The Puritan Gift - the rise and the role of Wall Street, MBA's and Accountants in the post war decline and export of US manufacturing industy

THE PURITAN GIFT Triumph, Collapse and Revival of an American Dream by Kenneth Hopper & William Hopper I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2007 Website Amazon

THE PURITAN GIFT traces the origins and characteristics of an American managerial culture which, over the course of three centuries, turned a handful of small colonies into the greatest economic and political power on earth. It argues that the energy, social mobility, competitiveness and capacity for innovation, all of which lie at the heart of that culture, have their origins in the discipline and ethos of America’s first wave of European immigrants: the Puritans.

Essential reading for the fall and rise of post WWII US manufacturing industry the malign rise of Management Schools and their graduates and the role of accountnats and the relentless demnds for increased quaterly returns being reported to support an ever rising share price and ultimately the reliance not on shareholders funds but funds from banks.

On November 4, 2008, Peter Day of BBC Global Business interviewed Kenneth and William about THE PURITAN GIFT. Visit Day's Global Business page and click on "Listen (23 mins)".

Short video describing the book


The cavity magnetron was invented in November 1939 by two British scientists, Drs Randall and Boot, working at Birmingham (UK) University under Professor Mark Oliphant. There was a need then for shorter-wavelength, higher-frequency oscillators for more accurate radar detection of planes, U-boats, etc, at frequencies that existing glass-valve oscillators couldn't generate. Randall and Boot (aged 22 at the time) came up with the idea of a "cavity magnetron" that produced high-power centimetric radar.

Early in 1940 Sir Henry Tizard suggested to Winston Churchill that Britain should disclose its scientific secrets on military matters to the USA and Canada in exchange for desperately needed assistance in technology and production. Tizard was Rector of the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London and had been chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence since its formation in 1935; this committee had been largely responsible for starting and promoting the work on radar in the UK. In 1939 Tizard was the chief scientific advisor to the Air Ministry and was a central figure in organizing science for the British war effort. The proposal for an exchange of information with the USA and Canada was the subject of intense debate after Churchill became prime minister in May 1940. The resulting maneuvers, both bureau-cratic and political, at this highly critical time just after the fall of France now appear quite extraordinarily short sighted. This sorry situation is well described in Zimmerman’s book Top Secret Exchange.

Churchill gave final approval on August 9th for a mission headed by Tizard to go to Canada and the USA.

James P. Baxter, the official U.S. historian of scientific developments in WW II, said of the first cavity magnetron brought from the UK to North America :

When the members of the Tizard Mission brought one toAmerica in 1940, they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores. It sparked the whole development of microwave radar and constituted the most important item in reverse Lend-Lease.

The Hoppers give this as an example of the skills of US industry in adopting ideas and revving up manufacturing ...The outstanding performance of the magnetron disclosed by the Tizard Mission in September 1940 persuaded the Americans of the need for a major laboratory to develop microwave radar. The result was the immediate establishment of the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA., which became the major US radar laboratory.

So successful was the programme at the Radiation Laboratory that the first experimental airborne 10cm radar was tested in a Douglas B18, with Bowen on board, on 27 March 1941, only seven months after the Tizard Mission had arrived in the USA. Their first 10cm AI (SCR720), accompanied by Bowen, was demonstrated in the UK in August 1941 and later became known as AI Mk IX.

In the course of the next year the Radiation Laboratory grew in size and soon became the most important and productive radar laboratory in the USA; by the end of the war the staff numbered about 4,000.

The Tizard Mission, was highly successful. It drew the attention of the Americans to the importance of radar as a weapon of war, introduced them to airborne radar, accelerated the development of centimetre-wave radar by giving them the cavity magnetron and helped them to set up the highly successful Radiation Laboratory.

Coins in his pocket

The major problem the UK had in ming their cavity magnetrons was in making the multiple chambered device central to the valve - it was for this reason that help was sought from the US and Canadian allies. An engineer drafted in to the meetings, had a habit of shuffling coins from his pocket from one hand to the other.

He realised that carefully designed and engineered slices woul enable rapid and precise fabrication. A secret they failed to share initially with their allies.


The Germans first discovered the multi-cavity magnetron on February 2nd, 1943, when
a British Pathfinder bomber on a raid on Cologne was shot down near Rotterdam, the plane containing an H2S airborne radar using a 10 cm wavelength magnetron (type CV 76).

The explosive charge, designed to destroy the radar set when the plane crashed, failed to explode.

The Germans were astonished at this microwave radar and very rapidly made Chinese style copies of the magnetron (even as far as copying the type number). Later in 1944
an H2X radar was captured from a crashed American bomber and the 3 cm wavelength magnetron was copied and was in production by early 1945.

Ending the Olympics - Another Chinese spectacular ? Fireworks in Space ?

As a wonderful £2.4 Mn finale to the Peking Olympics David Beckham is due to appear on top of a London Routemaster and kick a football into the crowd. Wow!

What spectacular have the Chinese in store for us ?

Will their space program launch something to remind the world that their efforts in space are moving ahead lickety splick ?

Yang Liwei, the first astronaut of the manned spacecraft Shenzhou V, was the first torchbearer in Beijing, and the opening ceremony torch was lit by Li Ning after his 'run in-space'.

Could it be Yinghuo-1 their first Mars orbital explorer ?

Could it be a major Shenzhou mission, with multiple crew members for a space walk spectacular , launched on the Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center ?

Maybe the launch of the 2 tonne Solar space telescope, which it is claimed will provide 3 years worth of results that exceed anything so far achieved by SOHO, the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory project between NASA and ESA.

Surely after their first robotic Moon mission they won't be ready for a manned moon shot will they ? Will they ?

Oyster - a lesson in obsolesence - a cracked technology and money will leak away through the cracks

STOP PRESS Saturday 26th July Transport for London apology Transys Links provided by Watching them watching us of problems agains caused for users on Friday 25th, this was blamed on " incorrect data tables being sent out by our contractor" , whatever that means.

The Epson HX-20 (called the HC-20 in Japan),was the world's first hand held computer. Weighing in at 1.6 KG , th size of an A4 sheet , it provided a small LCD sc reen of 4 lines of 20 characters,a full qwerty keyboard and nNiCad batteries. It had twin Hitachi 6301 @ 0.614MHz with RAM expandable to 32k and Microsoft Basic in ROM, running CPM. It was introduced in mid 1982 they sold over 1/4 million and cost then about £900 Sterling.

Lord Patel, in his days as a software developer used handy ground breaking machine for remote data collection, collecting shop floor data for batch processing.

2 years later Psion, introduced the The Psion Organiser I model, launched in 1984, it was, like the Epson based on an 8-bit Hitachi 6301-family processor, with 4K of ROM and 2K of battery-backed RAM, and had a single-row monochrome LCD screen - this was expanded into the Organiser II in 1986 which had a rudimentary operating system, POPL (the Psion Organiser Programming Language). They cost about £250 sterling but according to sales literature at above link sold for US$199 say £150 then.

These were lighter , truly hand held devices but due to the inability to develop an RS 232 interface Lord Patel gave up developing systems using them - despite Marks & Spencer using them for price Look Ups (PLU's) in stores held on EPROM. Psion later got their act together and produced a good range of machines bit they were never intended for rugged use.

In 1984 a new company (preceded by GR Electronics which then became Oyster Terminals and then Oyster Termiflex ) Oyster introduced the RT80 hand held computer.This was a bright yellow, ruggedised to MILspec, with a 64 line x 30 charcater display, a DIN45 D15pin male serial connector which was crap qiality for attaching a bar code reader. It had an 8086 chipset ran a modified Microsoft DOS with a limited Microsoft CBASIC.

A cradle provided both a serial link to the PC network and charged the batteries - which proved to be a major failing because they suffered an "image" problem and should be run down untl re-charged, so fater downloading data they should have been removed from the cradle , nobody did and the batteries could not be fully re-charged.

Other than that they were fabulous bits of kit. The problem was that Mr Gates produced Windows with a Graphic User Interface and Oyster didn't bother upgrading, so further developments had to wait for palm devices, from Compaq and Hewlett Packard.

All this to show how remorseless and rapidly changing technology makes items obsolete.

Oyster have gone the way of all flesh and have nothing to do with swipe cards for London Transport.

1. Tuesday 15th July 2008
"Thousands of London commuters found their prepaid Oyster didn't work, after a computer system crash disabled card readers across London.

The computer system went down for at least five hours on Saturday morning until around 9.30am. Card readers across the buses, London Underground and trains such as Docklands Light Railway were not accepting Oyster cards for parts of the day." See also BBC report

2. The Oyster card was first issued to the public in July 2003. By March 2007 over 10 million Oyster cards had been issued,and more than 80% of all journeys on services run by Transport for London used the Oyster card. Plans have been afoot to extend their use for small payments by users at shops for low price items, confectionary, drinks, newspapers etc.,

TranSys is a consortium of Cubic, EDS, Fujitsu and WS Atkins who developed the Oyster ( a name obtained at great expense by Saatchi & Saatchi) which was introduced in July 2003. It is based on NXP/Philips' MIFARE standard 1k chips provided by G&D and SchlumbergerSema and the card is a contactless radio transmitter / receiver."Our MIFARE contactless smart card ICs provide the most advanced combination of security and convenience for contactless interfacing in accordance with the ISO 14443A interface standard. "

Subway RFID cards like the Parisian Navigo Pass, the London Oyster Card the Tokyo Suica card and Boston's CharlieCard use the same technology. OECD Policy Guidance - A Focus on Information SEcurity and Privacy Applications, Impacts and Country Initiatives June 2008 is a worthwhile report to read on RFID uses which provide user identity, which has ramifications way beyond paying for a tube ticket...see especially "invisibility of data".

About ten million Mifare smartcards , used for a vraiety of purposes from payment to controlled access to buildings are sold in Britain each year,

Police regularly use information on the adult Oyster card system to get details about passenger movements. BBC London has learned that in the past year they made at least 3,000 requests for information. A young person with criminal convictions, warnings, reprimands and other sanctions committed on the public transport network could have the right to free travel withdrawn, the spokesman said.

"In order to enforce these specific cases, personal information is requested by the Metropolitan Police Service, City of London Police Service and British Transport Police," .

The Information Commissioner's Office has criticised Transport for London for "collecting data without a clear purpose" for the children's photocard. From June Transport for London (TfL) made it mandatory for children aged between 11 and 18 to carry an Oyster photocard in order to gain free travel.

The current balance and ticket data held electronically on the card rather than in the central database and the value held is "loaded" at a preselected barrier or validator.

It is possible to set up automatic direct debit transactions so that when the balance falls below (say) £5 another £20 is written to the card.

The daily transaction data is held and updates the main system overnight - it would be impossible to provide (with current technology and costs) a real time validation in use as it would lead to huge delays.

3. March 10th, 2008 - NXP Semiconductors, the independent company founded by Philips, today announced MIFARE Plus, a revolutionary contactless smart card IC that offers breakthrough security and performance for the cost-sensitive automated fare collection (AFC) and access control markets.

Security is at the heart of MIFARE Plus, which is the only smart card IC of its class to offer strong AES encryption for authentication, integrity and confidentiality, based on a 128-bit key length. MIFARE Plus chips comprise a number of additional security features which, when used optimally in the infrastructure, provide for a system that prevents individuals from being identified and tracked by others. This is entirely related to this bit of prior news...

4. Chip manufacturer NXP, formerly the semiconductor division of Philips and well-known for its Mifare RFID chips, has filed suit against a group of researchers at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Holland. According to information provided by the company, the suit is intended to prevent the scientists from their planned October publication of the results of their research on the poor security of the Mifare Classic chip, a security product that has been sold billions of times over around the world....

"The ball was set rolling when a group of researchers in the Chaos Computer Club scene presented the results of their hardware analysis of the Mifare Classic chip at the 24C3 hacker conference last December(2007). That made public for the first time the functional principle of the secret Crypto1 encryption key, as well as various attacks against glaring vulnerabilities in the encryption and the random number generator. The access key for a card can be cracked within minutes on a PC and, with the help of special hardware, within seconds."

German geek magazine C't published an article by Karsten Nohl , Jan Krissler, Henryk Plötz entitled rather nciely, "Chiptease" Verschlüsselung eines führenden Bezahlkartensystems geknackt - Report,RFID-Hack,RFID, Funkchip, Mobilfunk, NXP, Philips, Mifare, Mifare Classic, Pseudozufallszahlengenerator, PRNG, Crypto1, Stromchiffre, Funkchip, Rainbow-Tabelle, Rainbow Table,c't 8/08, Seite 80 which was in April . They remove the coating and reverse-engineered the cryptographic algorithm.

The security of Mifare cards relies on secret keys with a key length of 48 bits. Knowing the details of the cipher would permit anyone to try all possible keys in a matter of days.

In mid April, researchers of the University College London and the University of Virginia reported that they were also able to recover the algorithm. The researchers recovered the full 48-bit key in 200 seconds on a single PC.

5. Radboud University researcher Wouter Teepe presented evidence on the crack to the Dutch parliament, which has already delayed installation of a €1bn automated payment transport system based on the same core technology. Known as the OV-chipkaart, it is to replace paper tickets on all trams, buses, and trains and is already undergoing trials in Rotterdam. The development of the card, , has been beset with problems. It has also halted use of the Mifare chip for access control of Government buildings.

Designed in the 1990s before processors of that size could handle strong encryption, Mifare has suffered at least three published cracks, according to security experts who have urged Transport for London (TfL) to upgrade the system.

When NXP raised an injunction in June to prevent publication of the architecture of the chip which could lead informed people to hack the RFID cards such as the Oyster "Killing the messenger does not solve the problem," Jacobs said. "This paper serves the interest of our society. The problems are real and should be addressed on the basis of sound and well-informed judgment."

6. A Dutch judge has ruled today that researchers Professor Bart Jacobs and colleagues from Radboud University in Nijmegen can publish details of how to crack the Oyster card (and others in use or under development) used on London’s public transport system. The Judge overturned the injunction sought by NXP , citing freedom of expression laws. "(The) damage to NXP is not the result of the publication of the article, but of the production and sale of a chip that appears to have shortcomings," the court said.

Transport for London says it'll be able to ban hacked cards within 24 hours. Ho.Ho.Ho.

In case anyone thinks this is unusual see PIN Entry Device (PED) vulnerabilities
by Saar Drimer, Steven J. Murdoch and Ross Anderson Cambridge University , Computer LaboratorySecurity Group.

"In Chip & PIN card transactions, customers insert their card and enter their PIN into a PIN Entry Device (PED). We have demonstrated that two popular PEDs, the Ingenico i3300 and Dione Xtreme, fail to adequately protect card details and PINs. Fraudsters, with basic technical skills, can record this information and create fake cards which may be used to withdraw cash from ATMs abroad, and even some in the UK. These failures are despite the terminals being certified secure under the Visa approval scheme, and in the case of the Ingenico, the Common Criteria system. Our results expose significant failings in the entire evaluation and certification process. "

The weaknesses were shown on Newsnight BBC2, 26 February 2008. A video of the segment is also available (alternate version: part 1 and part 2). The full report is online here 37 pages Thinking inside the box: system-level failures of tamper proofing .

In this paper we examine the definition and application of security boundaries in tamper-proof systems. Our working example is the UK card payment system,‘Chip and PIN’, which is an implementation of EMV (the EuroPay, MasterCard and Visa protocol suite) [23]. We show how two models of PEDs fail to protect against tampering and demonstrate real, practical, low-cost attacks. The attacks highlight problems throughout the entire process of specification, design, certification and deployment.

So Boris is left with a serious problem. Well TRANsys has a problem.Well NPX / Philips have a problem. Whilst no reason has ever been given for the breakdown last Tuesday 15th July of the Oyster system it looks highly likely that someone has decided to screw the system.

As we all know the CCTV on the Underground doesn't work if you are intent on murdering Brazilian electricians, it is unlikely that anyone will track the crackers or what the Dutch call 'Zwart Rijden' "Black Riders".

Expect more of the same ...

Join the 32,000 feet Hi-Wi-Fi club on US airlines with Aircell

Boeing Connexion, a Boeing subsidiary were the first providers of Wi-Fi on planes in May 2004 with Lufthansa where charges started at US$10 for a half hour and US30 for a full flight.

This came to an end when Boeing pulled the plug end December 2006 - the heavy phased array antenna required for satellite tracking (at US$ 1/2 Mn per plane) proved to be a fuel hog, and revenues were tiny, although the service is still available on US Government planes under a US$53 Mn. contract.

A report from the Forrester group this month shows that US airline leisure passengers who want in-flight Internet access are equally split amongst men and women, have an average age of 42, an average household of nearly UK $100,000 per year, and they’re extremely well educated, with almost 60% with college degrees and 70% are members of airline loyalty programs.

That's a prime audience which the airlines want on board.

Now several airlines are trying to make inroads into that lucrative market by using / offering / promising wi-fi over land routes using cellular technology - satellites providing a service over oceans adds 600 milliseconds time delays -- the time for the signal to travel 23,000 miles to the satellite - which presents all sorts of problems with associated costs, as Connexion found out.

On December 11, 2007, JetBlue Airways operated the first commercial US airline flight (JFK-SFO) with highspeed in-flight email access in partnership with Yahoo and Canadian based Research in Motion Ltd - a limited but free service restricted to Wi-Fi enabled smartphones (no telephony though) , BlackBerries (12 Mn. users worldwide) and laptops to connect to work, friends and family via Yahoo!(R) Mail, Yahoo!(R) Messenger and BlackBerry e-mail and BlackBerry(R) Messenger services.

Continental have also announced the same limited service and also announced that real soon now (try January 2009 !) they will have LiveTV, with 36 channels of live, inflight satellite-based television programming provided by DIRECTV(R), the nation's leading satellite television provider, at every seat on Continental's new generation aircraft on US flights only.

Now passengers on American Airlines trans continental Boeing 767's will soon be able to surf the web at 34,000 feet when Aircell installations (at US$100,000 per aircraft) get FAA approval - remember passengers still won't be able to use portable electronics until the plane reaches 10,000 feet, which is an FAA ruling / restriction.

AirCell will offering broadband access using their EV-DO cellular technology operating in the 3Hz of ATG spectrum that AirCell won at auction in 2006. Passengers can expect to payUS$9.95 for WiFi access to the service on flights > 3 hours and US$12.95 on longer trips. AirCell is also looking into day passes and monthly and annual subscriptions.

That means passengers can surf the Internet using personal Wi-Fi devices including laptops, 802.11 a/b/g -equipped devices, and mobile handheld devices, so they can surf the web, check e-mail, send attachments, and log into their office network.

BUT .... VoIP and other bandwidth-hungry applications would be blocked in order to assure an ADSL-like experience for all users say American....and to eliminate any problems of passenger rage by noisy users of crap VOIP signals.

AirCell is also working with San Francisco's hometown airline, Virgin America, (getting there is half the fun?) which has committed to implementing the service fleetwide this year ..... ? Virgin who started service in August 2007 will offer not only wireless to passenger devices but also through the Panasonic in-seat IFE system aboard its brand new Airbus A320-family of aircraft - each seat of which is already equipped with a power point for lap tops and other portable devices. Virgin were 3 years in gestation folowing a lot of problems over foreign ownership , Airline Pilots and other US domestic airlines - they lost US$35Mn. in their 1st Qtr.

We all wonder what Mr O'Leary and the other Neanderthals at Ryanair thinks of this terrific idea for making passengers happy. UPDATE : Ooooops Ryanair have in fact announced plans for a joint venture with OnAir (a joint venture Airbus and SITA.)to install the system on its entire fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft beginning mid-2007.
"Ryanair's passengers will be able to call, text and email using their mobile phones, BlackBerrys and Treos at rates which will mirror international roaming charges," the airline said... er .. in August ...er....2006.