Erie County Clerk Kathy Hochul won a House special election in western New York on Tuesday night, a Democratic triumph in a conservative district that many regarded a referendum on House Republicans’ efforts to reform Medicare. With 90 percent of precincts reporting, Hochul had 48 percent of the vote. State Assemblywoman Jane Corwin (R) had 42 percent, with independent candidate Jack Davis running a distant third with 9 percent. Democrats contended that the race in New York’s 26th Congressional District — which the GOP had held since the 1960s — became competitive through their efforts tying Corwin to the House Republican budget plan that included a provision to turn Medicare into a voucher program. Read full article > >

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Democrat Hochul wins N.Y. special House election

A study commissioned by American Roman Catholic bishops says abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared landed in the midst of the turmoil of the 1960s and1970s.

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Church Report Cites Social Tumult in Priest Scandals

The White House Situation Room has served the president and his national security staff in a variety of ways since the 1960s. Read full article > >

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The White House Situation Room through the years

The key to understanding the Civil War, which began 150 years ago this week, is to realize that it’s still being fought. Indeed, it’s being fought now more intensely than at any time since the 1960s.

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150 years later, we’re still fighting the Civil War

BEIJING — Rock music icon Bob Dylan avoided controversy Wednesday in his first-ever appearance in Communist-led China, eschewing the 1960s protest anthems that defined a generation and sticking to a song list that government censors say they preapproved, before a crowd of about 5,000 people in a Soviet-era stadium.

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The times they are a-censored: Bob Dylan makes first appearance in China

The man who pioneered the mass-production of LSD in the 1960s was killed in an automobile accident in Australia.

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Owsley Stanley, Artisan of Acid, Is Dead at 76

The breakthroughs we remember, of course, are the grand successes: Apollo 11 landing on the moon; the Concorde making supersonic flight available to commercial travelers; Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne capturing the Ansari X prize for achieving “space” altitude twice in two weeks in a privately-funded spaceship. But as the $424-million failure of the Orbital Sciences Corp’s Taurus XL rocket last Friday underscored, the road to discovery and technology advancement is a rocky one, littered with failures, dead ends and ideas ahead of either their time or the technology of the day. Take, for example, the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed. Forty years ago (March 7, 1971), a prototype of a new class of aircraft, so odd-shaped that John McPhee of The New Yorker dubbed it the ” Deltoid Pumpkin Seed ” (see image below) completed its one and only successful test flight at the FAA Test Center in New Jersey. The craft was an early attempt at a hybrid airship that would rely on both an aerodynamic shape and internal helium to lift heavy cargo loads at low cost, and into remote areas where large cargo planes could not land. The Aereon 26, as the craft was officially called, was actually the second attempt at such a craft to take flight. A very primitive version of a dynamic airship was built and flight tested during the Civil War by Solomon Andrews — the same inventor who gave us the combination lock. Not surprisingly, Andrews’ design was highly impractical — as many first attempts are. A century later, the Aereon Corporation took Andrews’ original three-hulled design and idea and revamped it with the aid of 1960s computer-aided-design (CAD) tools. The shape deemed “optimal” by the computer for a cargo hybrid airship was a puffy, deltoid design that evolved, through several unsuccessful versions and several years of model and wind tunnel tests, into the Aereon 26. Unfortunately, for anyone who loves weird and wonderful flying machine ideas, the Aereon 26 was still ahead of its time, and that first test flight turned out to be a kind of one-hit wonder. Funding for further development or testing of the pumpkin seed never materialized, and the prototype now sits forlorn and largely forgotten in a New Jersey hangar, hoping for some philanthropic museum to rescue it from decay. The company still exists, but with a staff of one — William Miller, the president who oversaw the Aereon 26′s development and who, 40 years later, is still trying to find a home for the prototype and funding for related projects. What makes the Aereon story particularly interesting, however, is that while the Aereon 26 may have fizzled, the idea of a hybrid airship is once again in vogue (a development I wrote about in an Atlantic article last year). And this time, the idea, the need and the technology may be aligned well enough to generate success. Five years ago, Lockheed-Martin successfully test-flew a prototype of a tri-hulled, aerodynamic airship called the P-791. And last year, the Army awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman for a hybrid airship for reconnaissance work in Afghanistan. The Long-Endurance, Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), as the vehicle is called, is expected to make its first flight this coming summer. If successful, the LEMV will bring not only a new capability (long-endurance surveillance) to the military, but a new class of aircraft as well. And it could eventually lead to a successful cargo version of a hybrid airship — which will be the one everyone remembers, of course. And yet … just as shadow is inextricably linked to light, the failures, glitches and concerted efforts ahead of time or technology are an integral part of any eventual technological discovery or advance. Yes, we successfully landed on the moon. But a whole lot of rockets and concepts proved themselves wrong before we developed enough knowledge and technology to get it right. And even then, sometimes … like last Friday … we still fall short. (Which is, or should be, a cautionary reminder to advocates of commercial space tourism.) And sometimes, as in the case of the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, a good idea just has to wait a few years, or a few decades, for technology to catch up enough to bring success within its reach.

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The Rocky Road to Discovery

The Milan fashion shows show a fascination with the looks of the 1960s.

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On the Runway: In Milan, a 1960s Tilt

Mr. Flom, who began as a top adviser in proxy fights in the 1960s, became one of the pre-eminent lawyers involved in the costly and risky business of corporate mergers and acquisitions.

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DealBook: Joseph H. Flom, Pioneering Deal Lawyer, Dies at 87

Hit makers of the present got the awards, the strobe lights, the rhinestones and the video razzle-dazzle. And titans from the 1960s got some respect on the 53rd annual Grammy Awards show.

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Critic’s Notebook: A Mix of Genres and Generations

As a young woman in the 1960s, Sister Cecilia Dwyer came to an isolated Benedictine monastery in western Prince William County to begin her life as a nun.

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From pastures to bedroom community, rapid growth in Linton Hall mirrors state

The US Army denies ethnic Hmong leader Vang Pao, who led a CIA-sponsored secret war in Laos in the 1960s, a burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

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Key Hmong denied Arlington burial

by Bruce J. Holmes My thoughts in a previous blog (” Sputnik Moments “) opened with the question on the usefulness and need for the president’s claim that this is our generation’s such Sputnik moment, and closed with some cheerleading from me for the case that we need it to be. If this is (the moment), where do we go from here? In aviation and air transportation system innovations what will the result be? The Chicago Tribune of the 1960s printed a marvelous, full-page, color cartoon on the back page of the Sunday funnies titled something like, “The World of Tomorrow.” As a youngster with deep curiosity and facility about all things gadget-y, the images of futuristic cities, automated highways, and flying cars pulled me into an imaginary wonderland of — the world of “what if?…” We who were attracted to the world of what-could-be, the stuff of visionaries, got a big boost working at NASA in the early 1970s. The agency was alive with exciting aeronautics programs (the first A in NASA) that were created in responses to the oil crises of 1973 and 1979. In fact, all major NASA programs have been developed in response to some form of national crisis. The programs of the 1970s and ’80s funded the reduction of risk and the maturation of technologies that industry used to improve the efficiency and performance of turbine engines, to apply new composite and metal materials to airframes, to implement the first computerized avionics, and to use advanced drag-reduction and high-lift aerodynamics. Industry’s use of the new capabilities contributed to the extraordinary efficiency and performance of modern transport aircraft. The excitement for the researchers was fueled by access to the first supercomputers, to flight test aircraft, wind tunnels, and research simulators; imagination was our guide. If you could think it up, you could likely try it out. The levels of funding supported big ideas that led to the big improvements, and ultimately, to industrial innovation. We worked hand-on-throttle with industry collaborators and partners to move ideas into the air. Times have changed. The absence of a catalyzing national crisis in very recent years (claims of our new “Sputnik moment” not withstanding), coupled with the perception in the policy world that the matured world of the airline industry no longer warrants a role of the government in reducing long-term risk, produced a collapse of NASA’s budget for this arena of research. Roy Harris, retired Director for Aeronautics at NASA Langley Research Center, wrote about this situation in a recent issue of Aerospace America . Harris notes that the $1.8 billion levels of investments in the past decades has fallen to less than a third of that amount in 2010. The result of this collapse is the diminished ability of the U.S. aeronautics technology community to take on long term risk reduction — the sorts of technology advancements that propelled the U.S. to aerospace and aeronautics global pre-eminence during the end of the last century. Brian Vastag, in a Washington Post video on January 28, 2011, makes a related point about innovation in America. Vastag observes, “The problem: Grand new ideas where we need them most — in energy, transportation and health care — bang up against the old ways of doing things.” In aviation, this truth seems to doom the prospects for game-changing breakthroughs in new markets, products, and services for air mobility. Just ask those visionaries who have ventured into the world of financing start-ups in the aviation sector over recent decades. Does this condition mean, “Do not try to go there”? Of course not, but then how do we get there from here? In my more than three decades of research and technology development, from esoteric aerodynamic boundary layer stability exploration to national technology strategy formulation and execution, the most effective role of government I experienced was in the operation of public-private innovation partnerships. Effective here does not equate with easy, or sustainable, within government organizations that are largely not designed for these kinds of shared decision-making operations. When they worked, the industry and government partnerships were effective in accelerating the reduction of technical risks for new ideas, through leveraging of public and private funds, and shared decision-making. The programs left in place a legacy of industry design guidelines, standards for the new systems, and approaches to meeting regulatory requirements. The result that was mostly invisible to NASA folks was the effect of these results on the ability of industry to attract investment capital because of these advancements. Along the way, the industry’s efforts aligned with government program outcomes aimed at public good outcomes (safety, mobility, efficiency, for example). The result was better than “more with less”; it had the effect of stimulating large-scale industrial innovation and entrepreneurial efforts, with the potential of creating a new industry (or at least invigorating an existing one). There have been relatively fewer recent applications of this approach to accelerating technology deployment, perhaps for the simple reason that partnerships are really hard to operate, especially for government organizations that are comfortable with traditional contracted research projects. In the years since industrial collaboration on pre-competitive technologies was made legal (that is, did not violate Sherman Anti-Trust Law), many innovation alliances between companies and between companies and government have been formed, run their course, and concluded (not all successfully, but enough to demonstrate their value). Examples of these alliances include those that have worked on turbine engine advancements (see IHPTET ), streamlined composite materials qualification, crashworthiness, and lightning protection (see AGATE-NIAR ), computerized avionics for “glass” cockpits — now a staple in all aircraft, large, small, and smaller (see AGATE study ) and image below, un-crewed air vehicles (see ERAST ), computer chip manufacturing (see Sematech ), and numerous other technology advancements across industry domains. The challenges that justify the use of innovation alliances include those that benefit from industry speaking with a unified voice (to regulators and technology standards bodies); those that benefit from aligning industrial and public good outcomes; those that require coordination of efforts between the key parts of any innovation: investment, technology, manufacturing, users/customers, research, and regulation. Do we have challenges today that justify the alliance approach? If we want to create a future in which air mobility reaches its full potential as a contributor to the American quality of life and economic opportunity, we might be well served by realizing that public-private partnerships, rather then traditional research contracts can help us get there from here. Bruce J. Holmes, retired from his NASA career in public sector entrepreneurialism, is now practicing the art in the private sector as CEO, NextGen AeroSciences

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Can We Get There From Here?

This weekend, Rebecca Traister reviews Stephanie Coontz’s latest book, “A Strange Stirring: ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.” In a recent interview, Traister gave us her take on “The Feminine Mystique” and the state of feminist discourse today.

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Paper Cuts: Reviewer Spotlight: Rebecca Traister

R. Sargent Shriver, who was tapped to create the Peace Corps by his brother-in-law John F. Kennedy and crafted 1960s-era programs that remain cornerstones in the federal government’s efforts to combat poverty, died Jan. 18 at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, a family spokesman said. He was 95 and had…

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‘Warrior for peace and against poverty’