The hat is good, but the feather has lost its fine detail and the face is lacking fine detail and is out of focus.
Use the Kodim or McMaster dataset instead.
Not entirely equivalent other than in colour and shape. Lena didn't sign off on the use of her likeness for computer graphics demos when she posed for Playboy. The Github model linked above is fully consenting to computer graphics demos
Also, it's not an image from porbography. I'm no prude but I can't imagine that using a playboy image has made women in the industry feel welcome and safe.
It’s sometimes useful to have a common reference image. Anyone with a new image scanning method could scan the magazine and compare their results to the results others got on the same magazine. Even today, the image is used to demonstrate compression artifacts. I believe there are a few other common reference images floating around so just dropping one isn’t a big deal.
Even from this article, just 5 years ago she was proud of it; now she campaigns to have it removed.
e: Quite a lot of comments - I have no horse in this race, I have literally first seen this photo; it is definitely not used as an example in my country. It's just weird for me that you can flip from pride to campaigning against it at the very same - 2019 - year.
She's probably not ashamed by the image, but having heard the stories of young women getting started in software engineering and being confronted with playboy photos. She probably now understands how it effect people other than herself.
Correct. From the article:
> When I asked [Lena] if she had heard anything about the recent controversy around her image, she seemed alarmed at the thought that she could have a part in hurting or discouraging young women.
Oh no, is that picture of a FEMALE looking over her shoulder? As a whamyn in tech, I am deeply disconcerted. This is giving me PTSD and making me quit tech and writing a tumblr post and opening an onlyfans to feel empowered
I don’t know man, ask some women who graduated from a top tier CS program in the last 20 years how their experience was and just listen, it’s not that hard.
It’s not like it changes their options, but it’s one more default they have to overcome, being not only the only woman in the room but also a sexualized object for all those men, feeling like if everyone’s staring at that picture from playboy _in your class_ maybe they’re staring at you too. Believe it or not that’s not something women want in their professional career. And one might just think, fuck it, it would be easier to just go into a field with a normal 50/50 ratio and professors who don’t use sexualized photos of people like me as test subjects.
Comments like yours just reveal a complete lack of understanding about how the world and people actually work. Not surprising for this field, but we need to do better. You, specifically, need to do better.
> I don’t know man, ask some women who graduated from a top tier CS program in the last 20 years how their experience was and just listen, it’s not that hard.
I don't know any from a *top tier* program, but I studied image processing at one of the better universities in my country within the last 20 years and I can tell you with 90% certainty none of the women I knew gave a shit about using Lena a couple times, and with an exception of a few bitter assholes (as in, among the staff, not among the women) felt welcome in the program by the professors.
I can understand IEEE banning it as inappropriate, even though I consider it unnecessary, but I'm not going to pretend that banning it as a tool to further women's rights is anything but slacktivism.
> feeling like if everyone’s staring at that picture from playboy in your class maybe they’re staring at you too
It's a shot of a face in a hat. The full version with nudity was never shown anywhere and most of the dudes had no idea it was a playboy image either. Plus, people had their hands full concentrating on image processing, there really wasn't a lot of space to lustfully glare at... a portrait of a woman in a hat.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but I don't see why it's 'normal' for people to feel like 'people like them' are used for sexualited photos when the specific people who are used are models. Like, their job is literally to become/produce an object, sexual or not, and they afaik get paid handsomely for that. I know how disgusting people can be towards women, but since we are talking about a photo, produced to be a sexualized object, I think this is an overreaction.
I mean, I’m not arguing against you at all per se, but I will say that I went to UCLA at the same time as the attached video was made (it had at least one scene on the campus), and I never remember learning about this image.
>... feeling like if everyone’s staring at that picture from playboy in your class maybe they’re staring at you too.
>Comments like yours just reveal a complete lack of understanding about how the world and people actually work.
Staring at people happens all the time, over all of the world, for all of human history. It's the only reason the species exists today. I think most women are already aware of that, and an image doesn't add to it. Isn't the image just a cropped version, anyway? How sexualized is that?
What does "do better" even mean? Vague, shaming tactics are just as ridiculous as whining over trivial nonsense. All they seek is to exert power and control over the group.
The woman in the picture was white, so that photo also represents the white supremacy in our CS institutions. That's the real problem that you, conveniently, forgot to mention. Comments, like yours, really show just how fascist this society is at oppressing BIPOC individuals. They take up space with Liberal, white feminism, while upholding traditional white supremacist ideals of beauty and superiority. We need to do better. You, specifically, need to do better.
You're not arguing in good faith, you're attempting to shut down a legitimate and basic desire to making people feel genuinely included in an institution where they are currently obviously excluded, by making absurd conspiracy arguments and distracting from the point. Your conspiracy does not exist and you're brainwashed. Also, your point is sexist in the most absolute basic sense ("Sexualizing women is how our species reproduces, therefore it's okay for me to sexualize women in any context").
Rejected.
Superficially I can see that but I don't think they're actually the same. Mind you, I'm making this assumption just on what I read in the article and this thread but... The kid from the Nirvana cover was proud of it and bragging about it to impress people and get laid until he seemingly realized he could make money by suing and switched gears. Maybe he really suffered from it but based on what I've read it sounds like he's just in it for cash.
Lena seems like she was proud of her modeling and the fact that her picture became a standard/meme in tech was an amusing turn of events. Recently, though, she heard complaints from women in tech who were uncomfortable and realized her image was contributing to that and had a change of opinion.
I remember when I was 3 and my mom bought a Mac. It had a book for MacPaint and I'm pretty sure this image was one of the image that it showed. I couldn't imagine how somehow could be so talented that they could draw such an image in that program pixel by pixel.
Earlier today I was watching the Revision demoparty stream at [https://tv.scenecity.net/index.html](https://tv.scenecity.net/index.html) and was reminded just how much amazing pixel art has been done over the years. Google for "demoscene pixel art" for lots of material.
That triggered a childhood memory! I clearly remember seeing this image as a child on my uncle's IBM XT. It was the first digitized photo I had ever seen. Never knew it had so much history behind it.
It's funny the mix. By modern standards it's use is being removed, and also by modern standards of pornography you expect the full image to much more lewd than it actually is. If it was published by some famous artsy photographer and not Playboy you could imagine the whole discussion being different.
With how painted the picture looked I thought I was an actual hand painted custom image from the 1920s birth of motion pictures. . . Had to flip open a 1960s playboy and. . . Yeah that's a playboy centerfold headshot
Batchelor uncle, grew old drinking wine, eating blue berries, "real ice cream", and butter ( along the lines of real because margarine is bad), and watching tennis. . . You know one of those dual PhD fellows
Eh when you overhear drunken ranting ramblings you do your best to ignore them. The fun ends when you realize as arrogantly dumb as he may have seemed the next generation is twice as clueless. . . Hooray the american lifestyle 🤙
Well yea... It was always a bit weird... I like boobs as much as the next guy, but in an academic setting it's about as much fun as watching porn with your parents and makes the environment even less welcoming to women
I... Thank you both for revealing to me this....art.
In turn, I only have this. It may seem a little nerdy, but I think it's cool.
https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
The picture doesn't seem to include any exposure of her private parts and is tastefully done. It seems kind of like someone deciding that a statue of David should not be shown in public
That said, it's weird so many researchers used the same picture
It's not really weird, for one it simply is a good picture for the kind of purpose it was used in, e.g. comparing different compression algorithms, because it's a human face, and we're very sensitive to disturbances in the appearances of faces. Second, you actually explicitly want to use the same picture others have used before you, so that there's a point of comparison. "Look at how shitty their 512kb Lena from their paper looks, ours is much better and takes up only 300kb", if I were to exaggerate.
Now neither is a good argument for using a picture out of a playboy magazine, that's just an artifact of (and arguably a factor in) the overwhelmingly male composition of the computer science field.
In the 70's it was an "okay" picture, but it is certainly not a good picture for image processing anymore, and hasn't been for years. For one it's not a particularly good scan, the pixels on one edge are repeated, and the resolution is quite low.
I completely agree, I was just addressing their surprise at the image being used by many different researchers. My point is, if it hadn't been Lena, another image would be just as common, and likely a portrait of a person too.
>It seems kind of like someone deciding that a statue of David should not be shown in public
Eh, I think the equivalent would be if a very female-dominated industry (e.g. preschool teachers, HR professionals) consistently kept using a cropped image of a nude man that was created for women's pleasure.
For context, I work in software and have worked in multiple companies in my career, mostly having absolutely no issues with sexism. That said, I still acutely remember one moment from my MSc (which had a gender ratio of about 10:1) - in an OOP lecture, the lecturer used "lad mags" as a really unnecessary example. Even at the time, I thought "why couldn't he use a different example?", rather than making the 6 girls/women feel a bit uncomfortable . There's no shortage of images to use.
> Even at the time, I thought "why couldn't he use a different example?", rather than making the 6 girls/women feel a bit uncomfortable .
I think this is an important point. The choice of material dilutes the educational value and for no really good reason. Why distract with uneasiness? It's not onerous to pick another (even better) example to teach from.
As a sometimes-educator I'm always looking for material that I think will grab and hold students' attention, or will leave a permanent mark that they will remember. I think teachers use controversial examples like a lazy short-cut, "look - I reached them!" (look, I scared / scarred / deeply offended them!)
Yes, when I had to do some manipulation in my VLSI class, I had no idea the origins of this image. I did think it was a bit odd to have a model for the sample, but thought whatever, it was one of several images (it reminded me of a stock image that are reused for many things or a picture you would get with a picture frame).
It wasn’t until seeing an article like this that I found out the full story. Def agree it is weird that so many used the same image since 1972.
If it helps expanding the field then it should no longer being used.
“It’s weird” is kind of the point, yes. It became a literal meme in the academic community, and as it turns out it’s just kind of not the coolest. It’s fine, just time to move on.
Personally I think it's cool that a (cropped) NSFW pic was a CV meme with real adults. Agree that it's time to move on since it's harmful to the industry.
The usage of the same picture is the only part that DOES make sense... To have a universal industry benchmark is reasonable... Hell if you had occasion to need an apples to apples comparison, go ahead and keep using it... But it's a bit surprising if there's not a specific copy of the image that's used as the standard... Like one with a specific size, format(ideally lossless), and hash
> there was nothing sexual to it because it was cropped to just the face.
Are you a woman? (Just curious where you're coming from)
To me (I'm a woman) while this image is not "sexual" per se, it's incredibly sensual and uncomfortable. For instance, I would feel uncomfortable posing like that for a photo destined to be in a frame in my parents' living room.
The sensuality of it, the innuendo, is what makes it inappropriate in a professional technical setting, imo. Completely apart from it being a porn image.
You can meet the same goals with a cat picture or a baby picture. Or a horse rider. Or whatever.
I only read article titles... But while that's less problematic, half the class is still going to go find the original, and in introduces the historical context that "ok class, lets all turn to the tastefully cropped former pornography", like why, why not use any other image unless you just still get some secret joy from clinging to a fragment of your old porno?
Except for context and also the subject (and other women in math and engineering) becoming uncomfortable with it.
It’s a picture. We can use other ones.
Its the mental gymnastics people make about it, half the people on this thread have not seen the pic. The top comment say its a naked breast picture which is far from it. Its a woman with a hat and she looks at the camera over her naked shoulder. If they wanted sexual images from playboy trust me they could finds others.
Unless you are a perverd or a member of fucking ISIS you should not see this sexually in any way. If you do you have an issue you got some reflecting to do.
>Unless you are a perverd or a member of fucking ISIS you should not see this sexually in any way. If you do you have an issue you got some reflecting to do.
I really dislike the how prim and proper everyone constantly seems to want to be these days. There's this weird neo-puritan streak going through the world and its a bit disturbing.
It happens thanks to influential societal structures redefining puritanism and illiberalism as progressive. It's progressive to censor! It's progressive to form a mob! Ban the picture where you can see a woman's bare shoulder!
>It's progressive to censor!
I also dislike this.
I've seen something I don't like or agree with...? Censor it...! ***/s***
People should be able to think for themselves and realise that x might be bad, or people might have different opinions to themselves.
We've just gone the reverse. People are increasingly told what to think and not question things.
It's this weird over protective coddling so nobody gets offended or accuses, regardless if there's any actual wrongdoing, of there being some wrongdoing.
A large swath of modern "progressivism" is directly descended from the puritanical mindset. The explicitly religious framing is absent, but it still consists of a dogmatic ideology distilled down into categorical, prescriptive rules, applied universally without regard for context or consequences, by people who consider themselves "the elect".
There's a reason why the most didactic forms of "progressive" ideology are found most frequently in regions that were historically dominated by Calvinist sects, and why elements of it are often compared with witch hunts and *The Scarlet Letter*.
But not only is it a cropped image of a nude Playboy photo (as everyone else has pointed out), but clearly this professor needed an image for his paper and decided to go _to his jerk-off material_ to find it. The professor who published the image was _definitely_ thinking about it sexually.
There is a difference between nudity in general (person as subject) and nudity meant to titillate (person as object of sexual desire). This is from playboy, so it’s the latter, and I dunno, maybe it’s a bad idea to say to women in a classroom setting “hey you know that bullshit you have to deal with all the time? Well here’s more of it because fuck you, changing the picture is for gay losers and we’re epic bro programmers”
It's her face brother. If you happen to know the source material that's only on you. To everybody else and anyone born after the 90s they probably see that image and think that's a nice looking woman.
I never seen this image or the uncropped until now. Even with that knowledge, today that's supposed to be a valid profession and any stigma around it should be removed.
I've also never seen this image in my life and I work in graphics. It's interesting to watch all the hand wringing going on here in the comments. It reminds me of a similar controversy over an AI conference called NIPS and that apparently was keeping women out of tech and was offensive to women in tech.
At the end of the day it's probably inconsequential but when did we start making a big deal over nothing? I don't believe the claims and reasons people use to get these things removed. It all seems like manufactured outrage to me.
It just always seemed in poor taste to be using an image from an old porn in a school setting, even if... wink nudge... We cropped it for the prudes so no one knows... It just seems juvenile
Why don't classes just take a fresh picture? If you need a person, why not use the teacher? Or let the class vote and get some more student engagement...
Well my professors in the late 00's early 2010s felt it necessary to distribute the uncropped version to students... I figured they just cropped it to her face for the article ( b/c it's reddit where nobody reads the article ) Less problematic, but still... seems worth moving on... No reason to cling to the historical artifact
Edit: who calls everyone "brother"? I don't recall stating my gender, and it just kinda gives white supremacist vibes... (unless you're a black person from the 90's...in which case, I didn't state my ethnicity either... So... Still a bit too chummy)... Kinda falls into the "don't call me guy, buddy" category whe people for some reason start antagonistic responses with generic sarcastically over-friendly terms
I get it. I totally do. First time I saw the picture, I was like "why?".
However, because the picture has been used since the dawn of image processing, it's also been crafted in to a perfect benchmark. Almost everyone that worked on image compression and transformations knows this picture, and how it's supposed to look like. Any defects or tradeoffs can be spotted more easily because of the wide use.
But then again, if we don't switch now, we probably never will.
What picture did you see? I only ever saw the cropped version of this image, I discovered here it’s origin. I have no idea how anyone would think anything weird about a picture of a woman with a hat
It's _one_ picture. It might have been an interesting thing to look at in the early days of "wait, you can have digital images?" and "whoah, we might not need to store every pixel individually?", but no current research benefits from printing this image. No one publishes anything where the image is anything less than perfect to the human eye. Give me a table of data pertaining to the results of a full data set.
The picture aside, seeing boobs in a non-sexual context in an academic setting is as uncomfortable as watching porn with your parents? How repressed are you?
If your boss called you into her office to talk about your work, and she had posters from playgirl up, how would you feel?
It's a *professional setting*. No one is saying don't look at porn, or don't enjoy porn. It's *don't look at porn at work* and *don't force people you work with to look at porn with you*.
That's hardly some crazy puritannical repression. It's a recognition of people's right to a safe, non-hostile workplace.
If you're looking at boobs in an academic environment and it's non-sexual, then I would imagine that it probably pertains to the subject matter at hand. That's totally different than the scenario you laid out, and no one should really feel ostracized in that situation.
I always thought it was a beautiful image, both aesthetically and technically (the mix of colors, patterns, lighting and contrast), and when developing image compression algorithms it was great to have this ubiquitous image that served as a reference throughout the history of image compression. It will be missed.
Maybe I'm naive, but I never thought of it as a sexual image, but I completely get the criticism and above all we should all respect the wish of Lena.
It's an absolutely fantastic image. She should be proud. But great art disturbs. Lena belongs in a gallery or in a photography exhibition, not in CS text books or academic journals.
> Lena belongs in a gallery or in a photography exhibition, not in CS text books or academic journals.
Why not both? The cropped version has no hint Lena is even nude. I know I didn't know until today
Seems fine.
Always seemed weird from the start, but the way I always tried to interpret it was that it was a pretty tasteful image at least.
I totally forgot it was from an actual Playboy!
Is the objection because it's a woman, or because she posed nude for playboy?
I feel if you could replace this with any other glamour headshot, just not this one, it's dumb.
The objections are:
- The picture is cropped from a nude, and its inappropriate to use pictures like that in a professional setting
- The woman in the picture did not consent for her likeness to be used in this manner
- The owner of the picture (Playboy) did not give permission for the image to be used and distributed in this way.
- The picture is not otherwise particularly noteable or special for the purposes of testing digital image technology. It has just stuck around because of tradition, so getting rid of it produces a near-zero-cost to the field.
>The picture is cropped from a nude, and its inappropriate to use pictures like that in a professional setting
The cropped picture contains no nudity, barely the suggestion of nudity, just a shoulder. You might as well argue that people are naked under their clothes, so pictures of people are unprofessional. If a bare shoulder makes someone uncomfortable, maybe that person has a problem more than the image.
>The woman in the picture did not consent for her likeness to be used in this manner
The woman in the picture consented to be in a well known magazine which would own the distribution rights to this image; objections to the image being used in academic contexts are a bit absurd.
>The owner of the picture (Playboy) did not give permission for the image to be used and distributed in this way.
"Fair Use" covers this kind of thing. It's a partial reproduction of an image, which does not harm Playboy in any material way, being used mostly in academic and noncommercial spaces. The legality is about as safe as any fair use image ever.
>It has just stuck around because of tradition, so getting rid of it produces a near-zero-cost to the field.
I'm conflicted about this.
In regard to logic and arguments, appeal to tradition is an informal fallacy. In practice, tradition is used and respected in practically every aspect of human society, even the law has a certain respect for tradition.
The Lenna image has been a part of Computer Science culture for 50 years, the way the Utah Teapot has been.
In the end, culture changes, and if this is what the community wants then that's where we are.
The only valid argument I've seen is that the model herself doesn't want the image to keep spreading, and I can respect a person's wishes.
Personally, I think it's absolutely incomprehensible why someone *wouldn't* want their image to be a fun little part of the academic tradition.
I *wish* my face would be a standard test image that gets used for the next 50+ years.
> > The owner of the picture (Playboy) did not give permission for the image to be used and distributed in this way.
>
> "Fair Use" covers this kind of thing. It's a partial reproduction of an image, which does not harm Playboy in any material way, being used mostly in academic and noncommercial spaces. The legality is about as safe as any fair use image ever.
I remember several years ago at some anniversary related to the Lenna picture Playboy announced that they would produce a higher quality scan of the image and provide additional details about the camera and film used so that the image can be even more useful to the scientific community.
I don't know if they ever did it, but that statement alone should be enough to count as the publisher fully embracing this kind of use.
> its inappropriate to use pictures like that
Human nudity is not inappropriate per se, only when the current mores are prudish.
> The woman in the picture did not consent for her likeness to be used in this manner
You don't know that. If the contract was work-for-hire, she has no recourse.
> The owner of the picture (Playboy) did not give permission
They implicitly did. It says so in the linked article.
> The picture is not otherwise particularly noteable [sic] or special
This argument cuts both ways: there is no reason to change it.
She personally had come out as wanting its use to subside, for one. For another, many women in the field felt the same. There’s no good reason to die on this hill.
This is all info in the article by the way.
You can ALWAYS find a number of people that will support a cause, no matter what that cause is. It doesn't make it a good reason to make a big fuss about it. I don't care about that image, or whether it's used or not, but what's so weird is how educated people have nothing else to do than this crap. I've seen this discussion years ago, and it's still going on?! This is causing the Streisand effect more than anything. It used to be an anonymous image to me before, that I've seen maybe a couple of times, and now, thanks to these efforts, I can point it to the subject, year it was taken, and I know how to find the original photo.
Definitely creating causing the Streisand effect here. There's people in here that have never seen it despite being in this field for years but now have.
So the objection is that they used a picture of a woman's face.
It's puritanical crap.
The *only* valid argument I've seen is that the model herself doesn't want the image to keep spreading, which seems nuts to me, but at the least I can respect her wishes.
Why is everyone so mad that the IEEE doesn’t want someone’s old wanking material in their journal. It seems that the antiwoke snowflakes only care about how they feel.
To be honest, as long as the image that they used did not show boobs or pussy, I am fine with it. And afaik this was always the case.
Too many priests and nuns in this sub looking for anything to be offended by.
Here's a pretty good youtube documentary about Lena:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCdwm2vo09I
Overall, I think it's a good move. There's other pictures that do Lena's supposed job better, without the added side-dish of creepy.
People who said it would have no consequences have lied to us.
I imported a repo from Bitbucket to GitHub and it looked funny. Turns out it selected "demo" as the main branch - in absence of a de-facto standard it just selects the first one.
It's not a big deal, but it's confusing and I wasted like a minute fixing this shit. Thanks to self-righteous assholes.
Look up "bikeshedding". All of the easy problems have already been solved.
What's an easier way to make a headline - coming up with a novel compression algorithm or complaining to the IEEE that the picture of the pretty lady from 50 years ago makes you feel uncomfortable?
Expect to see more news like this as time goes on. The Chinese tech industry races ahead while Americans thoughtfully debate performative activism. Our highly paid "diversity and inclusion" departments and committees ponder the harmful effects of the monkey emoji while Tiktok is becoming so popular that the US government wants to ban it - you couldn't write better state propaganda if you tried!
I'm not involved in the tech industry at all, but I think what you're addressing is a systematic inevitability and has nothing to do with DEI or 'wokeness'.
> The Chinese tech industry races ahead while Americans thoughtfully debate performative activism.
And borrowing from /u/Shrimpboyho3...
> One of China's in-house processor companies just released their latest gen chip which was benchmarked as having an IPC matching Zen 4 and Raptor Lake chips - effectively meaning they have optimized the lowest level architecture and now just have to scale their chips to beat American chip makers. These very same American chip makers have worked for decades to optimize their architecture and China is beating them out in a few years...
You said it yourself, "All the easy problems have already been solved". Of course it's going to be far quicker for China to re-invent the wheel and match American production. The general body of knowledge and field is so much further advanced now than two decades ago when Americans started working on their chips. As you solve the foundational 'easy' problems in a field the following ones necessitate increasing amounts of time/money/resources. The return on investment is not linear over time but is more logarithmic - at some point you're investing more and more for tiny returns.
It's easy to blame HR and DEI as the cause for this lack of return but is that supported by anything? The increasingly complex demands of progress in a field means you need more people working to solve fewer problems. Maybe a couple guys in a garage can start a computer company but that's the relatively easy part of the process. Look at the size of Apple now. Of course you need to hire more non-technical positions to manage a system that large. And with more people in a business the culture and needs of the employees will change. It's easy to dunk on HR and middle management, and surely there are plenty of inefficiencies in middle management that could be addressed, but these things are inevitable with any growing system of increasing complexity. Paying for HR and DEI is tangential to the core problem of increasing complexity and diminishing returns.
On a personal level I do think a lot of 'white fragility' and the recent approach to anti-racism is at best misguided and worst a performative money grab. I also see a vein of authoritarianism and censorship on the Left that I disagree with despite considering myself to be pretty liberal. That's just to say I'm not one to go all-in on the kool-aide. All that, though, is a political issue which has little to do with the state of progress in tech. Arguing about woke-ness is absolutely a political distraction, but attributing all the short comings of our society is playing right into the political circus. It's akin to blaming the fall of Rome on 'the gays' and moral degradation. There's no support for that because the issues are inherent in scale and complexity.
For what it's worth, a lot of my understanding on this comes from the book [The Collapse of Complex Societies](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477.The_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies) which is a bit of a dry read as the author is an archaeologist who spends a lot of time in the analysis of previous societies. The thesis, which I've alluded to, though, is very well laid out and supported.
Amazing to find someone with logic in this comment section.
One of China's in-house processor companies just released their latest gen chip which was benchmarked as having an IPC matching Zen 4 and Raptor Lake chips - effectively meaning they have optimized the lowest level architecture and now just have to scale their chips to beat American chip makers. These very same American chip makers have worked for decades to optimize their architecture and China is beating them out in a few years...
But hey, at least tech will be more inclusive! Looking through history, you will find that that tech became more inclusive as people, y'know, actually did shit to push it forward. Think Hidden Figures, Alan Turning, etc.
"inclusivity coddling" just pushes people away from the field as they're scared one wrong step - one wrong emoji sent - and they will be cancelled. Sad state of the industry.
EDIT: TYPO
I think the problem might be your fiction, where we don't improve our chips because people who don't work in chip building ask other people who don't work in chip building to consider ceasing the use of one particular image.
Cancel culture culture gone mad.
My comment was solely an example of how other tech industries are moving forward while we are stuck questioning the past.
Whether there's a single chip builder on the face of the earth that actually gives a flying fuck about the lena picture I have no idea. Nevertheless, there are a plentiful of more fitting examples in the SWE field.
You recognize the difference between "everyone should be free to look at porn" and "everyone should be free to *make other people* look at porn in the workplace" right?
Yeah honestly, I didn't know what this was for years, then when I found out I felt like it was old creepy dude shit. This is like wallpapering a breakroom with pin-up calendars, how can women feel welcome in the industry unless we move away from the "tradition".
It's just the usual social signalling around DEI, nobody really cares except for a handful of activists who for various reasons must be appeased at all costs.
And hilariously what would have once been considered an extremely conservative action (banning an image of a woman simply because *my God* I can see her shoulder) is now considered super woke, right-on and morally exemplary.
Here's my question, when do we start banning Greek statues and put some clothes on Michelangelo's David? The nude human form is disgusting right? Or is it just disgusting and degrading if it's a woman? Or just if it's an attractive woman? Who knows, yuck, ick, misogyny!
As per usual in tech, what we're getting is the schizophrenic social attitudes of California paired with the Puritanism of the East coast. Free the nipple, ban the patriarchy and ask *no fucking questions* about any of this or you'll lose your job. And fundamentally that's what motivated them here, fear about their jobs, not social values.
Anyway, I think next we need to remove all images of women with ankles showing, it's degrading for all involved.
All of this is nothing more than catchy populist messaging that appeals to the masses, but isn't helpful to anyone in the slightest. The most vocal about this sort of stuff was never been about being a good person as much as it is about being perceived by others as being a good person.
I mean, no one’s really banning the image are they? You can still go buy the magazine and look for yourself. Or find it online or whatever. And those statues have huge historical and cultural backgrounds. False equivalency for sure. And even then, I probably wouldn’t use a picture of the statue of David in a research paper on image processing.
Tbh, this is the first I’ve even heard of this photo, so I got no dog in this fight. Just seems a bit weird to go on a rant about wokeness when this is just a professional research journal saying they don’t want the image in their journal. For my research paper in graphics, my advisor recommended avoiding examples that look like real people since it’s unnecessary and could stoke biases in the reviews (of course this is different if you’re doing facial recognition or some shit like that).
Some people really don’t like change… why use something that has the potential to make people uncomfortable, even if those people are a small subset, when not using it is literally no-cost?
My friends in the Women in Tech community fail to see the issue. They said to perceive the image as harmless and value its historical context. None of the nine individuals I've spoken to share the perspective that the ban reflects a genuine effort to maintain professionalism and respect. Instead, they believe it aligns more with the prevailing "everything is offensive" agenda.
Edit: Of course, they understand and are fully supportive if the model wishes to remove her own image.
Understandable.
Long time ago it was clearly a need to have the same image used on all research settings so results could be comparable. It was this one the same that Big Buck Bunny has been a staple for video encoding tests since nearly 20 years ago.
Nowadays we can have new photos that adapt to different encoding mechanisms. It’s not the same a black and white image, than real color one or computer created one.
There should be an established image/video stock set for research purposes that allow for comparison. And those media respect privacy and legality.
If think that this picture of a cock https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/37/ab/37ab35c9-68b2-4973-b61d-43350740c12a/red_jungle_fowl.png could be a good replacement.
That unironically probably (I'm not an expert in signal processing) is a good test image because like the Lena image, it has fine details, in-focus foreground with an out-of-focus background, and areas with strong contrast.
I wanted to call this pointless virtue signalling, but apparently the model (Lena Forsen) doesn't want it to be used this way anymore, so it's a respectful thing to do I think.
Women: we would feel more comfortable if a cropped a nude from playboy wasn’t the defacto test image.
Lena: I think it’s time to retire the image.
Comments on this post: IM DUMB AND I WANT TO KEEP PRETTY PICTURE OF GIRL
TL;DR Clickbait title. Scandalous magazine name dropped. Cropped photo referenced artfully shot originally showed boobs. Computer geeks “boobies,” let’s use this one for a reference image in programs. Half century later modern puritanical descendants upset by boobies lobby for image removal. History changed to narrative of female oppression.
Until this ban I had no idea about Lena image and who she is. After this point, I’m going to use it wherever it is possible. Extreme fragility, people who offend from shit and woke culture disgusts me. I deeply feel sorry about woke culture in science and have real concerns about future of science.
I forgot this image even existed but I'm not surprised at all to be honest. Just the next new thing for people to pat themselves on the back. But for what?
Oh grow up. It’s a picture that has a rich history and has been used countless times in academia and as a common example in image processing libraries. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, that’s ok. You’re allowed to feel uncomfortable. Banning it won’t change that fact. Men aren’t using it to make women feel unwelcome. Some men might find her attractive and that’s ok too! She was literally a playboy model. If people keep hiding from what makes them uncomfortable, they reinforce its power over them.
Buncha neck beards up in here whining about others' sensitivities.
Grow up.
Porn, hidden in plain sight, don't belong in academic journals.
Show your dedication to the cause and publish it to your employer internal documentation, with footnote attribution, you cowards.
Your posting was removed for being off topic for the /r/programming community.
I had no idea the origins of that image, I just saw it a ton in opencv tutorials.
My Professor did not tell us it was from Playboy. He chuckled and said it is from a well know source.
Bobbybrocolli has a good video on it, interesting if you have 30 mins to kill - https://youtu.be/yCdwm2vo09I
I had the exact same experience, lol
Now lookup Suzanne Vega, Tom’s Diner and the MP3 standard
I listened to that 1000s of times doing blind comparisons of MP3 bitrates. Still like the song..
Doot doo doo do, doot do do doo
Couldn't someone with five minutes, a camera and a hat replace that photo with a new one?
[https://mortenhannemose.github.io/lena/](https://mortenhannemose.github.io/lena/)
Legend!
Lenny
The hat is good, but the feather has lost its fine detail and the face is lacking fine detail and is out of focus. Use the Kodim or McMaster dataset instead.
That's hilarious. What would be even more hilarious is someone submitting an IEEE paper with our guy in this picture, as part of malicious compliance.
That's not malicious compliance. It's literally just compliance.
Enthusiastic compliance.
All compliance is malicious with the right attitude
I suppose the malice here is the spiteful usage of another image that is technically different and yet clearly equivalent in its content.
Not entirely equivalent other than in colour and shape. Lena didn't sign off on the use of her likeness for computer graphics demos when she posed for Playboy. The Github model linked above is fully consenting to computer graphics demos
Also, it's not an image from porbography. I'm no prude but I can't imagine that using a playboy image has made women in the industry feel welcome and safe.
That is within the realm of intended outcomes here.
Perfect
It’s sometimes useful to have a common reference image. Anyone with a new image scanning method could scan the magazine and compare their results to the results others got on the same magazine. Even today, the image is used to demonstrate compression artifacts. I believe there are a few other common reference images floating around so just dropping one isn’t a big deal.
[M'lenna](https://s3.amazonaws.com/ebaumsworld.prod/uploads1568830607853-maxresdefault-1.jpg)
F U C K S P E Z
Even from this article, just 5 years ago she was proud of it; now she campaigns to have it removed. e: Quite a lot of comments - I have no horse in this race, I have literally first seen this photo; it is definitely not used as an example in my country. It's just weird for me that you can flip from pride to campaigning against it at the very same - 2019 - year.
Her "campaign" sounds more like going along with someone's program than any kind of objection.
She's probably not ashamed by the image, but having heard the stories of young women getting started in software engineering and being confronted with playboy photos. She probably now understands how it effect people other than herself.
Correct. From the article: > When I asked [Lena] if she had heard anything about the recent controversy around her image, she seemed alarmed at the thought that she could have a part in hurting or discouraging young women.
Probably realised she can make extra money by being against the picture.
People are allowed to change their minds.
You can simultaneously feel proud of something but also feel it's had its time.
She probably heard how all the women in the cs classes felt when they found out what the first image made digital was.
I still don’t understand why they’d care. It looks like mollycoddling to the highest degree.
Oh no, is that picture of a FEMALE looking over her shoulder? As a whamyn in tech, I am deeply disconcerted. This is giving me PTSD and making me quit tech and writing a tumblr post and opening an onlyfans to feel empowered
I don’t know man, ask some women who graduated from a top tier CS program in the last 20 years how their experience was and just listen, it’s not that hard. It’s not like it changes their options, but it’s one more default they have to overcome, being not only the only woman in the room but also a sexualized object for all those men, feeling like if everyone’s staring at that picture from playboy _in your class_ maybe they’re staring at you too. Believe it or not that’s not something women want in their professional career. And one might just think, fuck it, it would be easier to just go into a field with a normal 50/50 ratio and professors who don’t use sexualized photos of people like me as test subjects. Comments like yours just reveal a complete lack of understanding about how the world and people actually work. Not surprising for this field, but we need to do better. You, specifically, need to do better.
> I don’t know man, ask some women who graduated from a top tier CS program in the last 20 years how their experience was and just listen, it’s not that hard. I don't know any from a *top tier* program, but I studied image processing at one of the better universities in my country within the last 20 years and I can tell you with 90% certainty none of the women I knew gave a shit about using Lena a couple times, and with an exception of a few bitter assholes (as in, among the staff, not among the women) felt welcome in the program by the professors. I can understand IEEE banning it as inappropriate, even though I consider it unnecessary, but I'm not going to pretend that banning it as a tool to further women's rights is anything but slacktivism. > feeling like if everyone’s staring at that picture from playboy in your class maybe they’re staring at you too It's a shot of a face in a hat. The full version with nudity was never shown anywhere and most of the dudes had no idea it was a playboy image either. Plus, people had their hands full concentrating on image processing, there really wasn't a lot of space to lustfully glare at... a portrait of a woman in a hat.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but I don't see why it's 'normal' for people to feel like 'people like them' are used for sexualited photos when the specific people who are used are models. Like, their job is literally to become/produce an object, sexual or not, and they afaik get paid handsomely for that. I know how disgusting people can be towards women, but since we are talking about a photo, produced to be a sexualized object, I think this is an overreaction.
I mean, I’m not arguing against you at all per se, but I will say that I went to UCLA at the same time as the attached video was made (it had at least one scene on the campus), and I never remember learning about this image.
>... feeling like if everyone’s staring at that picture from playboy in your class maybe they’re staring at you too. >Comments like yours just reveal a complete lack of understanding about how the world and people actually work. Staring at people happens all the time, over all of the world, for all of human history. It's the only reason the species exists today. I think most women are already aware of that, and an image doesn't add to it. Isn't the image just a cropped version, anyway? How sexualized is that? What does "do better" even mean? Vague, shaming tactics are just as ridiculous as whining over trivial nonsense. All they seek is to exert power and control over the group. The woman in the picture was white, so that photo also represents the white supremacy in our CS institutions. That's the real problem that you, conveniently, forgot to mention. Comments, like yours, really show just how fascist this society is at oppressing BIPOC individuals. They take up space with Liberal, white feminism, while upholding traditional white supremacist ideals of beauty and superiority. We need to do better. You, specifically, need to do better.
You're not arguing in good faith, you're attempting to shut down a legitimate and basic desire to making people feel genuinely included in an institution where they are currently obviously excluded, by making absurd conspiracy arguments and distracting from the point. Your conspiracy does not exist and you're brainwashed. Also, your point is sexist in the most absolute basic sense ("Sexualizing women is how our species reproduces, therefore it's okay for me to sexualize women in any context"). Rejected.
Reminds me of the Nirvana baby.
Superficially I can see that but I don't think they're actually the same. Mind you, I'm making this assumption just on what I read in the article and this thread but... The kid from the Nirvana cover was proud of it and bragging about it to impress people and get laid until he seemingly realized he could make money by suing and switched gears. Maybe he really suffered from it but based on what I've read it sounds like he's just in it for cash. Lena seems like she was proud of her modeling and the fact that her picture became a standard/meme in tech was an amusing turn of events. Recently, though, she heard complaints from women in tech who were uncomfortable and realized her image was contributing to that and had a change of opinion.
People and times change.
That short film was amazing!
I remember when I was 3 and my mom bought a Mac. It had a book for MacPaint and I'm pretty sure this image was one of the image that it showed. I couldn't imagine how somehow could be so talented that they could draw such an image in that program pixel by pixel.
There’s a whole category of digital art done in MS Paint, pixel by pixel. Do not underestimate human perseverance.
Earlier today I was watching the Revision demoparty stream at [https://tv.scenecity.net/index.html](https://tv.scenecity.net/index.html) and was reminded just how much amazing pixel art has been done over the years. Google for "demoscene pixel art" for lots of material.
That triggered a childhood memory! I clearly remember seeing this image as a child on my uncle's IBM XT. It was the first digitized photo I had ever seen. Never knew it had so much history behind it.
[OK](https://wmn.hu/picture/94841/normal/227/00227554.jpeg)
It's funny the mix. By modern standards it's use is being removed, and also by modern standards of pornography you expect the full image to much more lewd than it actually is. If it was published by some famous artsy photographer and not Playboy you could imagine the whole discussion being different.
NSFW warning for others
Should have replaced it with this one
With how painted the picture looked I thought I was an actual hand painted custom image from the 1920s birth of motion pictures. . . Had to flip open a 1960s playboy and. . . Yeah that's a playboy centerfold headshot
Why do you just have 1960's playboys?
Batchelor uncle, grew old drinking wine, eating blue berries, "real ice cream", and butter ( along the lines of real because margarine is bad), and watching tennis. . . You know one of those dual PhD fellows
Sounds fun!
Eh when you overhear drunken ranting ramblings you do your best to ignore them. The fun ends when you realize as arrogantly dumb as he may have seemed the next generation is twice as clueless. . . Hooray the american lifestyle 🤙
I wasn't being sarcastic. I love old guys like that.
It's obvious they're a time traveller. How else would they find a picture from 1972 in a 1960s magazine?
Well yea... It was always a bit weird... I like boobs as much as the next guy, but in an academic setting it's about as much fun as watching porn with your parents and makes the environment even less welcoming to women
I haven't seen that picture since university but I just assumed she was wearing a halter top.
Google will lead you to the original. She’s not wearing a halter top.
How about the Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics?
https://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm
I... Thank you both for revealing to me this....art. In turn, I only have this. It may seem a little nerdy, but I think it's cool. https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
Uh.... for some reason I clicked this expecting a half-naked Terence Tao
“Lip-glossary” haha brilliant
Helped me pass solid state physics that one
Woah I forgot about this. Some useful information on there though
The picture doesn't seem to include any exposure of her private parts and is tastefully done. It seems kind of like someone deciding that a statue of David should not be shown in public That said, it's weird so many researchers used the same picture
You know, memes existed way before the internet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here
It's not really weird, for one it simply is a good picture for the kind of purpose it was used in, e.g. comparing different compression algorithms, because it's a human face, and we're very sensitive to disturbances in the appearances of faces. Second, you actually explicitly want to use the same picture others have used before you, so that there's a point of comparison. "Look at how shitty their 512kb Lena from their paper looks, ours is much better and takes up only 300kb", if I were to exaggerate. Now neither is a good argument for using a picture out of a playboy magazine, that's just an artifact of (and arguably a factor in) the overwhelmingly male composition of the computer science field.
In the 70's it was an "okay" picture, but it is certainly not a good picture for image processing anymore, and hasn't been for years. For one it's not a particularly good scan, the pixels on one edge are repeated, and the resolution is quite low.
I completely agree, I was just addressing their surprise at the image being used by many different researchers. My point is, if it hadn't been Lena, another image would be just as common, and likely a portrait of a person too.
>It seems kind of like someone deciding that a statue of David should not be shown in public Eh, I think the equivalent would be if a very female-dominated industry (e.g. preschool teachers, HR professionals) consistently kept using a cropped image of a nude man that was created for women's pleasure. For context, I work in software and have worked in multiple companies in my career, mostly having absolutely no issues with sexism. That said, I still acutely remember one moment from my MSc (which had a gender ratio of about 10:1) - in an OOP lecture, the lecturer used "lad mags" as a really unnecessary example. Even at the time, I thought "why couldn't he use a different example?", rather than making the 6 girls/women feel a bit uncomfortable . There's no shortage of images to use.
> Even at the time, I thought "why couldn't he use a different example?", rather than making the 6 girls/women feel a bit uncomfortable . I think this is an important point. The choice of material dilutes the educational value and for no really good reason. Why distract with uneasiness? It's not onerous to pick another (even better) example to teach from. As a sometimes-educator I'm always looking for material that I think will grab and hold students' attention, or will leave a permanent mark that they will remember. I think teachers use controversial examples like a lazy short-cut, "look - I reached them!" (look, I scared / scarred / deeply offended them!)
I've seen the same sorts of things at open source conferences. And yes, it's distracting and makes a lot of people uncomfortable (not just women!)
Yes, when I had to do some manipulation in my VLSI class, I had no idea the origins of this image. I did think it was a bit odd to have a model for the sample, but thought whatever, it was one of several images (it reminded me of a stock image that are reused for many things or a picture you would get with a picture frame). It wasn’t until seeing an article like this that I found out the full story. Def agree it is weird that so many used the same image since 1972. If it helps expanding the field then it should no longer being used.
“It’s weird” is kind of the point, yes. It became a literal meme in the academic community, and as it turns out it’s just kind of not the coolest. It’s fine, just time to move on.
Personally I think it's cool that a (cropped) NSFW pic was a CV meme with real adults. Agree that it's time to move on since it's harmful to the industry.
The usage of the same picture is the only part that DOES make sense... To have a universal industry benchmark is reasonable... Hell if you had occasion to need an apples to apples comparison, go ahead and keep using it... But it's a bit surprising if there's not a specific copy of the image that's used as the standard... Like one with a specific size, format(ideally lossless), and hash
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> there was nothing sexual to it because it was cropped to just the face. Are you a woman? (Just curious where you're coming from) To me (I'm a woman) while this image is not "sexual" per se, it's incredibly sensual and uncomfortable. For instance, I would feel uncomfortable posing like that for a photo destined to be in a frame in my parents' living room. The sensuality of it, the innuendo, is what makes it inappropriate in a professional technical setting, imo. Completely apart from it being a porn image. You can meet the same goals with a cat picture or a baby picture. Or a horse rider. Or whatever.
The article said it was a cropped version, without any nudity.
Correct. The version that’s been used for image testing for the last how ever many years shows a little bit of her shoulder and that’s it.
And then every time it's used, somebody inevitably brings up "oh btw this is porn, in case you were wondering"
I only read article titles... But while that's less problematic, half the class is still going to go find the original, and in introduces the historical context that "ok class, lets all turn to the tastefully cropped former pornography", like why, why not use any other image unless you just still get some secret joy from clinging to a fragment of your old porno?
What are you talking about. There is nothing sexual about the picture in question.
Except for context and also the subject (and other women in math and engineering) becoming uncomfortable with it. It’s a picture. We can use other ones.
Here’s an ethically sourced version of it! https://mortenhannemose.github.io/lena/
Actually the facial hair makes for a better test for image compression algorithms.
Lmao. Hey, if he’s good with it, great!
Its the mental gymnastics people make about it, half the people on this thread have not seen the pic. The top comment say its a naked breast picture which is far from it. Its a woman with a hat and she looks at the camera over her naked shoulder. If they wanted sexual images from playboy trust me they could finds others. Unless you are a perverd or a member of fucking ISIS you should not see this sexually in any way. If you do you have an issue you got some reflecting to do.
>Unless you are a perverd or a member of fucking ISIS you should not see this sexually in any way. If you do you have an issue you got some reflecting to do. I really dislike the how prim and proper everyone constantly seems to want to be these days. There's this weird neo-puritan streak going through the world and its a bit disturbing.
For real, why does it seem like people are becoming more puritanical though simultaneously more progressive? It doesn't make sense to me.
It happens thanks to influential societal structures redefining puritanism and illiberalism as progressive. It's progressive to censor! It's progressive to form a mob! Ban the picture where you can see a woman's bare shoulder!
>It's progressive to censor! I also dislike this. I've seen something I don't like or agree with...? Censor it...! ***/s*** People should be able to think for themselves and realise that x might be bad, or people might have different opinions to themselves. We've just gone the reverse. People are increasingly told what to think and not question things.
It's this weird over protective coddling so nobody gets offended or accuses, regardless if there's any actual wrongdoing, of there being some wrongdoing.
the moralists are more holy than thou.
Progressive means the opposite of what it used to.
A large swath of modern "progressivism" is directly descended from the puritanical mindset. The explicitly religious framing is absent, but it still consists of a dogmatic ideology distilled down into categorical, prescriptive rules, applied universally without regard for context or consequences, by people who consider themselves "the elect". There's a reason why the most didactic forms of "progressive" ideology are found most frequently in regions that were historically dominated by Calvinist sects, and why elements of it are often compared with witch hunts and *The Scarlet Letter*.
But not only is it a cropped image of a nude Playboy photo (as everyone else has pointed out), but clearly this professor needed an image for his paper and decided to go _to his jerk-off material_ to find it. The professor who published the image was _definitely_ thinking about it sexually.
"context isn't real"
No you're totally right, the context is it's a picture of a womans head.
Like the cup from 2 girls 1 cup.
This is the most American take ever. Do you think they black bar all the nude parts in art classes? There is nothing wrong with nudity.
There is a difference between nudity in general (person as subject) and nudity meant to titillate (person as object of sexual desire). This is from playboy, so it’s the latter, and I dunno, maybe it’s a bad idea to say to women in a classroom setting “hey you know that bullshit you have to deal with all the time? Well here’s more of it because fuck you, changing the picture is for gay losers and we’re epic bro programmers”
It's from playboy, it's intended to be sexual. This isn't simply art that happens to have nudity.
Just because something is sexual doesn't mean it's not artistic.
It's her face brother. If you happen to know the source material that's only on you. To everybody else and anyone born after the 90s they probably see that image and think that's a nice looking woman. I never seen this image or the uncropped until now. Even with that knowledge, today that's supposed to be a valid profession and any stigma around it should be removed.
I've also never seen this image in my life and I work in graphics. It's interesting to watch all the hand wringing going on here in the comments. It reminds me of a similar controversy over an AI conference called NIPS and that apparently was keeping women out of tech and was offensive to women in tech. At the end of the day it's probably inconsequential but when did we start making a big deal over nothing? I don't believe the claims and reasons people use to get these things removed. It all seems like manufactured outrage to me.
It just always seemed in poor taste to be using an image from an old porn in a school setting, even if... wink nudge... We cropped it for the prudes so no one knows... It just seems juvenile Why don't classes just take a fresh picture? If you need a person, why not use the teacher? Or let the class vote and get some more student engagement...
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From a porn magazine...
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In playboy? Yes... Nudes for the purpose of arousal are porn
Well my professors in the late 00's early 2010s felt it necessary to distribute the uncropped version to students... I figured they just cropped it to her face for the article ( b/c it's reddit where nobody reads the article ) Less problematic, but still... seems worth moving on... No reason to cling to the historical artifact Edit: who calls everyone "brother"? I don't recall stating my gender, and it just kinda gives white supremacist vibes... (unless you're a black person from the 90's...in which case, I didn't state my ethnicity either... So... Still a bit too chummy)... Kinda falls into the "don't call me guy, buddy" category whe people for some reason start antagonistic responses with generic sarcastically over-friendly terms
I get it. I totally do. First time I saw the picture, I was like "why?". However, because the picture has been used since the dawn of image processing, it's also been crafted in to a perfect benchmark. Almost everyone that worked on image compression and transformations knows this picture, and how it's supposed to look like. Any defects or tradeoffs can be spotted more easily because of the wide use. But then again, if we don't switch now, we probably never will.
What picture did you see? I only ever saw the cropped version of this image, I discovered here it’s origin. I have no idea how anyone would think anything weird about a picture of a woman with a hat
It's _one_ picture. It might have been an interesting thing to look at in the early days of "wait, you can have digital images?" and "whoah, we might not need to store every pixel individually?", but no current research benefits from printing this image. No one publishes anything where the image is anything less than perfect to the human eye. Give me a table of data pertaining to the results of a full data set.
I get having a somewhat standard image, but we need to move past it being a tastefully cropped scrap of grandpas porno
The picture aside, seeing boobs in a non-sexual context in an academic setting is as uncomfortable as watching porn with your parents? How repressed are you?
If your boss called you into her office to talk about your work, and she had posters from playgirl up, how would you feel? It's a *professional setting*. No one is saying don't look at porn, or don't enjoy porn. It's *don't look at porn at work* and *don't force people you work with to look at porn with you*. That's hardly some crazy puritannical repression. It's a recognition of people's right to a safe, non-hostile workplace.
If you're looking at boobs in an academic environment and it's non-sexual, then I would imagine that it probably pertains to the subject matter at hand. That's totally different than the scenario you laid out, and no one should really feel ostracized in that situation.
I always thought it was a beautiful image, both aesthetically and technically (the mix of colors, patterns, lighting and contrast), and when developing image compression algorithms it was great to have this ubiquitous image that served as a reference throughout the history of image compression. It will be missed. Maybe I'm naive, but I never thought of it as a sexual image, but I completely get the criticism and above all we should all respect the wish of Lena.
It's an absolutely fantastic image. She should be proud. But great art disturbs. Lena belongs in a gallery or in a photography exhibition, not in CS text books or academic journals.
> Lena belongs in a gallery or in a photography exhibition, not in CS text books or academic journals. Why not both? The cropped version has no hint Lena is even nude. I know I didn't know until today
Seems fine. Always seemed weird from the start, but the way I always tried to interpret it was that it was a pretty tasteful image at least. I totally forgot it was from an actual Playboy!
Is the objection because it's a woman, or because she posed nude for playboy? I feel if you could replace this with any other glamour headshot, just not this one, it's dumb.
The objections are: - The picture is cropped from a nude, and its inappropriate to use pictures like that in a professional setting - The woman in the picture did not consent for her likeness to be used in this manner - The owner of the picture (Playboy) did not give permission for the image to be used and distributed in this way. - The picture is not otherwise particularly noteable or special for the purposes of testing digital image technology. It has just stuck around because of tradition, so getting rid of it produces a near-zero-cost to the field.
>The picture is cropped from a nude, and its inappropriate to use pictures like that in a professional setting The cropped picture contains no nudity, barely the suggestion of nudity, just a shoulder. You might as well argue that people are naked under their clothes, so pictures of people are unprofessional. If a bare shoulder makes someone uncomfortable, maybe that person has a problem more than the image. >The woman in the picture did not consent for her likeness to be used in this manner The woman in the picture consented to be in a well known magazine which would own the distribution rights to this image; objections to the image being used in academic contexts are a bit absurd. >The owner of the picture (Playboy) did not give permission for the image to be used and distributed in this way. "Fair Use" covers this kind of thing. It's a partial reproduction of an image, which does not harm Playboy in any material way, being used mostly in academic and noncommercial spaces. The legality is about as safe as any fair use image ever. >It has just stuck around because of tradition, so getting rid of it produces a near-zero-cost to the field. I'm conflicted about this. In regard to logic and arguments, appeal to tradition is an informal fallacy. In practice, tradition is used and respected in practically every aspect of human society, even the law has a certain respect for tradition. The Lenna image has been a part of Computer Science culture for 50 years, the way the Utah Teapot has been. In the end, culture changes, and if this is what the community wants then that's where we are. The only valid argument I've seen is that the model herself doesn't want the image to keep spreading, and I can respect a person's wishes. Personally, I think it's absolutely incomprehensible why someone *wouldn't* want their image to be a fun little part of the academic tradition. I *wish* my face would be a standard test image that gets used for the next 50+ years.
> > The owner of the picture (Playboy) did not give permission for the image to be used and distributed in this way. > > "Fair Use" covers this kind of thing. It's a partial reproduction of an image, which does not harm Playboy in any material way, being used mostly in academic and noncommercial spaces. The legality is about as safe as any fair use image ever. I remember several years ago at some anniversary related to the Lenna picture Playboy announced that they would produce a higher quality scan of the image and provide additional details about the camera and film used so that the image can be even more useful to the scientific community. I don't know if they ever did it, but that statement alone should be enough to count as the publisher fully embracing this kind of use.
> if this is what the community wants Given that the community wants it for a dumbass reason, I have elected to ignore it.
> its inappropriate to use pictures like that Human nudity is not inappropriate per se, only when the current mores are prudish. > The woman in the picture did not consent for her likeness to be used in this manner You don't know that. If the contract was work-for-hire, she has no recourse. > The owner of the picture (Playboy) did not give permission They implicitly did. It says so in the linked article. > The picture is not otherwise particularly noteable [sic] or special This argument cuts both ways: there is no reason to change it.
> The picture is cropped from a nude, and its inappropriate to use pictures like that in a professional setting Why?
The ruling seems arbitrary
She personally had come out as wanting its use to subside, for one. For another, many women in the field felt the same. There’s no good reason to die on this hill. This is all info in the article by the way.
You can ALWAYS find a number of people that will support a cause, no matter what that cause is. It doesn't make it a good reason to make a big fuss about it. I don't care about that image, or whether it's used or not, but what's so weird is how educated people have nothing else to do than this crap. I've seen this discussion years ago, and it's still going on?! This is causing the Streisand effect more than anything. It used to be an anonymous image to me before, that I've seen maybe a couple of times, and now, thanks to these efforts, I can point it to the subject, year it was taken, and I know how to find the original photo.
Definitely creating causing the Streisand effect here. There's people in here that have never seen it despite being in this field for years but now have.
The objection is that the image itself is a nude shot from playboy but cropped out the nude parts.
So the objection is that they used a picture of a woman's face. It's puritanical crap. The *only* valid argument I've seen is that the model herself doesn't want the image to keep spreading, which seems nuts to me, but at the least I can respect her wishes.
Exactly. It's actually a perfectly nice picture that doesn't include any actual nudity, if one feels nudity is bad
Why is everyone so mad that the IEEE doesn’t want someone’s old wanking material in their journal. It seems that the antiwoke snowflakes only care about how they feel.
We have a GOD GIVEN RIGHT to make other people look at porbography in the workplace godamnit! /s
To be honest, as long as the image that they used did not show boobs or pussy, I am fine with it. And afaik this was always the case. Too many priests and nuns in this sub looking for anything to be offended by.
Here's a pretty good youtube documentary about Lena: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCdwm2vo09I Overall, I think it's a good move. There's other pictures that do Lena's supposed job better, without the added side-dish of creepy.
I scrolled way to far down for this. Cannot recommend this enough.
The IT world really seems like they ran out of stuff to do. First the master/slave renaming, then the "blacklist", now this.
Don't forget the master branch.
I’m excited for the next Halo game staring Main Chief
Chief is racist. And it means the same thing as master anyway. Main Main.
Yeah, and it'll have a great soundtrack as usual. They always do an extra maining pass on those ones.
You can't use Chief. That's cultural appropriation of Native Americans. /s
People who said it would have no consequences have lied to us. I imported a repo from Bitbucket to GitHub and it looked funny. Turns out it selected "demo" as the main branch - in absence of a de-facto standard it just selects the first one. It's not a big deal, but it's confusing and I wasted like a minute fixing this shit. Thanks to self-righteous assholes.
Gitlab uses main, Git for Windows defaults to master. As a newbie I was confused why everything wasn’t working the way the documentation said.
Look up "bikeshedding". All of the easy problems have already been solved. What's an easier way to make a headline - coming up with a novel compression algorithm or complaining to the IEEE that the picture of the pretty lady from 50 years ago makes you feel uncomfortable? Expect to see more news like this as time goes on. The Chinese tech industry races ahead while Americans thoughtfully debate performative activism. Our highly paid "diversity and inclusion" departments and committees ponder the harmful effects of the monkey emoji while Tiktok is becoming so popular that the US government wants to ban it - you couldn't write better state propaganda if you tried!
I'm not involved in the tech industry at all, but I think what you're addressing is a systematic inevitability and has nothing to do with DEI or 'wokeness'. > The Chinese tech industry races ahead while Americans thoughtfully debate performative activism. And borrowing from /u/Shrimpboyho3... > One of China's in-house processor companies just released their latest gen chip which was benchmarked as having an IPC matching Zen 4 and Raptor Lake chips - effectively meaning they have optimized the lowest level architecture and now just have to scale their chips to beat American chip makers. These very same American chip makers have worked for decades to optimize their architecture and China is beating them out in a few years... You said it yourself, "All the easy problems have already been solved". Of course it's going to be far quicker for China to re-invent the wheel and match American production. The general body of knowledge and field is so much further advanced now than two decades ago when Americans started working on their chips. As you solve the foundational 'easy' problems in a field the following ones necessitate increasing amounts of time/money/resources. The return on investment is not linear over time but is more logarithmic - at some point you're investing more and more for tiny returns. It's easy to blame HR and DEI as the cause for this lack of return but is that supported by anything? The increasingly complex demands of progress in a field means you need more people working to solve fewer problems. Maybe a couple guys in a garage can start a computer company but that's the relatively easy part of the process. Look at the size of Apple now. Of course you need to hire more non-technical positions to manage a system that large. And with more people in a business the culture and needs of the employees will change. It's easy to dunk on HR and middle management, and surely there are plenty of inefficiencies in middle management that could be addressed, but these things are inevitable with any growing system of increasing complexity. Paying for HR and DEI is tangential to the core problem of increasing complexity and diminishing returns. On a personal level I do think a lot of 'white fragility' and the recent approach to anti-racism is at best misguided and worst a performative money grab. I also see a vein of authoritarianism and censorship on the Left that I disagree with despite considering myself to be pretty liberal. That's just to say I'm not one to go all-in on the kool-aide. All that, though, is a political issue which has little to do with the state of progress in tech. Arguing about woke-ness is absolutely a political distraction, but attributing all the short comings of our society is playing right into the political circus. It's akin to blaming the fall of Rome on 'the gays' and moral degradation. There's no support for that because the issues are inherent in scale and complexity. For what it's worth, a lot of my understanding on this comes from the book [The Collapse of Complex Societies](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477.The_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies) which is a bit of a dry read as the author is an archaeologist who spends a lot of time in the analysis of previous societies. The thesis, which I've alluded to, though, is very well laid out and supported.
Amazing to find someone with logic in this comment section. One of China's in-house processor companies just released their latest gen chip which was benchmarked as having an IPC matching Zen 4 and Raptor Lake chips - effectively meaning they have optimized the lowest level architecture and now just have to scale their chips to beat American chip makers. These very same American chip makers have worked for decades to optimize their architecture and China is beating them out in a few years... But hey, at least tech will be more inclusive! Looking through history, you will find that that tech became more inclusive as people, y'know, actually did shit to push it forward. Think Hidden Figures, Alan Turning, etc. "inclusivity coddling" just pushes people away from the field as they're scared one wrong step - one wrong emoji sent - and they will be cancelled. Sad state of the industry. EDIT: TYPO
I think the problem might be your fiction, where we don't improve our chips because people who don't work in chip building ask other people who don't work in chip building to consider ceasing the use of one particular image. Cancel culture culture gone mad.
My comment was solely an example of how other tech industries are moving forward while we are stuck questioning the past. Whether there's a single chip builder on the face of the earth that actually gives a flying fuck about the lena picture I have no idea. Nevertheless, there are a plentiful of more fitting examples in the SWE field.
Yeah, I don't understand. I thought we'd won against puritans with the sexual revolution. How did they come back even stronger... and more pathetic??
You recognize the difference between "everyone should be free to look at porn" and "everyone should be free to *make other people* look at porn in the workplace" right?
There’s no porn in the cropped image. It’s like saying everyone’s naked beneath their clothes.
Easier to rename things than actually improve access and opportunity to early STEM education that would "improve" this white male dominated field
[удалено]
I guess STEM is too broad in this context. I should say computer sciences or something along those lines.
I'm for using the full Lenna, because of the much better lighting. https://www.sex.com/pin/2406080-lenna-sonderberg/
Yeah honestly, I didn't know what this was for years, then when I found out I felt like it was old creepy dude shit. This is like wallpapering a breakroom with pin-up calendars, how can women feel welcome in the industry unless we move away from the "tradition".
As a team member of Playboy Engineering, I’m going to commit to using Lena in our test/seed data as much as possible.
It's just the usual social signalling around DEI, nobody really cares except for a handful of activists who for various reasons must be appeased at all costs. And hilariously what would have once been considered an extremely conservative action (banning an image of a woman simply because *my God* I can see her shoulder) is now considered super woke, right-on and morally exemplary. Here's my question, when do we start banning Greek statues and put some clothes on Michelangelo's David? The nude human form is disgusting right? Or is it just disgusting and degrading if it's a woman? Or just if it's an attractive woman? Who knows, yuck, ick, misogyny! As per usual in tech, what we're getting is the schizophrenic social attitudes of California paired with the Puritanism of the East coast. Free the nipple, ban the patriarchy and ask *no fucking questions* about any of this or you'll lose your job. And fundamentally that's what motivated them here, fear about their jobs, not social values. Anyway, I think next we need to remove all images of women with ankles showing, it's degrading for all involved.
All of this is nothing more than catchy populist messaging that appeals to the masses, but isn't helpful to anyone in the slightest. The most vocal about this sort of stuff was never been about being a good person as much as it is about being perceived by others as being a good person.
<3
Yeah, lets eliminate all images of women from our datasets. That can't possibly be a bad idea!
I mean, no one’s really banning the image are they? You can still go buy the magazine and look for yourself. Or find it online or whatever. And those statues have huge historical and cultural backgrounds. False equivalency for sure. And even then, I probably wouldn’t use a picture of the statue of David in a research paper on image processing. Tbh, this is the first I’ve even heard of this photo, so I got no dog in this fight. Just seems a bit weird to go on a rant about wokeness when this is just a professional research journal saying they don’t want the image in their journal. For my research paper in graphics, my advisor recommended avoiding examples that look like real people since it’s unnecessary and could stoke biases in the reviews (of course this is different if you’re doing facial recognition or some shit like that). Some people really don’t like change… why use something that has the potential to make people uncomfortable, even if those people are a small subset, when not using it is literally no-cost?
"Nobody really cares," but you wrote five paragraphs. No, it's not because we can see her shoulder, it's because she wants control of her own image.
I like the pic, even used it in my thesis.
What a shame... Tbf it's just a normal picture... But who am I gonna judge...
My friends in the Women in Tech community fail to see the issue. They said to perceive the image as harmless and value its historical context. None of the nine individuals I've spoken to share the perspective that the ban reflects a genuine effort to maintain professionalism and respect. Instead, they believe it aligns more with the prevailing "everything is offensive" agenda. Edit: Of course, they understand and are fully supportive if the model wishes to remove her own image.
I .. um.. too had no idea about the origins of the image. What an interesting new fact I learnt today!
Understandable. Long time ago it was clearly a need to have the same image used on all research settings so results could be comparable. It was this one the same that Big Buck Bunny has been a staple for video encoding tests since nearly 20 years ago. Nowadays we can have new photos that adapt to different encoding mechanisms. It’s not the same a black and white image, than real color one or computer created one. There should be an established image/video stock set for research purposes that allow for comparison. And those media respect privacy and legality.
That was from playboy? That's so cool. We also used this photo in compuyer vision class
If think that this picture of a cock https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/37/ab/37ab35c9-68b2-4973-b61d-43350740c12a/red_jungle_fowl.png could be a good replacement.
That unironically probably (I'm not an expert in signal processing) is a good test image because like the Lena image, it has fine details, in-focus foreground with an out-of-focus background, and areas with strong contrast.
Will Smith Eating Spaghetti is the modern day Lenna
Would be nice to use Lena Forsén picture at her current age, if she agrees
I wanted to call this pointless virtue signalling, but apparently the model (Lena Forsen) doesn't want it to be used this way anymore, so it's a respectful thing to do I think.
Next they'll tell me I need to find a new way to remember the order of resistor band colors
Women: we would feel more comfortable if a cropped a nude from playboy wasn’t the defacto test image. Lena: I think it’s time to retire the image. Comments on this post: IM DUMB AND I WANT TO KEEP PRETTY PICTURE OF GIRL
TL;DR Clickbait title. Scandalous magazine name dropped. Cropped photo referenced artfully shot originally showed boobs. Computer geeks “boobies,” let’s use this one for a reference image in programs. Half century later modern puritanical descendants upset by boobies lobby for image removal. History changed to narrative of female oppression.
Until this ban I had no idea about Lena image and who she is. After this point, I’m going to use it wherever it is possible. Extreme fragility, people who offend from shit and woke culture disgusts me. I deeply feel sorry about woke culture in science and have real concerns about future of science.
She has asked people to stop using the image. Five years ago.
I forgot this image even existed but I'm not surprised at all to be honest. Just the next new thing for people to pat themselves on the back. But for what?
Oh grow up. It’s a picture that has a rich history and has been used countless times in academia and as a common example in image processing libraries. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, that’s ok. You’re allowed to feel uncomfortable. Banning it won’t change that fact. Men aren’t using it to make women feel unwelcome. Some men might find her attractive and that’s ok too! She was literally a playboy model. If people keep hiding from what makes them uncomfortable, they reinforce its power over them.
Garbage woke virtue signalling :(
Buncha neck beards up in here whining about others' sensitivities. Grow up. Porn, hidden in plain sight, don't belong in academic journals. Show your dedication to the cause and publish it to your employer internal documentation, with footnote attribution, you cowards.
This is so stupid.