America’s Oldest Voice Recording Restored

“Mary had a little Lamb,” “Old Mother Hubbard,” and a 23-second cornet solo are the highlights of what could be described as America’s oldest recorded music album. It’s not for sale on iTunes.

Thanks to technological advances, experts have been able to transfer a rough 78-second recording made in 1878 on a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph from flimsy tin foil to a computer. Experts believe it’s the nation’s oldest such recording.

“This is the first 1878 tin foil recording that we’ve played, you don’t get much closer to that moment of Edison’s transformative invention than this,” Dr. Carl Haber, senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory told ABC News. “If there are older ones, it would be just be by a couple of months.”

The recording, available to listen to online, opens with a cornet solo followed by a man reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” followed by laughter, a recitation of “Old Mother Hubbard,” and finally more laughter and speaking.

In the history of recorded sound, captured audio that was playable was an enormous breakthrough.  A French inventor named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville had previously recorded sound waves visually on paper 1860, but was unable to find a way to play them back.

“Edison’s was the first sound recording which was itself playable at the time. From my point of view that was the transformative invention because sound recording became very useful once you were able to play it back,” said Haber.

“There was a lot of innovation and experimentation that went on in the 1880s and 1890s, that was the period of real growth. But the 1870s is when it first happened, that broke the field wide open” he added.

The Edison phonograph used a sheet of tin foil, a stylus and a hand crank to record sound waves generated by the operator’s voice. Such recordings were very fragile and could not be played back repeatedly.

“Every time you played it you probably damaged it a little bit,” said Haber.  ”There are a few foils like this that are around, but this is the only one that has been played back to date.”

Museum of Innovation and Science curator Chris Hunter told ABC News the voice on the recording is believed to belong to St. Louis newspaper humor writer Thomas Mason, who often used a pseudonym I.X.Peck.

The digitized recording is scheduled to be played this Thursday during a presentation entitled “Found Sound,” at the GE Theater in Schenectady, N.Y.

The technology required to restore the audio was developed through a collaboration between the Optical Sound Restoration Project and the Library of Congress, and by research sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library services.

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

Google blacklists sites run by family of British politician

Google has placed almost twenty websites owned and operated by the wife, sister and mother of a prominent British politician on a black list after an investigation has found that they have been illegally harvesting other people's content in order to increase search rankings and hit rate.

Here’s a story for those who feel letdown by American politicians and the moral standing of same: While it’s true that our elected officials have been known to cheat, lie and generally fail to live up to the standards that they themselves try and portray themselves of possessing in order to win our votes, we can at least take some small amount of solace in the fact that none have yet found themselves embarrassed by Google announcing that it has blacklisted their family following revelations of copyright infringement. Somewhere in the United Kingdom, Conservative politician – and newly named co-chairman of the entire Conservative Party – Grant Shapps only wishes that he could say the same.

Shapps has found himself facing the public embarrassment of Google placing a network of up to nineteen separate sites officially owned and operated by numerous members of his family (His wife, his sister and in a somewhat unlikely turn of events, his 75-year-old mother) on a blacklist after it has been discovered that the sites engage in a process known as “spinning and scraping” to steal content from other sites in order to increase their own Google Search rankings.

To make matters more embarrassing for the politician, a company that he himself founded has been revealed to sell software that allows others to do the same thing. The Guardian newspaper last week revealed that for just $497, TrafficPaymaster would create websites that would do well in Google rankings – by spinning and scraping their way to something resembling success.

Although company policy prevents Google from officially commenting directly on the Shapps situation, the company did release a statement in which it said that it “take[s] copyright very seriously and invest significant time and money in keeping advertisers and publishers that violate our policies out of our network,” adding that it “bans ads and advertisers involved in activities that infringe on copyright from using our systems and prohibits publishers that violate copyright from participating in AdSense.”

In addition from being blacklisted from future AdSense or related advertising programs, an anonymous source within Google has also said that the sites owned and operated by the Shapps will “be naturally demoted by our search algorithms.”

Responding to the news, a spokesman for Shapps sought to distance the politician from the charges. “Grant Shapps derives no income, dividends, or other income from this business, which is run by his wife, Belinda, with a registered office in Pinner in north-west London,” the spokesman explained. “He is quite simply not involved in this business. Mrs Shapps runs her own online business, uses freelancers, moderators and programmers to post on forums, generate products and maintain a help desk.” For her part, Shapps’ wife Belinda didn’t exactly help matters by refusing comment and redirecting all questions on the matter to Conservative Party headquarters.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Innovation Centers in Africa [Infographic]

The latest report according to infographic on visual.ly shows that start-up incubators across the African continent is booming, “need, they say is the mother of invention” From the  Open innovation Studio, Codebridge & Google Developers Apps Hackathons in CapeTown to House4Hack in Johannesburg, from iHub in Kenya to CChubNigeria in Lagos Nigeria, indeed Africa is now rising to the challenge. Where are the centres of innovation in Africa? The infographic below explains, double click on it to expand

Browse more infographics.

Source : techtalkafrica[dot]com