March 27, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

WASHINGTON - U.S. audio historians have discovered and played back a French inventor’s historic 1860 recording of a folk song — the oldest-known audio recording — made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

“It’s magic,” audio historian David Giovannoni said on Thursday. “It’s like a ghost singing to you.”

Lasting 10 seconds, the recording is of a person singing “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit” (”By the light of the moon, Pierrot replied”) — part of a French song, according to First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists and others dedicated to preserving humankind’s earliest sound recordings.

It was made on April 9, 1860, by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on a device called the phonautograph that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp, Giovannoni said.

Read it all here.

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March 27, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

From today’s WSJ: 

The claim that deregulation went too far is coming from many sides. We need more regulation, the argument goes, and even a single regulator to bring stability. Former SEC chairman, Arthur Levitt, Jr., made some of that case on this page. House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank has prepared legislation, and others are rushing forward with their own plans.

Their diagnosis is wrong. Mistaken regulation contributed greatly to the current problems in financial markets. Take the 1970s Basel agreement between developed country governments, which followed bank failures in Germany and the U.S. The idea was to have equivalent risk standards in all the principal lending countries. The agreement required banks to increase their capital if they increased mortgage loans and other risky assets.

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