Sebuah kamera yang tak sengaja jatuh ke laut masih dalam kondisi "on" merekam pemandangan di bawah laut. Sebelumnya, kamera itu meluncur jatuh dari papan selancar milik Jens Knof, saat ia asyik bermain di atas gulungan ombak di Pantai Kite, Cabarete, Republik Dominika. Saat terjatuh, ia berpikir akan kehilangan kamera kesayangannya itu selamanya. “Namun, kamera itu ditemukan dua setengah bulan kemudian oleh nelayan setempat,” tulis Daily Mail (27 Mei 2013). Saat itu, sang nelayan sedang menyelam di dasar laut dengan tombaknya untuk mencari ikan. Ia menemukan sebuah kamera.

Sebuah kamera yang tak sengaja jatuh ke laut masih dalam kondisi "on" merekam pemandangan di bawah laut. Sebelumnya, kamera itu meluncur jatuh dari papan selancar milik Jens Knof, saat ia asyik bermain di atas gulungan ombak di Pantai Kite, Cabarete, Republik Dominika.
Saat terjatuh, ia berpikir akan kehilangan kamera kesayangannya itu selamanya. “Namun, kamera itu ditemukan dua setengah bulan kemudian oleh nelayan setempat,” tulis Daily Mail (27 Mei 2013). Saat itu, sang nelayan sedang menyelam di dasar laut dengan tombaknya untuk mencari ikan. Ia menemukan sebuah kamera.

Kamera itu ternyata menangkap pemandangan bawah laut yang menakjubkan, mulai saat kamera jatuh, turun menuju karang, dan berhenti di dasar laut. Kamera itu terus merekam dari sudut pandang yang unik di bawah gelombang hingga akhirnya kehabisan baterai. Rekaman ini menampilkan sekilas pemandangan laut yang menarik, dengan tampilan ikan yang menari-nari di karang laut.

Knof telah memposting rincian kehilangan kameranya secara online dengan harapan kameranya dapat ditemukan kembali. Namun, sudah begitu lama tak ada kabar hingga ia nyaris merelakannya. Dia tertegun ketika mengetahui bahwa kamera itu tidak hanya dalam keadaan utuh tetapi juga telah merekam perjalanannya ke bagian bawah karang. Kamera itu kini kembali dalam keadaan “selamat” serta membawa ”oleh-oleh” pemandangan menakjubkan bagi tuannya.

saco-indonesia.com, Wakil Ketua Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK), Bambang Widjojanto, telah mengaku pihaknya tidak akan terges

saco-indonesia.com, Wakil Ketua Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK), Bambang Widjojanto, telah mengaku pihaknya tidak akan tergesa-gesa dalam melakukan penahanan terhadap Gubernur Banten, Ratu Atut Choysiah. Pasalnya, KPK juga harus memeriksa terlebih dahulu saksi-saksi secara intensif agar bisa melakukan penahanan.

“Polanya KPK juga tidak terburu-buru untuk menahan orang. Tapi memeriksa saksi-saksi secara intensif,” kata Bambang melalui pesan singkatnya, Jumat (20/12/2013).

Bambang juga mengaku KPK tidak memiliki kekhawatiran Atut akan menghilangkan bukti atas tindakan pidana korupsi maupun Tindakan Pidana Pencucian Uang (TPPU) yang telah dilakukannya. Pasalnya, KPK juga akan menelusuri harta bendanya mengalir.

“Selama ini juga kan KPK tetap berhasil dalam menyita barang-barang mereka. Coba lihat kasus Djoko Susilo,” ucapnya.

Sebelumnya, juru bicara KPK, Johan Budi, juga mengungkapkan hanya penyidik yang tahu mengenai informasi kapan Atut akan ditahan. “Belum ada informasi (Atut ditahan atau tidak). Itu penyidik yang tahu,” kata Johan.

Seperti yang telah diketahui, hari ini, KPK juga akan memeriksa Atut untuk yang pertama kali dengan statusnya sebagai tersangka. Atut telah menjadi tersangka pada Selasa 17 Desember dengan tuduhan diduga ikut terlibat dalam kasus suap Pilkada Lebak yang menyeret mantan Ketua Mahkamah Konstitusi, Akil Mochtar. Atut juga akan ditetapkan menjadi tersangka pada kasus dugaan korupsi pengadaan alat kesehatan di Banten pada periode 2011-2012.

Penetapan tersangka Atut, juga merupakan pengembangan KPK setelah lebih dulu menetapkan adiknya Tubagus Chaeri Wardhana alias Wawan sebagai tersangka suap sengketa Pilkada terhadap Akil. Uang suap senilai Rp1 miliar itu rencananya juga akan diberikan melalui pengacara Susi Tur Andayani. Dalam perkara ini, Atut disangkakan memiliki peran sebagai pihak pemberi suap.


Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Mr. Paczynski was one of the concentration camp’s longest surviving inmates and served as the personal barber to its Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss.

Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison’s phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one.

The Rolfses, longtime collectors of Edison phonographs, knew that if they turned the cranks on the dolls’ backs, the steel phonograph needle might damage or destroy the grooves of the hollow, ring-shaped cylinder. And so for years, the dolls sat side by side inside a display cabinet, bearers of a message from the dawn of sound recording that nobody could hear.

In 1890, Edison’s dolls were a flop; production lasted only six weeks. Children found them difficult to operate and more scary than cuddly. The recordings inside, which featured snippets of nursery rhymes, wore out quickly.

Yet sound historians say the cylinders were the first entertainment records ever made, and the young girls hired to recite the rhymes were the world’s first recording artists.

Year after year, the Rolfses asked experts if there might be a safe way to play the recordings. Then a government laboratory developed a method to play fragile records without touching them.

The technique relies on a microscope to create images of the grooves in exquisite detail. A computer approximates — with great accuracy — the sounds that would have been created by a needle moving through those grooves.

In 2014, the technology was made available for the first time outside the laboratory.

“The fear all along is that we don’t want to damage these records. We don’t want to put a stylus on them,” said Jerry Fabris, the curator of the Thomas Edison Historical Park in West Orange, N.J. “Now we have the technology to play them safely.”

Last month, the Historical Park posted online three never-before-heard Edison doll recordings, including the two from the Rolfses’ collection. “There are probably more out there, and we’re hoping people will now get them digitized,” Mr. Fabris said.

The technology, which is known as Irene (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), was developed by the particle physicist Carl Haber and the engineer Earl Cornell at Lawrence Berkeley. Irene extracts sound from cylinder and disk records. It can also reconstruct audio from recordings so badly damaged they were deemed unplayable.

“We are now hearing sounds from history that I did not expect to hear in my lifetime,” Mr. Fabris said.

The Rolfses said they were not sure what to expect in August when they carefully packed their two Edison doll cylinders, still attached to their motors, and drove from their home in Hortonville, Wis., to the National Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass. The center had recently acquired Irene technology.

Cylinders carry sound in a spiral groove cut by a phonograph recording needle that vibrates up and down, creating a surface made of tiny hills and valleys. In the Irene set-up, a microscope perched above the shaft takes thousands of high-resolution images of small sections of the grooves.

Stitched together, the images provide a topographic map of the cylinder’s surface, charting changes in depth as small as one five-hundredth the thickness of a human hair. Pitch, volume and timbre are all encoded in the hills and valleys and the speed at which the record is played.

At the conservation center, the preservation specialist Mason Vander Lugt attached one of the cylinders to the end of a rotating shaft. Huddled around a computer screen, the Rolfses first saw the wiggly waveform generated by Irene. Then came the digital audio. The words were at first indistinct, but as Mr. Lugt filtered out more of the noise, the rhyme became clearer.

“That was the Eureka moment,” Mr. Rolfs said.

In 1890, a girl in Edison’s laboratory had recited:

There was a little girl,

And she had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very, very good.

But when she was bad, she was horrid.

Recently, the conservation center turned up another surprise.

In 2010, the Woody Guthrie Foundation received 18 oversize phonograph disks from an anonymous donor. No one knew if any of the dirt-stained recordings featured Guthrie, but Tiffany Colannino, then the foundation’s archivist, had stored them unplayed until she heard about Irene.

Last fall, the center extracted audio from one of the records, labeled “Jam Session 9” and emailed the digital file to Ms. Colannino.

“I was just sitting in my dining room, and the next thing I know, I’m hearing Woody,” she said. In between solo performances of “Ladies Auxiliary,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Dead or Alive,” Guthrie tells jokes, offers some back story, and makes the audience laugh. “It is quintessential Guthrie,” Ms. Colannino said.

The Rolfses’ dolls are back in the display cabinet in Wisconsin. But with audio stored on several computers, they now have a permanent voice.