apt-get install kdelibs5-dev
• This will deinstall kdelibs4-dev and reinstall the stuff you chucked out earlier.
• Now go find a .deb for Ubuntu KDE 3 konsole. e.g. http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/konsole
• Unpack it (using “ar -x packagename.deb”, or even KDE’s own ark tool), then untar the data portion and locate the libkonsolepart.* files in usr/lib/
• Copy them to /usr/lib/kde3/
• ldconfig
• Run quadkonsole

Hopefully there’s enough there to get you going. I’m guessing that the average quadkonsole user is probably not totally afraid of the cli! If nothing else, it might assure you that you can get quadkonsole working under KDE 4 relatively easily.

A while back I wrote a few notes on building a small home server box. Specifically that I had chosen this neat Morex case and this VIA EK Corefusion motherboard.

Here in southern Europe the summer has been in full swing, and it got hotter by the day. A few weekends back I thought I’d do a quick check on temperatures on this system to make sure it wasn’t about to burst into flames.

Logged in and ran ’sensors’. Yikes! CPU at 77 degrees C, and the chassis temp only a couple of degrees lower.

Went over to the box and touched it. Very warm. Listened. No sound of a fan. Now the motherboard is fanless (in the 800MHz version I chose for this very reason) but the Morex case has a single internal fan which I was pretty sure I had wired in to the system/case fan header on the board. Peering in the side with a torch I confirmed that it most definitely wasn’t turning.

Investigation

Power off the box (very inconvenient as it really is a busy little thing) and take it to the workbench. Off with the lid. Poke around. Looks OK. Almost no dust in it at all (which was odd - most of my systems have half a sheep inside them.) Also checked the fan was still wired to the header.

The system runs completely headless, so connect up a spare screen and keyboard and power it on. Notice that the fan spins for the first few seconds of power, then the BIOS cuts it off. So in to the BIOS to see what it thinks is going on. Interesting…

VIA Corefusion BIOS Settings

The BIOS allows temperature monitoring to be simply enabled or disabled for CPU and/or chassis. If either goes over the threshold, the corresponding header is powered. And upon looking I see that the threshold it fixed at… 80 degrees. Wow. That’s flippin’ hot.

Each 80 setting also comes with what they call a “tolerance” number, of 0 up to 3 degrees. What the hell is that?

Anyway, I pack it all up again and set the threshold On and the tolerance to ‘2′. The system then creeps up to about 70 degrees after a few minutes (and we’re talking an ambient temperature of about 28 degrees for starters) And no fan.

Which header? CPU versus chassis temp

Having monitored the system for a while, I see the pattern of CPU temperature versus chassis temperature. Rather reasonable when one thinks about it: CPU temperature of course ramps up and down very quickly indeed in direct response to utilisation. Chassis temperature moves more slowly, both up and down. So you can have a chassis AND CPU temp of (say) 60, then the CPU peaks up to 75 for a couple of minutes. During this time the chassis temp might only pop up a degree or two. And when the CPU utilisation drops to nothing, the CPU temp can even drop below chassis temp for a little while. Of course the longer the CPU stays at a higher temperature, the closer the chassis temperature approximates to it. In the longer term they will be in constant proportion. But in the short to middle term they are not.

Hence the choice to change the single case fan from the chassis header to the CPU header. Let it respond to the CPU threshold being breached rather than the chassis temperature.

So what’s wrong? Nothing at all

System in the high 70’s (and that’s Celsius, note) and no fan? BIOS appears to only trigger at 80? And guess what? That’s absolutely right! If I cranked up the CPU to 82 degrees (the fixed threshold of 80 plus the mystical “tolerance value” which I set at 2) the fan kicks in. For the first time in its life. And it keeps spinning until we drop to the chilly depths of 77 degrees.

So we now know two things: the mystery “tolerance” value is actually the hysteresis offset, to stop the fan turning on and off rapidly when the threshold is breached.

The other thing we learn is that these VIA boards are as tough as old boots. Hot, very very hot, old boots. This fanless motherboard simply does not require cooling until we hit at least 80 degrees C. Which is amazing. And a tribute to the designers of this stuff. It’s robust beyond belief. I love it.

The Basel accord the reviewer is referring to is the Basel II agreement of 2004. [EDIT: I stand corrected. It's Basel I] The overall purpose of this agreement was to define a framework allowing regulation of capital reserves held by banks to cover financial and operational risks. The so-called “third pillar” of Basel II related to how much banks must disclose to the markets, based upon their overall exposure to risk. A slightly more down to earth description of this is that bank must exercise more accurate pricing for risk, or in other words raise their prices for high risk lending. Which seems sensible as far as it goes.

In summary, Basel II encouraged (or, indirectly, forced) banks to become more price-sensitive to credit risk. No more, no less. Yet our reviewer tell us that this “pushed” banks into “securitising sub-prime mortgages”.

Securitising?

Well let’s just hold off a moment and be sure we understand the deliberately unhelpful terminology here: “securitising”. The Economist is normally a paragon of clarity and unnecessary jargon, so it’s rather surprising that they slip this in without any help to the reader. Securitisation is a very complex, large subject, and I do not pretend to understand every last subtle nuance. But I do know enough to understand the fundamental concepts. In the context of mortgage lending, securitisation is all about raising funds by selling risk. Nothing wrong with that, in principle. However another key element of securitisation is, as the banks would have it, to more fairly price the underlying risk they are selling. That’s the idea. But one man’s fair price is another’s unfair price - and clever securitisation of risk can, in reality, be used as vehicle to hide risk. In some forms of securitisation this technique is explicit: repricing “traditional” credit risk by, for example, factoring in future cash flows. But the line between unavoidable complexity and intentional obfuscation is very very fine indeed, and banks knowingly exploit this by securitising based upon inexact, by definition, valuations.

But let’s veer back to the original gripe: the securitisation of sub-prime mortgages. Well whatever your view of the art (I hesitate to call it science) of securitisation of mortgages, subprime or otherwise, what is new about it? In the US it started in the early 1970’s, and galloped along thereafter pretty successfully. So what? It’s not new and it has, until recently, been at least adequately successful.

The whole mention of securitisation is a nonsense: what the reviewer seems to mean is that Basel II pushed banks into the sub-prime mortgage market, securitised or otherwise. So just how DO you “push” a bank? Well, let’s not be willfully dumb: what he’s alluding to is that since Basel II required banks to be more price-sensitive to risk in general, they could now choose to lend to higher risk customers than before, albeit with a correspondingly appropriate (i.e. higher) price. Note that little word: “could”. It’s important. I could sell my car for 1 Euro. I’d be a fool, but I could. I could pay 100 Euros for a loaf of bread. But who would? None but a fool.

The whole sub-prime (and don’t you just LOVE that word. Sub-prime. So much nicer than “insanely high risk”, dontcha think?) is a joke. The pricing of sub-prime mortgages was so incompetent it boggles the mind: never mind about the creditor’s ability to pay out of future income, just factor in the annual 10% property price increase (whaddya mean that might not always happen? It has for years now!) and, hey presto, the risk has just about gone. So twiddle the risk calculations around a bit and sell on the risk to some punter at the other end of the food chain. Loadsamoney. Take on stupid risk, then pass it on. Brilliant.

“We’re all to blame”

Of course at this point someone will pipe up about others who are “equally” to blame. Not least the person who borrowed the money in the first place and, less commonly, the institution (and, trickling down, ultimately, the “small people”) who chose to carry the risk. Someone was dumb enough to take out a sub-prime mortgage, and some other person (or institution) was dumb enough to buy the risk at too low a price. Surely they are culpable, or at least equally so, as the bank in the middle?

One end of the chain

There was a time when people trusted banks as advisers, rather than seeing them as pure profit-centered machines, intent on success at any cost. That view might have been rather naive, of course, but if only because banks were indeed more careful about taking on risk they did have a reciprocal benefit of preventing misguided individuals from taking on stupid financial risks themselves. People taking on high-risk mortgages (I’m fed up with the ’sub-prime’ euphemism) are very often the poorest, less-educated sections of society and they are, frankly, being exploited. Yes, that a subjective judgment, but it’s a pretty clear case. Capitalism is not unfettered - we have regulations and laws to prevent the exploitation of individuals. Capitalism itself does not require them, but what we might recognise as a civilised society most certainly does. As it pertains to how they interact with individuals, many (most?) types of institutions are regulated to ensure some sort of balance in the transaction. Banks used to be the same. But increasingly they side-step (who lets them… another big question, but let’s limit things a bit for practical purposes) such limits on their behaviour in order to pursue profit.

And the other end

So while we have banks selling ridiculous mortgages to foolish people, at the other end of the financial chain we have institutions merrily gobbling up these subsequently-securitised gambles as fast as they can lay their slobbering chops on them. And who are these institutions? Some shadowy group? Some group of companies lurking in the background? Why no, they are… banks. Very often the same banks who are selling them. It’s a wonderful merry-go-round, with banks ever more incestuously gearing up their exposure to increasingly high risk. But in the tradition of the Emperor’s New Clothes, almost no one will stand up and put a stop to it. You cannot break the chain - to even utter the thought that the whole system might be in peril would be to put it at risk. Waffle waffle by me, and the word I’m really struggling for suddenly comes to mind: it’s a bubble. A classic, text-book bubble. Tulips one century, crap mortgages in another.

So who cares?

I do.

I care about the real people, with real children and real lives who will be shattered by losing their homes. Their ignorance has been ruthlessly exploited and they will pay a fierce price.

I care about the governments and financial regulators who have stood by and allowed this to happen, totally complicit in the “never mind the obvious longer term, for now things are simply fantastic!” elective blindness. They have failed us.

I care about the untold billions of my taxes which will go to bailing out (that’s a market term for “saving those who should not be saved”) the banks concerned, yet will rarely actually be used to save the evicted family out on the street. It will instead be used to pump new “profit” into these incompetent institutions.

I care about the fact that voters are too apathetic to rise up and throw from government those who allow this to continue.

Just how bad does it have to get before people demand change?

Pros

• DirectX-10. Well, it’s a “pro” of sorts. DirectX-10 offers some pretty marginal graphics improvements over DirectX-9 and, critically, requires a very recent graphics card. And even given all that, very few games yet support its use anyway. So more of a theoretical “pro” than a real one, at least for me.
• Aero GUI. The Vista GUI is indeed prettier than bog-standard XP. Kinda curvier, more translucent, more, dare one say it, Apple Mac-like? Nice to have, but not really life-changing.
• Security. Vista’s security improvements are much promoted by its makers, but really not up to much. To a great extent it’s a question of turning on stuff which by default was off in XP. And then, of course, making the mistake of turning it all up too much… After a few weeks of blindly clicking “Yes” to some needless “security check” you get so pissed off you turn it all off anyway.

Cons

• Memory hog. Yes, I KNOW memory is incredibly cheap these days. But why, once I simply boot Vista and have all the “essentials” up and running, do I need TWICE as much memory as XP ever required? It’s just ridiculous. I would be fine if it needed more memory due to the amazing whizz-bang improvements it brought me, but it doesn’t do that.
• CPU hog. OK, not by much, but you do feel the machine is less snappy and responsive under Vista.
  
• Network. Oh my, this is a pile of crap. Vista networking is a huge step backwards. I mean how difficult should it be to open a shared folder from another PC or a server? Under XP it bounces up immediately. Same folder under Vista, maybe 10 seconds to open.
  
• Network. Again. When my remote, shared folder does finally open, just because it contains maybe 30 or so applications (installers, actually) does Vista REALLY need another couple of MINUTES to display them all?
• Network. Yup, again. PPTP VPN connection. When I’m connected I want a little flashing icon thingy on my toolbar, right? Just like I’ve had for years with XP. So where is it Microsoft?
• Network. Yawn. WebDAV. Widely used, and well-integrated within Windows XP. So why has it completely disappeared from Vista? Not changed, or hidden a bit. Completely GONE.
• Boot time. I’m putting this as a ‘con’, as Microsoft has made so much of the fast boot-time of Vista. What a bunch of liars. The time taken for the desktop itself to display is nothing special, but then the lying little bastards hide all the ongoing stuff in the background. Minute after minute of displayed-but-unusable desktop. Time to display desktop: acceptable. Time to display *usable* desktop: friggin’ ages.
• Still, even after SP1 for Vista, significant numbers of drivers are still not officially Vista-compatible. Luckily most “old” drivers work anyway.

I’m making no pretence that this is a complete list of pros and cons. It’s just some of the things that struck me after using Vista for a while. The intriguing thing about Vista is just how backwards it is. I know it’s fashionable to knock Vista as being some truly awful, unusably bad operating system. It’s not. However when you take in to account the hundreds of man years that Microsoft put in to developing it you can’t help but ask “Why?” Take XP and pump up the security a bit (which has happened along the way anyway with the three service packs) and drop a pretty face on it and you’ve got…. Vista. Well, Vista without the mucked up Windows Networking and resource hogging. It really is just a total non-event.

Microsoft have some smart people working for them. I hope they are ashamed of Vista. I would be.

The three Ubuntu systems in my life were headed for an upgrade! First off a Kubuntu laptop I use for work. Fairly vanilla configuration. Upgrade took a while due to a *lot* of downloads, but it went well and the upgraded system worked fine. [EDIT: See below - Later saw this upgrade was bad too...]

Unfortunately this encouraged me to try two others, which both went very badly…

A Kubuntu workstation at home: Upgrade seemed to complete well. However at the time of writing the new system is completely and utterly unbootable. The new kernel cannot even see the root disk. This is a really poor show. Luckily I can still, via grub, boot off the old kernel and it works fine. But to upgrade a machine and make it unbootable…. well, that smacks rather of Microsoft. Really bad, only very slightly ameliorated by the fact that they leave the old kernel in place for recovery (which makes one wonder whether they expect this sort of thing!)

The other system to suffer was a Ubuntu server installation. For a server it was pretty straightforward: web-services, MySQL, etc and some Samba (Windows) file-sharing. Quietly and without any sort of warning, the Ubuntu server upgrade rips out the working SMB-fs installations and replaces it with CIFS. Yes, I *know* smbfs has been deprecated for a while, but you do NOT silently remove software and replace it with something that is NOT a 100% drop-in replacement. Sure, CIFS is similar. Very. But it ain’t damn well identical. I know what I’m doing yet I had to spend a good hour faffing around with CIFS mount options to restore the server to its prior working state.

I checked out the release notes - not a word about ripping my Samba installation to shreds. I checked the server-edition specific upgrade guide. Nah. Nothing.

Note to Ubuntu people: you should NOT do that without appropriate documenting and hence warning people.

Ubuntu, on a clean install, is a fab distro. But the upgrade process, at least this time around, is very poor indeed.

[EDIT: From the intro, shortly after posting this I found, on the apprently successfully upgraded Kubuntu laptop, that if I tried to start KDE's System Setting (kind-of like Windows' Control Panel) it simply crashes, with no meaningful error message. This, folks, is why Linux, much as I love it, is not going to take over the desktop from Windows just yet... 3 machines, 3 bad upgrades, each bad in a different way, but resulting in an unusable machine]

And the item they wish to censor? GET IT HERE!!!!!!

EDIT: And here is Dan’s analysis of the document.

First things first: I LIKE KDE. I like it a lot, and have done for years. I use it every day (literally) and always look forward to new versions. They just get better and better.

KDE 4 was finally released a few days ago, and I installed the Kubuntu version of it to take it for a spin.

First impressions? It’s pretty. After oooing and aahing at the new GUI for a few seconds I decide to stick with it. All I have to do is make a few customisations to ensure it’s how I like it, and I’ll be all set.

To replicate my existing (3.5) KDE environment I only need to do the following:

• remove any photo from the desktop background (I like it a plain colour)
• move the taskbar from the default position at the bottom of the screen to the right-hand side.
• check a screensaver is defined.

Can I do any of these things? Nope. Not a chance.

I’m really sorry to have to say this, but the KDE people have made an incredibly stupid decision to release this as a finished product. It isn’t. In fact in light of the items I found missing / not working within about 2 minutes of starting it it’s not even beta standard. It’s an early alpha.

The developers have nothing to be ashamed of. KDE 4 shows huge promise. However the KDE management should take a long hard look at the damage this release could do to KDE’s previously well-deserved reputation.

Disappointed. Very disappointed.

What is a home server?

Like many homes these days we have various PCs and client devices scattered around the house, all networked back to a central point and, if required, via that central point to each other. What sits at the centre? Internet access, a fat hard disk for backup of workstations’ data and a couple of server-related functions. The server-side of things has several requirements:

• allow users to back up to a central location
• allow users to access shared media (e.g. photos)
• allow a media client (e.g. Pinnacle ShowCenter 1000) to access shared media (e.g. photos, audio and video files)
• act as a Bit Torrent client (to allow the BitTorrent functionality to sit on a server rather than on workstations)

Finally, the device also acts as a firewall. While most ADSL modem-cum-routers can themselves provide this functionality these days (and my LiveBox is no exception) the main reason for doing this is to allow QoS (Quality of Service) to be applied to BitTorrent streams so that interactive use of the Internet (e.g. web-browsing) is unaffected (by making sure BitTorrent traffic is of lower priority than other traffic).

My starting point

Today I have an old PC sitting there doing all of this. It was cheap (almost free, in so far as it was built from old components lying around the place) and works OKish. Apart from recent unexplained ‘glitches’ (total system hang - no errors logged) which smell of hardware issues looming, it works well. But it’s large and noisy. Sure, I could buy a slightly smaller case, change/reduce fans and so forth. But that’s no fun. Let’s replace the whole thing with something really small and neat. Hence this project.

I’ll split the project in to two parts: building the hardware and then installing and configuring the software.

Hardware requirements

What are my key requirements for the hardware?

• Compact (something not too much bigger than, say, a typical DVD player - and preferably somewhat smaller)
• Quiet
• Headless (i.e. no screen or keyboard attached, although they must be possible for setting up and diagnostics)
• Adequate performance for firewall and media-serving functions.

Software requirements

What are my key requirements for the software?

• Firewall
• Media server
• BitTorrent client
• Remotely manageable
• Filesharing to Windows or Linux
• Free (in every sense of the word… )

Software choices

Since I already have a box doing just this, let me summarise the software environment which will be more or less replicated on the new device:

• Ubuntu 7.10 - server edition (A wonderful Linux distribution)
• Firewall: Ubuntu, like almost any Linux distro, come with iptables. However using this “raw” is hard work! So we will make use of Shorewall and Webmin to layer on top of it to make life easy and friendly.
• Media server: the very wonderful MTPCenter 2.0 is used.
• BitTorrent: using torrentflux-b4rt means that users can acccess the BitTorrent system from any PC via a web-browser. It works very well.
• Remotely manageable: internally (i.e. within the house) we make use of Webmin. And for external ssh access we’ll set up a port-knocking daemon to make sure we’re really secure (yeah, I know the arguments against it - I work in security…).
• Filesharing: built-in to Ubuntu, and we’ll allow Webmin to administer it.
• Both the media server and the torrrentflux software require a “LAMP” environment (Linux - Apache - MySQL - PHP) Despite the fact that the L, A and M bits can actually be provided by different packages, we’re going to go with the standard set. They are anyway installed by default with Ubuntu server edition.

Hardware - more detail

So now we move back to the hardware. Some slightly more detailed requirements:

• Totally fanless would be ideal, but I’m prepared to compromise. I do want a fanless motherboard (i.e. no CPU fan) but will tolerate a single not-too-small fan venting the case itself.
• Network. 10/100 Ethernet will do (rather than 10/100/1000) as much of the client-connectivity is anyway wireless (802.11g) But a key requirement, since we’re going to be acting as a router/firewall is that we have two network interfaces.
• How much CPU does it need? Very hard to actually quantify this, but experience says “Not much” A box such as this is almost entirely I/O limited, by network and, to a lesser extent, disk. Almost all that the CPU will do here is shift data in and out, with little manipulation.
• Memory. One could actually run all of this in very little memory indeed. 64MB would work, but frankly these days why fret? It’s so cheap let’s stuff 512MB in there. That way we also have a nice buffer against getting bogged down occasionally, as we can use the RAM for caching. If I’d already got a spare 256MB stick of DDR400 (see later) I’d have gone with that. It really isn’t too critical.
• Disk. I’m actually going to go with a slightly smaller disk than others might. Since I already have NAS (network attached storage) available for bulk storage, I’ll find 80GB massively more than enough. But one could just as easily pop something bigger in there. It’s really down to personal need.
• Optical disk. Not bothering - I have no need for one. But one important caveat: for the initial build we will need one, albeit temporarily.
• Form-factor: given the requirements above, mini-ITX seems the way to go. Smaller than that and it all gets harder to spec, particularly given the dual Ethernet requirement.

Components selected

So finally we move on to the actual hardware ordered. The build list is:

• VIA EPIA EK 8000EG 800MHz Fanless Dual LAN Motherboard
• Black Morex 3688 Mini-ITX Case
• 512MB DDR400 DIMM - EPIA SP/ML/M/MII/EK Compatible
• WD Scorpio 80GB 2.5in SATA 8GB Cache HDD
• SATA Data and Power Cable

The motherboard has heaps of features we won’t be making use of, but that’s always the way - these things come loaded with the kitchen sink. No matter. The case choice is very subjective. I liked the look of it. Disk: this model has better performance than many 2.5in disks.

All of this was ordered from mini-itx.com - they are good. UK-based, but seem to ship anywhere. Prices are OK, they have an excellent selection and when they say “In stock” they seem to be telling the truth - unlike some other suppliers I could mention. Also, technically they seem to know what they are talking about. I have no affiliation to them at all - I’m just happy to recommend them.

Building the hardware and installing the software will now cover the next steps! Read on…

And how do they measure the value of “luck”?

Apparently the technique is, for a given town:

“based on the number of top prize-winning entries as a proportion of its adult population.”

Which might, as first glance, seem reasonable - or at least reasonable given the stupidity of trying to measure “luck” in the first place. Anyone with a passing knowledge of statistics will observe that even if you could measure something called “lotto luck”, this would not be a valid way to do it. A more sane measure would be to base it upon the number of top-winning tickets as a proportion of tickets bought in a given town. Anyway, let’s not get statistically pedantic, as the concept of measuring luck is daft anyway…

What stands out much more starkly from these statistics, yet is not mentioned at all in the report, is the nature of the “Top” list of locations thereby calculated. From the article:

• Medway Towns
• Ilford
• Romford
• Newcastle-upon-Tyne
• Dartford
• Bradford
• Teesside
• Sunderland
• Hull
• Perth

What is outstanding about the list? Well, since we know that luck has nothing to do with it, areas with the highest ratio of winning tickets to population can be assumed to also have the highest ratio of tickets, winning or not, to population. Or, in other words, this list represents the areas where people buy the most lotto tickets, per head of population.

That being so it is notable that this list covers area that are “deprived”. “Deprived” is a politically-correct term meaning many things these days, but official government measures of (economic) deprivation include such things as:

• Child benefits claimants
• County Court judgements for debt
• Income support claimants
• Unemployment claimants
• … and so on

Deprived areas would once have been called simply “poor” but one has to avoid that word these days, since it implies there’s no one to blame. Deprived is so much better at implying that someone or something has made these areas this way. Anyway, back to matters in hand.

My suspicion is that the areas where people buy most lottery tickets have a high proportion of uneducated, poor people, at least by comparison with the rest of the country.

Before seeing if this is so, why would I even suspect this? Basically because I believe the long-touted theory that a national lottery is a stealth tax on poor, less educated people. They simultaneously are more likely to lack the ability to understand how hopeless their chances of winning the jackpot really are, while more likely buying greater numbers of tickets in an attempt to reverse their financial situation. It’s not at all a new concept. But is there evidence for it?

But is it true?

So I set off to the UK Government’s own statistics web-site to see if there was any basis for my belief. Now as one moderately well-versed in the art of deception-by-statistics let me say that the range of statistics on that site would probably, if quoted selectively, permit one to prove just about anything you would choose. I really am trying to be honest here, and pick those which I genuinely think represent meaningful measures in the context of my inquiry.

A key measure of “poorness” is the proportion of people of working age who claim some sort of benefit from the state, ranging from unemployment benefit to income support. The statistical measures of education sets out to measure just that: education. We’re not measuring intelligence - no one says that the people in certain areas are less intelligent than those in others. I’m saying they are less educated (which is itself probably largely a consequence of the “deprivation”)

I chose two measures - while one relates to 15 year old school pupils and the other to those a couple of years older, they measure somewhat different groups: the 15 year-olds were required to attend school - How well do they do? The others opted to remain at school - How did they do?

The measures for Perth were unavailable to me. And the last line, “National”, is the national average for all-England.

These measures suggest that my feeling may well be correct: these areas are significantly poorer than average and less well educated than average. It’s also worth noting that the apparent marginally “better” areas in the south of the country are rather flattered by being compared on a national scale. In fact if Romford, Ilford and Medway are compared not with the whole country but with their peer towns in the southern region they are also very much below average.

Conclusion

My suspicions are reinforced by this causal trawl through the figures - poorer and less educated people are disproportionately mugged by the lottery dream.