JAKARTA,  - Unjuk rasa besar- besaran di Jakarta sudah jauh hari digaungkan para buruh akan digelar untuk memperingati Hari Buruh, Rabu (1/5/2013). Istana Negara rencananya akan menjadi salah satu tujuan aksi. Tapi, ternyata Presiden Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono bertolak ke Surabaya, Jawa Timur, Rabu pagi, untuk kegiatan kunjungan kerja.

Agenda Presiden ke Jawa Timur, tak sepenuhnya tak terkait dengan peringatan Hari Buruh. Dijadwalkan Presiden akan berdialog dengan buruh PT Maspion dan PT Unilever di Surabaya. "Adalah menjadi tradisi yang kami lakukan, tujuh tahun terakhir ini setiap peringatan Hari Buruh 1 Mei kami selalu ada forum dialog dan komunikasi dengan para pimpinan konfederasi dan federasi," kata SBY ketika menerima para pimpinan beberapa serikat buruh di Istana Negara Jakarta, Senin (29/4/2013).

Presiden Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) mengaku terus memantau dinamika yang berkembang di kalangan buruh menjelang peringatan Hari Buruh Internasional atau May Day. Termasuk rencana buruh melakukan aksi unjuk rasa besar-besaran. "Saya memantau dinamika dan perkembangan teman-teman di perburuhan termasuk unjuk rasa  tetapi yang jelas saya kira semua sepakat unjuk rasa buruh itu tertib dan tidak merusak," kata SBY.

SBY mengaku senang kalau demo buruh berjalan tertib dan tidak merusak karena itulah yang namanya  demokrasi. "Boleh ada ekspresi ada sesuatu yang ingin dikritikkan pada pemerintah, pada yang lain, termasuk pikiran seperti apa, tapi tertib. Kalau tidak tertib apalagi anarkis membawa masalah bagi semua, bagi negara, perekonomian, industri dan pekerja sendiri," kata SBY.

Oleh karena itu, SBY meminta buruh dalam berunjuk rasa nanti harus menjaga situasi itu. "Manakala harus menyampaikan protes dan aspirasinya jaga ketertiban, sehingga pesannya sampai pada saya, pada pemrirntah dan ada solusi," kata SBY.

Sebelumnya, para buruh yang tergabung dalam Majelis Pekerja Buruh Indonesia (MPBI) menyatakan, sudah ada 150.000 buruh yang mengonfirmasikan keikutsertaannya dalam May Day. Tak hanya datang dari seputar Jabodetabek, buruh yang mengikuti aksi hari ini datang dari Karawang, Purwakarta, dan daerah lain.

Berita terkait dapat dibaca dalam topik: Demo Buruh

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.