How Some Men Fake an 80 Hour Workweek and Why It Matters
Kenaikan Harga BBM Bersubsidi Akan Diumumkan 17 Juni
JAKARTA, Saco-
Indonesia.com — Menteri Perekonomian Hatta Rajasa mengatakan, pengumuman kenaikan
harga bahan bakar minyak (BBM) bersubsidi selambat-lambatnya tanggal 17 Juni 2013. Hal itu
sesuai dengan selesainya rapat paripurna soal Rancangan Anggaran dan Pendapatan Belanja Negara
Perubahan (RAPBNP 2013).
"Kenaikan harga BBM subsidi akan dilaksanakan selambat-
lambatnya tanggal 17 Juni 2013 sesuai berakhirnya pembahasan APBNP 2013," kata Hatta Rajasa
di Kantor Presiden seperti dikutip dari laman Sekretariat Kabinet di Jakarta, Selasa
(4/6/2013).
Lebih lanjut, Hatta mengatakan bahwa pembahasan APBNP 2013 bukan hanya
menjadi kepentingan pemerintah, melainkan juga negara. Dengan demikian, semua pihak terikat
dengan jadwal ketat yang sudah ditetapkan DPR.
"Begitu selesai di DPR, pemerintah
akan langsung mengumumkan penyesuaian harga BBM beserta kompensasinya," kata Hatta.
Penyesuaian harga BMM bersubsidi, kata Hatta, harus segera dilakukan secepatnya, dan yang
penting masyarakat harus dibantu. Hatta mengingatkan kepada para spekulan untuk tidak main-main
dengan harga dan tidak mencoba melakukan penimbunan BBM.
"Hentikan spekulasi
seperti itu karena akan berhadapan dengan hukum. Jangan berspekulasi," katanya. Dalam
rangka menjaga stabilitas harga kebutuhan pokok menjelang puasa, Hatta mengatakan bahwa
pemerintah akan melakukan intervensi demi mencukupi ketersediaan pangan nasional.
"Kita bersyukur bulan Mei terjadi deflasi dan berharap pada bulan Juni ini inflasi
tidak terlalu tinggi. Caranya dengan menjaga pasokan bahan pangan sehingga cukup,"
tambahnya.
Untuk mengantisipasi inflasi yang tinggi, pihaknya sudah meminta jajarannya
untuk secepatnya melakukan intervensi untuk menjaga harga pangan, terutama daging.
"Kasihan nanti menjelang puasa daging harganya tinggi. Rakyat kita kaningin
makan daging," ungkapnya.
Sementara itu, Menko Kesra Agung Laksono mengatakan,
penyesuaian harga BBM bersubsidi harus dilakukan secepatnya karena volume BBM subsidi terus
meningkat. Jika berlarut-larut, maka akan ada risikonya.
"Saat ini kuota BBM
bersubsidi telah melampaui batas, yakni mencapai 48 juta kiloliter dari sebelumnya 46 juta
kiloliter," ujar Agung. Terkait adanya partai anggota-anggota koalisi di kabinet yang
menolak kesepakatan bersama menyangkut harga BBM serta kompensasinya, Agung mengingatkan,
sebagai anggota koalisi yang tergabung dalam sekretariat gabungan, sebaiknya kesepakatan politik
apa pun yang sudah disepakati dengan cara demokratis dan ikhlas seharusnya tinggal dilaksanakan.
Terlebih lagi, jika hal itu menyangkut kepentingan rakyat banyak.
Ghostly Voices From Thomas Edison’s Dolls Can Now Be Heard
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.