BRUSSELS, Saco-Indoesia.com — Tingkat korupsi di Eropa sangat mengejutkan dan membebani ekonomi Uni Eropa sekitar 185 miliar dollar (atau Rp 2,2 triliun) per tahun. Demikian kata Komisi Eropa.

Laporan yang baru pertama kali ada tentang korupsi di 28 negara Uni Eropa itu menempatkan Uni Eropa, yang sering digambarkan sebagai salah satu kawasan paling bersih dari korupsi di dunia, dalam sebuah sorotan yang tak menyenangkan.

Di kalangan pebisnis ada keyakinan yang tersebar luas bahwa satu-satunya cara untuk berhasil adalah melalui koneksi politik dan hampir separuh dari perusahaan yang melakukan bisnis di Eropa mengatakan bahwa korupsi merupakan masalah bagi mereka.

Semakin banyak jumlah warga warga Uni Eropa yang berpikir bahwa korupsi kian parah, meskipun pengalaman terkait korupsi berbeda-beda di blok itu. Hampir semua perusahaan di Yunani, Spanyol, dan Italia percaya korupsi meluas. Namun, hal itu dinilai langka di Denmark, Finlandia, dan Swedia.

Inggris termasuk di antara negara yang dikritik karena gagal membersihkan dan mengatur pembiayaan partai politik, sebuah masalah yang komisi itu tentukan sebagai faktor utama dalam korupsi.

Cecilia Malmstrom, komisioner urusan dalam negeri Uni Eropa, mengatakan, korupsi mengikis kepercayaan dalam demokrasi. "Korupsi merusak kepercayaan warga terhadap lembaga-lembaga demokrasi dan rule of law. Hal itu merugikan perekonomian Eropa dan mengurangi penerimaan pajak yang sangat dibutuhkan," katanya.

"Satu hal yang sangat jelas: tidak ada zona bebas korupsi di Eropa. Komitmen politik untuk benar-benar membasmi korupsi tampaknya hilang. Ongkos karena tidak bertindak menjadi terlalu tinggi."

Dia mengatakan angka korupsi yang sesungguhnya "mungkin jauh lebih tinggi" dari 185 miliar dollar itu.

Sebagaimana diperlihatkan oleh survei komisi itu, banyak warga Uni Eropa yakin korupsi telah menjadi lebih buruk sebagai akibat dari masalah-masalah ekonomi dan keuangan di zona euro akibat krisis utang. Warga juga menduga korupsi merupakan hal lumrah dalam bisnis. Delapan dari 10 orang yakin bahwa hubungan dekat antara bisnis dan politik menyebabkan korupsi.

"Secara keseluruhan masalah Eropa tidak banyak terkait dengan soal suap kecil-kecilan," kata Carl Dolan dari Transparency International di Brussels. "Hal itu terkait dengan kelas politik dan industri. Telah terjadi kegagalan untuk mengatur konflik kepentingan para politisi dalam menangani bisnis."

Karena itu, Komisi Eropa merekomendasikan kontrol yang lebih baik dan kerja keras dalam penegakan hukum. Dalam sejumlah rekomendasi yang tidak mengikat, Inggris diminta untuk "menghentikan sumbangan kepada partai politik, membatasi pengeluaran kampanye pemilu dan memastikan monitoring yang proaktif dan penuntutan terhadap pelanggaran potensial".

Kurang dari satu persen orang Inggris, atau lima orang dari 1.115 orang yang disurvei oleh komisi itu, melaporkan bahwa mereka telah diminta untuk memberi suap. Itu merupakan "hasil terbaik di Eropa". Sebaliknya, 6 hingga 29 persen orang di Kroasia, Ceko, Lituania, Bulgaria, Romania, dan Yunani mengatakan mereka telah diharapkan untuk membayar suap.

Para pejabat dikritik karena tidak memasukkan sebuah bagian dari laporan itu yang mencantumkan korupsi di lembaga-lembaga Uni Eropa. Paul Nuttall, wakil pemimpin Partai Kemerdekaan Inggris, mengatakan, Komisi Eropa sebaiknya juga menganalisis dan mengubah budaya korusi di lingkungannya sendiri. Komisi itu jangan malah menutupi atau bungkam tentang apa yang terjadi di dalam dinding temboknya sendiri.

Sumber :Kompas.com

Editor : Maulana Lee

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.