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My High School CS Homework Is the Centerfold
theodp writes: To paraphrase the J. Geils Band, Maddie Zug's high school computer science homework is the centerfold. In a Washington Post op-ed, Zug, a student at the top-ranked Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, argues that a centerfold does not belong in the classroom. "I first saw a picture of Playboy magazine's Miss November 1972 a year ago as a junior at TJ," Zug explains. "My artificial intelligence teacher told our class to search Google for Lena Soderberg (not the full image, though!) and use her picture to test our latest coding assignment...Soderberg has a history with computer science. In the 1970s, male programmers at the University of Southern California needed to test their image-processing algorithm. They scanned what they had handy: the centerfold of a Playboy magazine. Before long, the image became a convention in industry and academia."
(Wikipedia has a nice background, too.)
We demand that you CHANGE EVERYTHING! Everywhere! In every thing that you enjoy or spend time doing, you must alter it for our benefit! Fuck you and fuck your history and fuck your interests!
The Mesa Teapot is an outrage to hard-working lower and middle-class developers too. To use such an upper-crust elite symbol as a teapot, partially a symbol of British oppression, is offensive to me.
The Lena Rossi image is famous, but tossing it into a CS class with a bunch of eighteen-year-old men is just asking for a hostile work environment for any women in the class. The really sad thing is that the instructor is so in love with the old photo that he (I'm guessing) couldn't anticipate the problem and didn't come up with a better photo to use. That particular image is so low-resolution and has such poor colors that using it as a standard for doing CS instruction in 2015 would be stupid even if it weren't a problem in any other sense.
This is dumb. Lena headshot is the standard image for virtually every image processing publication in the past 25 years. It's just a headshot for crap's sake.
Some people just like to complain.
Grow up.
Its a woman face and she's very proud of her picture. If there is anything about the image and the way its being used that bothers you, YOU have a problem and need to shut your uppity ass up.
You will not survive in the world if you unable to look at the face of a smiling woman in a photograph. You need to be evaluated. You aren't principled you're an uppity drama queen that no one is going to give a shit about in 2-4 years.
To take that a step further, if the naked female form bothers you in general, you also have serious issues and one has to wonder how you managed to cope with yourself this long in life? Or is it just jealousy?
Theres pretty much no way you come out of this without making it clear that your just being an uppity cunt. I presume the statue david and Venus shouldn't be in your lesson plan either?
If this post offends you, then it also applies to you, so just consider that when replying.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
That's pretty basic. This is 2015, not 1975, and while there is still probably room for playboy pinups in some public places (let's say, at an auto garage), a CS classroom with coeds is not one of them.
Naa naa na-na-na-na na na na nanana nah nah!
That picture has been a standard for a long time. I can remember the original article in an IEEE magazine. Unfortunately the young kids of today still need to grow up.
Cave paintings depicting fertile women with large breasts were drawn by MALE cave dwellers 10000 years ago. DOWN WITH THE PATRIARCHY!!!
So, full disclosure, I am gay guy and most of my friends are women. They (we) ogle pictures of sexy guys in magazines and post them on message boards etc. all the time.
The problem here is not female nudity.
The problem is not nudity.
The problem is a RELIGIOUS legacy of people being ashamed of their bodies. Women, especially, are taught to feel ashamed of their bodies.
Note that the complaint isn't from the subject, or the photographer, or the publisher.
It is from women who have been taught to be so ashamed of their own bodies that they have to project that shame on other women who are more proud of their bodies.
These are the same women who tell a plus-size (that's "chubby") semi-pro model friend of mine to stop posting pictures of her in sexy clothing all over her Facebook feed, because there's something wrong with being proud of your body and ugh it's disgusting and blah blah all sorts of bullshit which comes down to, "My daddy/mommy told me this was bad so I'd feel bad doing it so you can't do it either."
Grow the fuck up.
And guys who think that such images are an excuse to objectify women are behaving equally awfully, but this is not the problem right here.
It is not a standard head shot. It is a sexualized model. If a woman is looking at you in a sexually suggestive way, you don't have to see her naked body to realize she is looking at you in a suggestive way. Twenty years of cheap digital cameras and we still have this shit. Damn.
LOL you are a fucking prude. Who gives a fuck if she's looking sexual. Let's ban all pictures with a sexual looking expression then. Will that satisfy your taste for SJW? FFS, get a clue man.
Holy shit, it's like I woke up behind the looking glass. The social justice mob officially went full circle, screeching about completely ordinary photos of women. It's like a bizzaro world version of fundamentalist Islam that forbids depictions of the Prophet.
From a purely technical POV, it's never seemed like a great test image to me. It's soft, the red channel is washed out, the blue channel is noisy, there's absolutely no green or cyan (in the sense of pixels where green is the strongest channel, or red is the weakest channel) and very little blue.
Also, they cropped out her knockers and bum.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I was reading just yesterday about how film color targets were racist because they were calibrated for Caucasian skin-tones.
We don't make things anymore, it would just offend people
in the early 80's i started working in the photofinishing industry
custom color and black and white HAND enlarging and such
lenna was one of the KODAK standard test images
almost EVERY book on photography has her image ( the G RATED VERSION!!! )
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
0h come on, you could say similar about the handsome/pretty models used in workstation/office furniture magazine.
I'm not saying whether it's a good idea or a bad one, but isn't the fact that it's a defacto standard, sort of the objectors' point? Yes, you're right: it's a long-established tradition, with deep roots going back to when the computer room was a total sausagefest. I can't playfully slap the secretary's ass and then get off the hook by saying, "oh c'mon, we dudes have been doing that forever! It's always been like that. Quit trying to change our culture."
Changing the culture is an explicit part of a lot of peoples' agenda, because nobody really likes the damn computer room sausagefest (we just don't know what to do about it, which is why I really have no idea whether or not the picture is really a problem).
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
...and you're worried about a fucking photograph!
This perfectly summarises everything that's wrong with the western world today.
Right! We should stop all women from looking at people in sexually suggestive ways. That will solve the problem of ... wait, what's the problem again?
Knowledge Brings Fear
What the devil do you want, an image of Golda Meir? Lena is looking over her bare shoulder at the camera. She looks healthy and attractive. She's even wearing a hat!
Her mouth isn't open, her tongue isn't visible, her eyes aren't half-closed, she's not gesturing "come hither" with her finger, etc., etc.
If that image is sexually suggestive to you, the problem is squarely between your ears.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
> It is a sexualized model
Saying it's so because that's what you see, is not a compelling argument to avoid using it.
This story is the first time I understood it came from a playboy magazine. *shrug*
I don't see the issue.
* computer history - taught
* image compression - taught
* art history - taught
* computer art appreciation - taught
Anyone who thinks this image is an issue is pushing their so-called morality on the rest of us. It is their own perversion on display, not those of anyone else.
I cannot blame this youngster for his world views. His parents, their religion and teachers taught this shame.
Would it have been as reprehensible if it had been a similar picture of Grace Hopper? Or does is it tainted by where it was published?
No complaints over this?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
The professor mentioned it was originally a nude photo, we were surprised, everybody (male and female) looked it up later on. End of story.
Why do Americans make such a fuss of things?
It is not a standard head shot. It is a sexualized model.
She wasn't a model, she is a girl that did a gig for the lulz.
was from the text used in a graduate-level data communication course I took many, many years ago. It said, more or less, that "Communication requires three things: a shared model, a shared set of symbols, and a common system for associating symbols with objects from that model."
Now here's the thing that I think is wise about that idea. People respond as if something like a famous photograph has an objective meaning and that everyone *should* somehow all have the same reaction to it. But intelligent, educated people should know better than that. Personally, I see a considerable element of self-deprecating humor in this particular choice of photo. However nobody should be particularly surprised that not everyone is laughing.
After many years of watching people drag out the pitchforks and torches when they're offended, or man the ramparts when they're offended by that offense, here's what I think the sensible way to handle this kind of thing is. When you feel offended by something someone says, say so, but without accusing the sayer of bad faith or collusion with the Forces of Oppression. When you have given offense you apologize and express yourself a different way.
You have a choice: you can either accept that people coming from different experiences will view things differently than you and work around that; or you can try to convince everyone in the world to think and feel the same way you do about everything.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
1. "OMG I didn't know how to use the application and they told me to check the man page.. the MAN page! No wonder there are no women in STEM!!!
2. "OMG I just got herpes, it should be called HISpes because men give it to women!"
3. "OMG moon is spelled close to man. We need to destroy the moon so more women can get jobs in STEM!"
4. "Warrroooo! Grrrrrr. Lalalalalala mansogeny!"
Yes, another sad crazy person for whom Political Correctness is a competition, not a goal.
They scanned what they had handy
Not true. They had lots of images handy, but none of them were suitable for the test they wanted to do. They wanted something with a variety of color and preferably a human face. They used the top part of Lena's image because it was a good example of what they wanted to test.
Once upon a time, there was a high school CS class who's teacher chose a picture of a noose hanging from a tree as the subject of an image-processing test. When it was pointed out that this material might send a discouraging and undesirable message to black students in the class, the internet erupted in protest.
"Come on, people, it's just a picture of a rope! No big deal. Grow up!"
"We all have ropes lying around, you know. I have one in my garage. You probably do too."
"Do these idiots realize that our clothes are held together with thread? Tiny little ropes, all around us! There're everywhere! Ahhhh!"
"Oh, great, I bet they're going to ban rodeos now, too. All those cowboys walking around with loops of rope in their hands. Can't have that! OMG, where does it end!"
------
Context matters. The same image/concept/action that in one context is entirely benign may send a hostile message in another context. The Lena photo would be fine in an art museum, or in a fashion magazine, but as material in a CS classroom it sends a hostile message to some students. Anyone who can't understand that either a) has no ability to see things from anyone's point of view but their own, or b) actually approves of the hostile message, or both. Of course there's no changing the minds of people like that. We can only hope to outlast them.
I don't agree that using a picture of a woman's face for an assignment is a good analogy for lack of diversity in technology classes at this school. The entire article assumes that the audience thinks Playboy Centerfolds are pornographic and objectify women, therefore has no place in the class. It seems silly to me that the author believes censorship will contribute to encouraging a more diverse classroom environment.
I think a better idea would be to encourage the students to participate in bringing their objections to the teacher, whom could let them do the assignment with a different image.
(Reposting as myself, forgot to log in)
Once upon a time, there was a high school CS class who's teacher chose a picture of a noose hanging from a tree as the subject of an image-processing test. When it was pointed out that this material might send a discouraging and undesirable message to black students in the class, the internet erupted in protest.
"Come on, people, it's just a picture of a rope! No big deal. Grow up!"
"We all have ropes lying around, you know. I have one in my garage. You probably do too."
"Do these idiots realize that our clothes are held together with thread? Tiny little ropes, all around us! There're everywhere! Ahhhh!"
"Oh, great, I bet they're going to ban rodeos now, too. All those cowboys walking around with loops of rope in their hands. Can't have that! OMG, where does it end!"
------
Context matters. The same image/concept/action that in one context is entirely benign may send a hostile message in another context. The Lena photo would be fine in an art museum, or in a fashion magazine, but as material in a CS classroom it sends a hostile message to some students. Anyone who can't understand that either a) has no ability to see things from anyone's point of view but their own, or b) actually approves of the hostile message, or both. Of course there's no changing the minds of people like that. We can only hope to outlast them.
And i read the comments. I really have no fucking clue what anyone is talking about. God damn it slashdot.
Speaking of the "come hither" look, here's Golda with a similar pose: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/1914_Golda_in_Milwaukee.jpg.
It's the only way to make the system fair.
(And no, I don't think it would be "fair" but it would be waaaay funnier.)
So it's standard. Windows is too. That don't mean it's the best tool for the job.
This ain't the best picture for the job (it was picked because it was handy, not because it's objectively superior to any of dozens of other pics), and it definitely doesn't mean that you should be explaining to your 11th grade Computer Programmers that this particular image isn't really porn because it's only a headshot and all good computer programmers use it because they've always used it.
Somebody will freak out, and instead of spending an hour or three devoted to learning image processing you'll spend a week or month explaining that, no this is not Porn because it was shot in Playboy, this is not evidence that the Liberals have stormed the Academy and are corrupting our daughters, and really Rev. Patterson I have no fucking clue why you're talking with me about evolution when I teach CompSci...
Oh you thought feminists would be the problem? That's in College. In High School the problem demographic is typically evangelical Christians with either a) no college education, or b) an education from a conservative institution that simply refuses to believe that intellectually honest and intelligent people exist outside the confines of the Evangelical Community; and since they always fucking show up for School Board elections they can get your dumb ass fired quite easily. As a High School teacher you'd expect some push-back from feminist students (or at least some dirty looks, combined with decisions not to take the second half of the course), but it's much more common for a School Board to screw over a teacher whose offended the local Baptist Pastors then the National Organization for Women.
So if you're a High School teacher you'll recommend a bunch of pictures that have nothing to do with porn, and then when some kid shows up with a project based on Lena you deal with it then.
She's going to faint once she sees some of the images in her art history class.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
I'm not saying whether it's a good idea or a bad one, but isn't the fact that it's a defacto standard, sort of the objectors' point? Yes, you're right: it's a long-established tradition, with deep roots going back to when the computer room was a total sausagefest.
That's why it's not a problem. It wasn't chosen to be offensive.
Changing the culture is an explicit part of a lot of peoples' agenda, because nobody really likes the damn computer room sausagefest (we just don't know what to do about it, which is why I really have no idea whether or not the picture is really a problem).
It's not a problem, and I know what to do about it! In this particular case, anyway. Just add in a similar photograph of a man's face, cropped from a similar and equivalent picture of a man. People photograph men, too. Sometimes with no clothes on. Yes, I know, it's shocking, but it's true. Men aren't as likely to wear makeup, so you can take the opportunity to talk about the differences in processing of the two classes of image instead of pretending that there are no differences between men and women at all.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It is not a standard head shot.
Parent wrote "standard image", not "standard head shot". It's the image itself that is a standard, not the method used to take it.
It is a "standard image", companies like Kodak used the image as a reference image for their tests.
No-one had a problem with the image whatsoever until someone started to dig up where it actually was from.
The problem isn't with the image itself but where it is from. Claim that it is from somewhere else and there isn't a problem.
Why does it matter what you use to test your CS homework, if a centerfold bothers you then maybe you need to mature abit.
Why go with Golda Meir when you can go with Fabio?
This nimrod will fit in perfectly in the Bay Area, she can be a social justice warrior like that idiot that's the CEO of reddit at the moment.
That's like saying "many people try to force others into doing stupid things, so anything I want to try to force you into is good, right and holy."
Some dumb-ass school rule stands as absolutely no legitimate justification for pop-culture repression of personal and consensual choice.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Hi all, computer vision scientist here. This image has been bothering me for a long time, and while my PhD advisor removed it from his assignments on my request, you are still guaranteed to see it at any conference in the field. Sure, it's just a face, and when I first saw it I thought it was a still from some glamorous old movie. I only found the truth when my undergraduate vision class thought we'd track down this actress we kept seeing and watch her work together to celebrate the end of our course -- needless to say, that did not happen.
Here's the thing: a picture can communicate more than just what's in the picture. Let's say you needed an image to test your algorithm on. You pick some guy's face, it goes in a journal, and later you find out this fellow made a name for himself as a rabid white supremacist. That's embarrassing, but you didn't know and the people reading your paper don't know, so you haven't hurt anyone and you just use a different picture next time. Now assume that you picked that picture *knowing* this person's history, and beyond that, knowing that the people you are showing it to *will know it as well*. In that case, there is something deeply wrong with you. If it is standard practice (or even considered acceptable) in the field, there is something deeply wrong with that community. Similarly, accidentally using a G-rated crop of a Playboy centerfold is an embarrassing mistake, but intentionally bringing up Playboy, even by reference, as a senior scientist in a professional and male-dominated setting is inappropriate and irresponsible. You could argue that the Playboy logo is a perfectly acceptable image for a slide in a professional talk, because after all it's just a bunny, but when everyone knows the context that would be a ridiculous thing to assert. The widespread knowledge in the field about this image means that it functions the same way.
A picture can stand for more than what it shows directly. When talented young women discover that the primary in-joke in this field is on them, they take their gifts elsewhere and we miss out. This picture, used by senior scientists from positions of power in professional settings, is threatening, it is damaging, and as a member of this field it is frankly embarrassing.
first they just wanted to be treated equal, but now that they have their nose in the tent they want to change everything to suite their tastes...
In a Washington Post op-ed, Zug, a student at the top-ranked Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, argues that a centerfold does not belong in the classroom.
The thing is, Maddie should have just used a picture of Justin Bieber for her homework (or someone equivalent to Justin Bieber). I am sure that the teacher would have adapted (even if it's not the current standard, it could become one).
And in her op-ed article, she should just have campaigned for that. Making light of the situation by making your own one-sided request sure beats telling everyone not to do something. Nobody likes to be told that they can't do something, even men. Instead of telling someone not to do something, replace it with a positive action they can do instead. And if she wants to win the argument, she should argue (tongue-in-cheek) that everyone, even the heterosexual boys in her class, should be using Justin Bieber from now on for learning image processing.
The first thing that needs to get done is to translate some of the current tutorials on image processing with a picture of Justin Bieber. The second thing that needs to get done is to improve on those tutorials in whatever way possible. If you get a bunch of teenage girls working on those two tasks, I can guarantee you that they'll learn something about Image Processing. And of course, the tutorial examples with Lena Soderberg won't disappear because of this, but at least, you'd be creating alternative materials, so you'd actually be giving high school teachers a choice in which materials to choose.
Is Lena by chance Hawaiian?
Table-ized A.I.
One could argue that this doesn't belong in any educational setting.
Playboy isn't porn. It's art.
This is the fundamental problem. Porn has been redefined to mean absolutely anything that references sex. Sorry, but that is a nonsensical and unworkable operational definition that is contrary to the reality of human experience and culture.
Playboy is not porn. It is art.
To claim otherwise is to be against freedom of expression as pertains to art. That is patently un-american (first amendment) and anti-humanist. All artists, progressives and liberals must be against such a stand, including technological artists, otherwise they are being hypocritical to their core philosophy.
that mannequin was undressing me with its eyes....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
It's just a sexy headshot for crap's sake.
Fixed that for you.
My take: it's not the world's biggest problem, but if it's necessary to provide comparisons with earlier papers go ahead and use Lenna, go right ahead. If you just need to illustrate a technique on human skin tones, pick something else and stop needlessly pissing people off.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"We Need More Women in Computer Science".
"Well not THAT woman."
#YesThatWoman
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I find this picture totally unacceptable! Mostly because they replicated the top line, because their scanner fucked up. Fortunately it features a friendly looking lady.
that mannequin was undressing me with its eyes....
You have been living in your mother's basement too long.
it definitely doesn't mean that you should be explaining to your 11th grade Computer Programmers that this particular image isn't really porn because it's only a headshot
So basically, your argument is that, even thought it doesn't show anything, the image is still pornographic. That's exactly like saying your post is nothing but pornography, because all the letters you used have at some point also been used in a porno.
Or better (worse?) yet, that all images everywhere are porn, because of Instant Rule 34. (WARNING!!! TOTALLY NSFW!!! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!)
How about a picture of a mountain, or food? Or if it's a face recognition class, then just some random ordinary-looking people in a public setting, rather than a model?
What the devil do you want, an image of Golda Meir? Lena is looking over her bare shoulder at the camera. She looks healthy and attractive. She's even wearing a hat!
Her mouth isn't open, her tongue isn't visible, her eyes aren't half-closed, she's not gesturing "come hither" with her finger, etc., etc.
If that image is sexually suggestive to you, the problem is squarely between your ears.
Social Justice Warrior are not renowned for their towering intellect and sense. Attack attack attack. HOW DARE YOU for questing?
Period. The instructor is an idiot. Leave the porn where it belongs, at home where you can do as you please. Not everyone likes, wants to see it, or uses it. Have a little regard for your fellow human beings.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
But the man face has to have a 2 to 4 week beard, ironically this is really interesting as a beard that old can be a pretty complex texture making it ideal for the tests.
Choice quote: "Lena became for the engineers something like what Rita Hayworth was for U.S. soldiers in the trenches of World War II."
More historical background available here and here.
I looked at the original full image. In that image, there is no part of Lena's body that is not on public display on beaches around the world.
And - even if there were - what of it? Do the people who are offended by the image not possess the same body parts? I mean, WTF? Don't they see all of that and more, every time they bathe?
Oh, I think I get it. They don't like their own bodies, how can we expect them to like images of bodies that are in any way similar to their own?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Objectively, yes, it has one feature which makes it superior to most other images. It is "the standard". That is, the same work has been done with the image a zillion times, and much of that work can be referenced for comparison.
It has already been mentioned that Windows is the "standard", and that the standard is not always the "best" tool for the job. I can agree with that. But, show me the Linux administrator who can't use Windows, and I'll show you an incompetent Linux administrator.
Same here. The COURSE wasn't built around this image, was it? TFA implies that this image was used for one assignment in the course.
If, in all other respects, the image were exactly the same, but the subject in the image was selling makeup, would people still be offended by it? If not, why not?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Short answer: Reproducibility. The image is one of several which have been commonly used in the literature for decades.
Also, it's actually, it's a really good photo for testing various types of computer vision algorithms - complex backgrounds (including a mirror), varying textures and colors (e.g. the hat feather thing), and a simple grayscale conversion works well.
.: Semper Absurda
That's why it's not a problem. It wasn't chosen to be offensive.
I'll buy it wasn't chosen to be offensive. So? Someone has to want to offend you, to be offensive? They were sitting around at work, with porn magazines out in the open. Does that really not strike you in any way to be misogynistic?
The problem isn't with the image itself but where it is from. Claim that it is from somewhere else and there isn't a problem.
Which itself is almost the definition of the ad hominem fallacy.
.: Semper Absurda
If you'd get your head out of your ass for one second and look, there is nothing objectionable about the Lenna test image itself. The issue has always been about what it represents and the history of how that image got into the set we typically use for testing.
Also, some people are hung up on the human body, that's the trigger for the vast majority of the naive puritanical parental outrage. And some people are concerned with the exploitation of women in a misogynist society and the history of that in male centric academic institutions, which is closer to the concerns of the student who brought this to everyone's attention.
It's a picture of a beautiful person, a picture with an ugly history.
The standard Lena used in cs is nothing more than a head that looks a bit 70s. Nothing more. Seems to me that the teacher's only gaffe was giving it historical context.
I doubt the face picture with a history really bothered her that much. She saw an opportunity of being published (that might help when applying to the good colleges) and went for it, maybe she even wrote the op-ed.
They were sitting around at work, with porn magazines out in the open. Does that really not strike you in any way to be misogynistic?
Oh yeah, they hated women so much, they wanted to look at pictures of them naked.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I do not wan't my daughters to grow up thinking that as females society expects them to be as obnoxiously stupid a troll as Maddie Zug is.
This needed to be said.
There's nothing wrong with a centerfold. The human body is a beautiful
thing and exceptional examples of the human body ARE nice to look at.
If you doubt this is true, how do you think Playboy made its empire ?
I"m sick to death of some prudish idiot trying to tell everyone else how to live.
Shut the fuck up, Maddie Zug, and learn the lesson that the world doesn't have to conform to
your wishes.
Ah to be young , idealistic, and stupid again.
This is High School, not PhD-level research. There is no point in comparing the tools a 16-year-old kid in 2015 makes to one made by ComSci PhDs in 1975. It is a waste of time.
Moreover, this is a high school class. It includes 16-year-old-boys who revel in excessive male horseplay, and have not mastered the fine art of turning it down because it's incredibly dickish. It also includes 16-year-old girls who have not mastered the fine art of dealing with excessive male horseplay/dickishness. By telling the kids they are using porn you will increase the excessive male horse-play by roughly infinity, which will in turn increase the misery of the poor 16-year-old girls by a similar amount. Your defense of this picture's use in the specific place this article is about (High School) is simply cruel, and the actual High School stopped using it for precisely this reason.
Most importantly this is a High School class. The boss isn't some wizened old PhD who thinks deeply about the abstract concept of Academic Freedom, it is an elected school board. The School Board consists of (in my experience) precisely two kinds of people: religious conservatives striving to Jesusify the country via the education system, and union shills striving to prevent the religious conservatives business allies from gutting their pensions. If the Jesusify people find out you used part of a pornographic photo in your class you get fired and call you evil because you probably believe in evolution, and your entire program gets cancelled., If the feminists go crying to the union about your misogyny for using part of said pornographic photo to teach your class, you get fired and your program, they will call you evil for threatening their campaign donations, the entire program gets cancelled, but at least they make sure you retain your equity in the pension plan.
So, in conclusion read the fucking summary. This is about High School, not a Post-Doc research symposium. The kids are not 20-something adults who can deal with porn in a mature and non-dickish manner. They are immature 16-year-old-kids who (as you probably remember) specialize in making each-other miserable, and you are advocating that they have yet another opportunity to do so.
There seems to be some rampant confusion that anything involving sex is sexist. It's not. And then come to find out, it's a fucking headshot. There is NO SEX AT ALL in this photo. If it was published in the NYT it would be fine. And therein lies the rub. (pun intended) It's not sexism they are worried about. It's sex. I bet they have no idea the Europeans let their high schoolers have overnight sleepovers with each other. You'd think the fucking world would end by now, if this were normal!
It was cute for the first hundred posts pretending to be stupid, but then it just got old.
Of course the entire point is it's from a Playboy centrefold and the kids googled for it, then went into Bevis and Butthead mode.
The "if your precious snowflake cant handle the image of a beautiful womans face wearing a hat" tripe is missing the point by so far it may as well be on the moon.
Looks like people aren't even bothering to read the summary before posting "with certainty" these days.
A teacher fucked up and told them to search. They didn't just get the "face", they got the info that it was a centrefold and suddenly all the baggage that comes with that became an issue. Storm in a teacup but even if taken seriously it's still very different to "That any classroom that has a woman's face in it is a hostile work environment" deliberate idiocy.
While developing the ICA channel's 256-color support, they needed images to test whether it was displaying them accurately. So of course, they chose porn, and described it as "the nipple pallet".
If it was Runaway1956's "girl on beach" in the same pose etc and you'd managed to get it in a gallery they'd have no problems bringing school groups into the gallery.
Since it's a Playboy centrefold that brings in extra baggage and implied support of that baggage, which in a school setting just sends the kids off into Bevis and Butthead mode.
The only fuckup was getting the kids to search for the image instead of supplying it.
The "they don't like their own bodies" is way off the planet since the whole discussion is about some kid finding it funny that his homework is from a centrefold.
Don't have to go so far - people are just complaining about the source of the material and not the content. They don't want their kids searching for stuff connected to Playboy magazine as part of their schoolwork.
I got a good laugh out of your "grow up" post in response to a teacher's obvious fuckup in telling kids slightly younger than yourself to do a classroom google search for something that's likely to lead to Playboy magazine. It's pretty good advice kid, but you should try following it yourself before unleashing such a torrent of shit on someone who's just posting about an amusing classroom fuckup.
You're not a kid? Why haven't you grown up mentally then? Why are you picking on little girls?
The computer room isn't a sausagefest because people inside try to keep women out, it's a sausagefest because it's the ghetto that people outside shove unattractive or non-conforming men into. You want to change the sausagefest stop demonizing the men in it. You can't keep screaming "sausagefest! neckbeards! fuckbois!" and act like you're not the origin of that stereotype.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Wow. Your limited view of school board members is really something. Maybe you're just projecting your own inner turmoil onto those board members?
As for the rest of your post - well - the boys AND the girls need to grow the fuck up. Oh - yeah - that's what high school is all about, right? Growing up?
The boys will eventually come to terms with being dicks, and the girls will eventually come to terms with the dicks. That's life.
I'm sorry that you were so damaged in the process of coming to terms with dicks. Unfortunately, it seems that it does happen sometimes.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
As put by arch-pluralist Isaiah Berlin, "[l]et us have the courage of our admitted ignorance, of our doubts and uncertainties. At least we can try to discover what others [] require, by [] making it possible for ourselves to know men as they truly are, by listening to them carefully and sympathetically, and understanding them and their lives and their needs." Pluralism thus tries to encourage members of society to accommodate their differences by avoiding extremism (adhering solely to one value, or at the very least refusing to recognize others as legitimate) and engaging in good faith dialogue.
similar pose? Since when has looking suggestively behind you over your naked shoulder been a similar pose to staring straight at you, fully clothed?
"Zug, a student at the top-ranked Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, argues that a centerfold does not belong in the classroom"
:)
So, I always knew the average american to be fairly prude - well, unless they are tweeting their nude behinds on a daily basis, 'cause that doesn't count, obviously - but this is crazy nuts. I've been in image processing research for the 15th year now, and Lena's face was among the very first test images I've ever saw. It was about 2 years later I found out where it's coming from, I smiled a bit, and went on with my work. As did hundreds and thousands of other image processing students before ad after me.
Well, until the the top-ranked Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology came along, 'cause well, there we can't tolerate such heresy. Heresy, I tell you! This just can't be! How dare one use the image of anice face as a test image, for decades nonetheless. Outrage, man, outrage.
Well, [most] idiots are funny
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
High School is not about growing up.
It's about surviving long enough to make it to college. You can grow up in college.
Yup, and people complain. I worked at an artificial intelligence lab one time and one researcher complained smutty images even though the most you saw was her shoulder. I didn't even know it was a centerfold image for several years after that.
Now on that note, if someone said "go google for Lena Soderberg", innocently thinking it was just a picture of a head, I could understand the problems that would come up...
The problem perhaps comes from googling for the name and ending up with links to Playboy instead of image analysis sites.
You were conceived by two naked people! And probably your mom gave your dad a funny luck on the way to the action, and got untamy to get him going. Life is not as clean as you pure soles would like to have it, sexual attraction & action is what keeps it going. Even in the class room. If that is considered hostile to women, that's just sick.
Incorrect. Image number 4 for me in a search for "lena soderberg" was this:
http://www.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://std3.ru/57/a9/1382360119-57a9226b58e2e1baa311e9f0f6fa0728.jpg&imgrefurl=http://imgarcade.com/1/lena-soderberg-original/&h=700&w=384&tbnid=sHNdiBO8gK9_6M:&zoom=1&docid=G3OImPX1TScqOM&ei=g8VFVbHPAYTsmAXfoICwBA&tbm=isch&client=firefox-a&ved=0CB8QMygDMAM
Don't bother with the long URL just do the search yourself.
So a fuckup by the teacher. Maybe an irrelevant storm in a teacup but the image does come up.
You're an asexual fuck-tard. Please commit suicide by ripping your unused penis off and bleeding to death.
The only fuck-up was the mother that birthed you.
Porn is not misogynistic.
That's because you're a fucked-up piece of shit. It used to be that teenagers were responsible adults, old enough to start families and support them. Shit like you have turned teenagers into over-sized children because you can't stand the idea that you might not be in control over a sexually-mature child who is perfectly capable to run their own life. Or would be, if you hadn't ruined them.
>Short answer: Reproducibility. The image is one of several which have been commonly used in the literature for decades.
If we are going by that standard we would probably have to use something like BBC Test Card F
>Also, it's actually, it's a really good photo for testing various types of computer vision algorithms - complex backgrounds (including a mirror), varying textures and colors (e.g. the hat feather thing), and a simple grayscale conversion works well.
Not really. Firstly we don't have great documentation on the hardware involved. The hardware involved is also highly non typical by modern standards (if your system is designed around drum scanned film and its 2015 you are doing something wrong). Using an image produced by a digital camera using Bayer filter would be more fit for purpose (the most obvious difference is that you will get more information on the green channel that the red and blue channel, this doesn't happen with film) . It would also avoid the rather messy copyright situation around the image.
Its not 1973 we are not short of digital images to use for testing any more. Chosing one that doesn't come from playboy is a reasonable choice.
Dog-Cow is overly abusive with his response - but he's not far off target. Most, not all, but most of my generation were grown up when they graduated from high school. Legal adults, with the right to vote, the right to drink, the right to fight for our country, the right to marry, the right to have children, and the right to work.
Today? WTF has happened to our country?
We need Charles Darwin to remind us of that "survival of the fittest" thing.
If the kids aren't ready to make adult decisions sometime between 15 and 20, then they are not fit for survival. If parents aren't ready to cut the apron strings by the time the kids are 20, then those parents are unfit, themselves.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Yeah, we'll just use a head shot of the Goatse guy. It's just a head shot, so everyone should be cool with it, right?
Very strong words - why exactly? Would you like high school CS teachers to discuss porn with their students or do you have some other motivation for your sad attempt at bullying me?
It's not the time, place or the person that should be trusted with doing it. By sheer co-incidence I'm currently reading a biography of a radio "shock-jock" who was driven out of high school teaching for having frank discussions about sex with his high school students until 3am (and other stuff that was suspected but not proven). It's not something that should be encouraged since teachers have so much influence over their students.
I suggest you get off the computer before daddy comes back and sees you have logged into his account.
I'd have thought the fact that it is copyright Playboy would have dissuaded academics from using it by now, but I suppose as long as no lawsuits are filed...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You seem to be confusing Playboy for classical art. It's not the nudity, it's the source and the nature of the image.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
WTF has happened?
There's no jobs that pay for high school educated kids. You need at least an Associate's, or you're in retail. If you're in retail you really can't be a parent because the scheduling is so fucked up I work one of these places, and they insist that all their employees should be able to be their, and chipper, with 7.5 hours between shifts, even the poor motherfuckers who have a half-hour commute and happen to be your fucking age).
OTOH, when you were 18 you could get a job that paid the equivalent of $20 an hour (it actually would have been more like $3 or $4, but inflation), with a set schedule, and good benefits, just by being a US Citizen who showed at work every day. With that much money, and no commitments, emotional maturity is a side-issue. As long as you were emotionally mature enough to avoid the legal system and show up at 9 AM you were fine. If weren't quite that mature you got to go to Vietnam.
But today you not only need to be mature enough to avoid the cops, you also have to be good enough academically to get into a real college (a two-year-program that has a track record of getting people jobs counts), if you're working your way through college you have to maintain a job with a terrible schedule plus school, which costs at least $10k a year (in the 70s, even after adjusting for inflation, most schools were under $5k), etc.
Baby boomers.
Your parents freaked out at things that most people today would think of as just part of High School, like losing your virginity and using any mind-altering substance. Can you imagine what they would have done if you'd said "yes Mom, this picture from Playboy is part of my class's assignment?"
And it's not because she's a stick-in-the-mud-no-fun-prissy-pants, it's because your Mom knows what being a 16-year-old-girl is like, and your Mom doesn't want you to make your classmates cry.
But, through your stoner-haze, you vaguely remember that most of your friends were claiming to do all that shit, and you're quite confident that you would have been fine if you had actually succeeded; and you have no experience whatsoever being a 16-year-old-girl you're whining because you don't want the boys to be denied the dubious pleasure of talking about their playboy-picture-using class.
This may not be a difficult issue to address. Why don't we just find an image of an attractive man (preferably a tastefully cropped bit of pornography) and make that one of our standard test images that we use when we use Lenna?
It sounds like the major objection is not that the Lenna image has a scandalous history, but that it seems unfairly biased towards heterosexual men / homosexual women. As researchers, we would prefer to keep using Lenna because we have years of experience looking at various portions of the image for artifacts. Adding a male image with a similarly scandalous history would address the gender imbalance without requiring us to stop using one of our standard benchmark images (and it's much less onerous that other changes/additions most us have made to make a reviewer happy).
Sounds like a heap of excuse making to me. We were discussing growing up, were we not? And, you bring up how badly the economy sucks. How does a bad economy justify immaturity? I simply don't see any connection.
Had you attacked my generation's parenting and nurturing skills, I would be right on board with the attack. Can't spank a child, can't speak harshly to a child, can't just drop kick the smart mouth into next week. How in hell did we EXPECT the kids to grow up, if they never face harsh consequences for improper conduct?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Cartman would call you pathetisad and I would be inclined to agree with him. You and Maddie should both take the time to learn why this image was used and grow up a little.
Because this is the one that someone chose 40 years ago and there is a lot to compare your work to. Given the fact that there is absolutely nothing at all offensive about this image, other than the source, why stop using it?
When did Slashdot get filled with so many people who don't have a basic understanding of research?
Except you don't. Even an image search with safesearch off gives you 1000 rated g images before you give up trying to find porn. No links to playboy on the first 3 pages of standard search either.
Have to wonder if anyone complaiend about those two women using Fabio images. He is looking very suggestive and the image probablly came from the cover of a romance novels. I am offended because romance novels tend to sexualize and objectify men.
TV test pattern, because it has a stereotypical representation of a Native American on it....
The whole purpose of a standard image is to be able to make direct comparisons between your work and the work of others. For better or worse, the Lena image (cropped so as not to show the naughty bits) IS the standard test image in this field, much as the old Indian Head was in the days before color TV.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Just put James Deen's headshot in all CS text examples. Preferrably, right after the cum shot. It will just look like a happy white male.
So there is something out there to offend everyone, and some who are offended by almost everything.
The picture in question? If you are offended by that photo, you are very close to the Offended by Everything portion of the spectrum. Either that or a member of some religion that believes that women should be covered with a garment that makes it impossible to see her face.
What is important is who we pay attention to
To assuage anyone's booboo feelings caused by the oppressive men's hegemony that has the nerve to show and use such an offensive image that apparently degrades all women, here are some appropriate and healing videos from Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Changing the culture is an explicit part of a lot of peoples' agenda, because nobody really likes the damn computer room sausagefest (we just don't know what to do about it, which is why I really have no idea whether or not the picture is really a problem).
If the picture is a problem, you got a problem.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That's why it's not a problem. It wasn't chosen to be offensive.
I'll buy it wasn't chosen to be offensive. So? Someone has to want to offend you, to be offensive? They were sitting around at work, with porn magazines out in the open. Does that really not strike you in any way to be misogynistic?
Looking at porn and finding the women attractive is misogynistic? Let's run with that one. Gay guys who look at gay porn are now homophobic, as well as gay women who enjoy looking at porn pics of females.
So how it's suddenly some sort of historic baggage that you have to bring with the photo? That a very attractive woman's face and shoulder photo, which shows nothing offensive (unless you belong to a religion in which showing any part of a woman is offensive) now must have some sort of context that it cannot escape form?
So if we only showed her hat from the photo, it would likewise be sexually offensive? According to your rationale, it would be.
Christ, it's so complicated in today's modern world with misogynistic pornhats and people who like to look at things they apparently hate.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I agree with you in that the American culture is prudish. However, we're more likely to see a full naked female body on tv (breasts and vagina), than a man's butt and much less likely the penis. I would argue the insecurity falls more on the men.
For women, their parts get exposed more frequently in the media. It's all about making XYZ sexier for him. When is the last time the media latched on men's beauty standards for her? The last article I read was about how the "dadbod" or dad body is all the rage now. It gives us an excuse to be fat and lay any fear of male beauty standard to rest.
I'm a heterosexual married guy and I don't shy away from nudes from either genders. What I'm arguing is that there's an imbalance in the media, and women gets the brunt of it, which extends to academia due to silly tradition or legacy reasons which can be easily rectified with modern technology. I'm all for un-censoring nudity, but that cultural battle is much more difficult in this prudish country. Rectifying the sexism in CS which started in the 80s (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding) is still something we can fix before it gets out of hand.
Taking it to an extreme, but if the standard image was a Sambo stuffing fried chicken and watermelon in his mouth while being whipped, we wouldn't just say "it's ok because it's a long-established tradition"
It's not like this image is the biggest problem in the world. Nobody is saying it is. They're saying that it's one straw in the massive bale of sexist hay in the world. Why do you get so offended by people trying to clean up messes? There are probably dozens of things that could be improved in choosing a new image anyway.
The computer room isn't a sausagefest because people inside try to keep women out, it's a sausagefest because it's the ghetto that people outside shove unattractive or non-conforming men into. You want to change the sausagefest stop demonizing the men in it. You can't keep screaming "sausagefest! neckbeards! fuckbois!" and act like you're not the origin of that stereotype.
Well said. Why on earth would any woman want to get into that work world? Yet we're constantly told we are the lowest of the low.
By the way, sausagefest guy or gal forgot to add that we're living in our mom's basement, and have never seen a real vagina since exiting her's.
Odd how that photo of a woman's face is offensive, but all the hatred shoveled in shitloads on us isn't offensive.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The problem isn't with the image itself but where it is from. Claim that it is from somewhere else and there isn't a problem.
Which itself is almost the definition of the ad hominem fallacy.
No it's not.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
this heinous pornography that every human is guilty of must be stopped now!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
How about a picture of a mountain, or food? Or if it's a face recognition class, then just some random ordinary-looking people in a public setting, rather than a model?
Why - do you have a problem with attractive people? A lot of women absolutely hate attractive people. All of this is easly explained by mis-whatever beauty hatred is called.
Here is a column written by a woman that addresses just that.
http://un-ruly.com/why-women-h...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The connection is that your memory is biased by your economic success. You were not more mature then us, and you cover it by a combination of rationalizations and the fact it was trivial to get a good job in 1970.
Let me put it to you this way: according to your parents you were much less mature then they were, spoiled as children, and failures as adults. According to their parents your parents generation was much less spoiled then their (the grandparent's) generation. And on and on and on. One of two things is going on: either every generation of old people forgets precisely how pathetic they were at 18, or back in 1750 8-year-olds had the emotional maturity of our 60-year-olds.
OTOH, that was the Revolution generation, and you are probably in your 60s, so you may just have proven your case.
Stop being a pussy.
According to my parents? There is no doubt that my generation was far less mature than my parent's generation. I didn't find it necessary to go to the Pacific Ocean when I was fifteen years old to fight against Imperial Japan. There was no Pearl Harbor for my generation to respond to. My sister didn't find it necessary to work in a factory at age sixteen, to provide ammunition for her brothers in the Pacific. There are a lot of differences between my generation and my parent's generation.
My grandparent's generation? Huge difference again. My mother's children all survived to adulthood, except one infant. Grandma? Guess again. I'm a guy, so I don't really remember accurately - but memory indicates that the old woman birthed 18 babies - only 9 of whom lived to adulthood. The medical sciences sucked back then, and the Great Depression helped to ensure that not everyone had ready access to the best that medical science offered.
You may go on, seeking to minimalize the differences between generations, but there are real differences between us.
Trivial to get a good paying job? Really? You mean it wasn't necessary to work hard? Maybe you're confusing me and my generation with the sixties Union activists. Hell, a union member in good standing couldn't be fired for much of ANYTHING. Sorry, but I wasn't part of that socialist shindig.
Now - as for good paying jobs - have you CREATED any jobs, yourself? No? Why not? Open up a business, and put some people around you to work. Get after it, Pal. Do something useful.
Before you ask - I DID go into business. Ultimately, I failed. I employed 5 to 8 people for a few years, competing against the invading illegal aliens. I thought I was doing alright, until one of my people was injured. Ooops - no insurance. I got out from under that impending disaster, but realized it was only a matter of time before another injury would destroy me. So, I folded up, and went back to work for more established companies.
Why don't you do what I failed at, and prove yourself the better man?
Or, do you feel that government owes you a living?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Playboy disclaimed copyright because the image was so ubiquitous by the time they figured out, it was too late.
Still I'm going to quote the BMVA style guide (latex cls file) which uses Lena as an example image with the caption something like "if I never see this image again it will be too soon". While not exactly the official position on the BMVA, it's a common attitude among reviewers.
Personally, when I review papers, while this image won't put it instantly in the discard pile, it generally is a black mark because it's almost always indicative of laziness on the part of the author. There are very, very, VERY few legitimate uses of such an image. Most uses sadly are along the lines of "look at the features we get ", which makes me reply, "where are objective measures such as repeatability and information content or matching score? "
So suck it, MRAs. I get to review papers and you don't, so I get to decide. So there!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
From Wikipedia: "An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, means responding to arguments by attacking a person's character, rather than to the content of their arguments."
The Lenna image is supposed to be "bad" solely because of its provenance (Playboy) rather than because of any content, so the analogy to an ad hominem argument is pretty clear.
.: Semper Absurda
So you could have gone down to the plant, gotten a good-paying job, and then earned a very good wage for your hard work; but you're arguing that it was not trivial to get a good-paying job in your generation? Sounds pretty trivial to me. A lot more trivial then this generation has it. Hell, even a minimum wage job in your generation paid more then many full-time jobs do in this generation.
And this generation to get more you can't just show up at the plant with a High School Equivalency Certificate, you either need very good business skills, or you need a degree. Generally the degree is pretty advanced and it costs you a lot of money.
In my experience the correlation between hard work and compensation is non-existant. In many cases the worst-compensated work hardest because you don't give the guy with nothing to offer but his back a good wage. At the top you'll get people who work long hours, but they aren't actually working harder then anyone else. They're working smarter, and they're working longer. But they ain't working harder the guy loading a half-ton of mulch into a van by hand.
Way too many computer vision papers get through while relying on just one or a few images, or without any real results (e.g. "look at the features!"). I can't count the times a promising-sounding segmentation algorithm turns out to be based on one or two easy images...IMHO if anything you should probably become even more stringent about lazy image selection in your reviews.
.: Semper Absurda
Right! We should stop all women from looking at people in sexually suggestive ways. That will solve the problem of ... wait, what's the problem again?
It's either men are misogynists, or women are misogynists. If looking at an image of an attractive woman makes a person angry, they probably don't like wonen.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
No complaints over this?
Interesting that you bring that up. Fabio, the fantasy man of the freely available at department store cash registers, literary porn for women.
Of course no one cares. Men aren't all priggish about porn, and women enjoy it. It's somehow "different."
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The problem isn't with the image itself but where it is from. Claim that it is from somewhere else and there isn't a problem.
Which itself is almost the definition of the ad hominem fallacy.
I looked up some of her other pix, and I can claim she's from heaven.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
TIt includes 16-year-old-boys who revel in excessive male horseplay, and have not mastered the fine art of turning it down because it's incredibly dickish. It also includes 16-year-old girls who have not mastered the fine art of dealing with excessive male horseplay/dickishness.
It is noted that you have no reference to 16 year old women being rude and nasty. Apparently they are all pure. It is also noted that you refer to the male penis when you refernce their activity. Your sexist attitude against males is duly noted.
So you figure complete separation of the sexes should help keep thes pure women from being abused by these - as you refer to them - "dickish" boys? Indeed, we need to have studies that show that in all girls schools, that an equal amount of young ladies turn to STEM careers as boys do. Sounds like a great study, as they would not be around boys, which is apparently the major factor in keeping women out of STEM - right? We'll even demand they have only Femal STEM instructors, or do we want to go for the trifecta, and not allow and male teachers at all, to avoid any male interference?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
High School is not about growing up.
It's about surviving long enough to make it to college. You can grow up in college.
I'm beginning to understand a little more about you.
Yes, High school is indeed about growing up. Putting that off until college is not a good thing at all. I'll venture to say that is a person isn't mature by HS graduation, they ar eprobably never going to fully mature.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Don't worry, I'm quite brutal. Feature detection papers won't get past me unless they at least have some repeatability experiments not fouled up, or some better or equivalent alternative.
Also argh! I hate the Berkeley segmentation dataset. I know, let's make a low level algorithm try to perform the "same" as humans doing a high level task where each human had to guess what the task was! Mind blowingly bad :(
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Seems like it was one moronic head at one school, and some bullshit hype from the Daily Mail. Pigs are not being banned in children's books, the publishers have confirmed it.
The publishers blew a hell of a lot of hot air during which they denied blanket bans "in dictionaries" and agreed that they would never "edit a pig out of a work of historical fiction"; however:
"What we do, however, is consider avoiding references to a range of topics that could be considered sensitive – in a way that does not compromise quality, or negatively impact learning. So, for example, if animals are depicted shown in a background illustration, we would think carefully about which animals to choose."
This is covered in layers of squishy politicospeak. They will "consider", they would "think carefully", yadda yadda yadda. This is clearly obscurantist, euphamistic babble. What are their actual policies and guidelines given to authors? This is what Graun has to say, a paper not generally known for their support of Daily Mail anti-Muslim puffery:
One brief for an author seen by the Guardian warned that the book: “should also work in all areas of the world including more modest markets like the Middle East. For this reason you must be extremely cautious about cultural taboos such as young men and women cohabiting as students, or girls going shopping for shorts, or friends going out drinking.”
Doesn't mention pigs, but I think it's relevant (particularly the girls + shorts bit.) This is written evidence actually "seen by the Guardian". Other evidence re: pigs that was printed in the Guardian is testimony from the authors themselves. So yeah, the very next day the publisher comes along and smears it all over with weasel-words that admit some form of soft-ban is in place... and you interpret this as proof the entire claim against them was a right-wing fabrication. Well done!
I doubt many people would agree with your logic, since the obviously conclusion must be that any kind of pornography or images are acceptable in a classroom
No, my "logic" is that pictures of faces being deemed unacceptable because they happened to be cropped from a larger nude image is a dangerous attitude to placate. With right-wing prudes, you are catering to people who will be perfectly happy to ride this slippy slope until classical art has been censored as well (See: John Ashcroft and Lady Justice.) With left-wing prudes... well, I'm not even sure what their endgame is, but it appears to involve vilifying male sexuality and/or treating women as psychologically brittle.
The summary above is a complaint FFS and some of the comments here contain complaints. There's no need to bring imaginary factors in, lets just keep things real OK?
The boys in that class probably were (think back to your schooldays) so the search for something that was sourced from a centrefold is a fuckup on several levels.
Did a shock-jock eat your brain? No? Then lay off with the ridiculous over-reaction that insults the intelligence of everyone that reads it. You cannot possible be so stupid as to connect a complaint about porn in the classroom with a vast social conspiracy - shock-jocks had to destroy their brains with years of cocaine abuse to get that far.
A centrefold with nipples on show rated G in the land of the massive outrage of a nipple at the Superbowl? Not a chance of it being rated G. Mild or not, it's still porn in the CS class and the boys went into Bevis and Butthead mode which upset the girls. It was a fuckup. It's as stupid as rolling out the porn at Sunday school.
Way to get waaaay off the point, and you missed the "Art class? Maybe" above.
Deliberate pretence of stupidity is not cute you know.
The issue at hand is boys in a class giving a girl a hard time because the teacher fucked up, not ten tons of irrelevant baggage you want to pretend I'm against.
I successfully masturbated to this.
Don't get out much, do you? That look is - is this photo shoot finally done yet?
Never the less, she is a fine example of a woman and Heff realized it. He has a very fine eye. Reminds me of a 1978 I think photo of a 50 year old woman that was in playboy. Caption was she's hot isn't she? She's also 50. I can still see her in my mind.
It is astonishing to me how many ways commenters have found to contort themselves around the obvious problems that come with using a porn-derived image in a classroom.
We should try to create environments at school and at work where people can excel based on their ability, character, and drive. And we should try to break down barriers related to identity, whether they be external (limits imposed on someone by the prejudices of others) or internal (messages received by someone saying they don't belong, or aren't competent, that assault a person's self confidence purely because of their identity). That should go for our field, and for every field. That should go for every conceivable way we could label a person: gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, nationality, language, everything. This is liberalism 101.
This photo is a slap in the face. It is derived from porn, a medium that is today inseparable from images of women as objects for men to control and humiliate, and that obliterate women as human beings. Like it or not, these are the connotations of porn, and these are the messages that explode into the classroom when you put a playboy centrefold in your students' homework. Young women hear that this is how women are thought of in this field. Young men hear that it is OK think of women this way too. This isn't about causing offense, this isn't about anybody's feelings. This is about the tacit messages of porn infiltrating CS class.
Yes, the cropped image itself has no nudity. Yes, it's an established piece of CS history. Neither of these things lessen the problem.
Folks, your reaction here is a big part of the reason why we have a massive gender imbalance in software and IT. You and I are each responsible a little slice of the culture that has excluded women for so long, and we are each responsible for changing our slice for the better.
What is the submitter's beef? Or cheese cake, or whatever the current slang is? Or does he/ she/ it/ they not actually have enough of a complaint to express what they're complaining about?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Look, at that age, lots of things were sexually suggestive to me, including but not limited to head shorts of attractive women. The ears are not what the problem is between.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
oh please. Those proto-neckbeards just bought Playboy for the fine articles.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
The point here is that there is a message conveyed. If I look at a nude photograph from an unknown source, I cannot state categorically that was done with intentions that objectify women. But this image is not from an unknown source - it is from a magazine that exists to objectify women and titillate men. When attitudes and intentions are the issue under debate, "ad hominem" is no longer a fallacy.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Have you ever dealt with actual High Schoolers?
Because your entire argument is based on abstract principles that have jack-squat to do with reality. 18-year-olds are not mature adults. Period. They have quite the legal responsibilities of adults, but nobody is surprised when they check a criminal record which includes a lot of stupid shit prior to the age of 21 and is clean thereafter. Just ask Jenna Bush. Her father took even longer to grow up.
The education strategy appropriate for them is not at all similar to the one you;d use with adults. Moreover, this story is not about 18-year-olds. It is about 16-year-olds. They have even less maturity. They have fewer legal responsibilities. If you give them rifles and send them to Afghanistan you get dinged by War Crimes Tribunals.
What happens when you give a class of 20 of them Lenna is quite simple:
A couple of them (95% of this groups will be boys) go crazy. They are so happy to be working with porn they barely contain their glee. As soon as teacher is out of the room they boast about it. All their friends/enemies/frenemies/random people walking the same hallway know about it. Within minutes everyone knows that if they, too, take this class next year they, too, will get to work with porn. Note that these boys are not mature or discerning enough to care that the actual bit of Lena that gets used is a headshot, all they care about is !!PORN!!*
Which really pisses off a couple of their classmates (probably majority girls, but committed religious boys would be here too). They did not go to a taxpayer-funded High School and take an Advanced Placement class in Computer Science because they wanted to have a deep discussion about contemporary sexual mores. They did not go because they wanted to listen to some juvenile gloat because this one time his mom can't yell at him for looking at Playboy. They went to learn about computers. And now everyone knows that a) they're in the porn class, and b) they had to work with porn. They, too, do not particularly care that it's a headshot with the actual porn removed.
If you're lucky you don't get in huge trouble for pissing off people who vote (ie: the religious boys I mentioned), and next year your class is full of bright young boys eager to work with porn and precisely nobody else. Thus the brogrammer problem.
What happened when this particular CompSci teacher tried it? A bunch of the boys went around boasting about porn which made at least one girl so uncomfortable that she went to her principle and got the entire class changed. And then she got the whole story written up in the national media because everyone more mature then a 16-year-old-boy could not believe some idiot teacher had tried to impose this on a class of 16-year-olds of both genders.
*Dwarf Fortress reference intentional.
If I look at a nude photograph
It's not a nude photograph - the content of the image has nothing to do with TFA's point.
it is from a magazine that exists to objectify women and titillate men
Stipulated. The interesting questions are, given the above two elements, should the image, despite it's unobjectionable content, be considered 'bad' in some way because of its provenance, and if so, why.
So far all I've heard is appeals to emotion - with which I am inclined to agree - but no arguments.
.: Semper Absurda
Have you ever dealt with actual High Schoolers?
Because your entire argument is based on abstract principles that have jack-squat to do with reality.
I've been an Ice Hockey coach from the Squirt level to the Midget level. That's roughly 10 years old through 18 - 19 years old. I've been the president of a Youth Ice Hockey association, and probably surprisingly to you, associated with "Take our Daughters and Sons to Work" day for several years, and as part of that, attempted to steer young women toward Science and technical careers.
The young boys and girls on the hockey teams have a marked tendency to be well behaved at the squirt level - with only a few exceptions, then when puberty kicks in, can become quite erratic in behavior. By the time they reach 15 years old, most have adapted to the surging hormones. By the time they are at Midget age, they are pretty close to physical adulthood, and are in large part, pretty sensible, and are capable of making intelligent decisions. note: I was not around many young ladies at the midget level, because with a few exceptions, they had moved to women's Hockey from co-ed hockey due to differences in mass of the young men.
While my experience with the young ladies in the TOSADTW events was not as in-depth as the coaching, the same maturity level was true. Little kids that turned into giggly early teens, then by they time they were seniors, intelligent and articulate young ladies. If they were allowed.
18-year-olds are not mature adults. Period.
And some folks want to extend that age of adulthood to 25 years old. But it really doesn't matter, because children will stay children as long as you allow/force them to be children.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/ad...
I'll bet that 30 years might be the next extension.
Not too many years ago, people were married at the young age of thirteen or so, and supported themselves and raised families.
I was 21 when I was married, and my wife had just turned 18. I was working full time, just having started my first retirement program - at her insistence, which turned out to be a rather mature move on her part, perhaps?
But if you are correct about their immaturity, it is because we don't allow them to be mature, not because they are inherently biologically or psychologially incapable of maturity. Millions of years of evolution mock your "Period". If 18 year old people were not capable of maturity, we wouldn't be here today. We'd be sleeping with the fossils.
They have quite the legal responsibilities of adults, but nobody is surprised when they check a criminal record which includes a lot of stupid shit prior to the age of 21 and is clean thereafter.
And you know, some people never gain adult maturity either. Regardless, my notation of the biological versus artificially extended childhood still stands. You didn't see those 15 year olds a hundred years ago with a couple children getting into trouble.
Moreover, this story is not about 18-year-olds. It is about 16-year-olds. They have even less maturity. They have fewer legal responsibilities.
Sure. But it's part of the extended childhood thing. And I'm not even arguing against extended childhood within reason
But people - all of them - have to realize that there is simply no possible way to protect their children from every possible threat or from bad people, or even other people who are just goofy. That's why colleges had so many problems with Helicopter Parents. The parents were still trying to make every decision for the pseudo adults they were refusing to let go. Ever have a adult child call mommy and daddy, because some professor is "mean" to them, then the outraged parents demanded the professor be fired? It's happened. Ever see a parent scheduling their childs classe
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The image as frequently used itself (cropped face image) is no problem.
Why in the world would the teacher tell the class to search for the image instead of just giving the face image?
When you search for the image lots of full-body shots of the naked woman and other naked women show up. I think that
was purposely creating a hostile environment for women in the class (unless they teacher was really, really stupid.)
Lisa
First a totally off-topic question, which you (or may not) be able to answer:
How common is it for a High School Ice Hockey team, to have a couple of girls on defense because they're the only ones who know how to skate backwards? I read a story ages ago about hockey in Tennessee, and one of the things it said was this team's top two defenders were the coach's daughters, because when they were tiny they'd learned to figure skate, which meant skating backwards. And I thought "Gee, that makes sense, it's fucking Tennessee, they don't make a frozen pond in their back yard every year thing that the Canadians and Minnesotans do."
Now back to on-topic (or at least the off-topic we were discussing before), as I mentioned another time on one of these (it may even have been to you) I'm not sure you're maturity was actually emotional maturity. Years years, when the Baby Boom was entering the work force, somebody with a High School degree could get a job earning the equivalent of $10-15 an hour, full-time, virtually no questions asked. The staring UAW salary (which, again, was there for the taking for almost anybody who lived near a union auto plant), was the equivalent of $23.59 in 1970. That means just about any guy who could show on-time for a shift can afford to pay for a House, a wife (who may even be able to be a stay-at-home wife), and a couple kids; even if they're immature.
The 2015 economy is not that simple. Jobs for High School guys who will show up guaranteed are almost all part-time/minimum wage deals. The maturity level is irrelevant, no girl's gonna marry that. Much less settle down to be a stay-at-home mom. Jobs for college graduates (including two-year Associates programs) can be much better, and a college grad is pretty much by definition demonstrating a significant amount of maturity just by getting through a four-year-program that they had to design themselves. But unless you have the exact right major and/or are great at marketing/networking you can easily end up having student loans greater then 10% of your monthly income, which you deal with by getting on a payment plan, and whose gonna marry a guy who can't make his debt payments?
And in the end, if young women are so turned off by a completely innocuous photo that they declare that as a reason to go into another field, and that a photo like that is ispo facto sexual harassment, we have a choice of three things.
1.Try these obnoxious males as adult sexual offenders, and give them the same punishments.
2. completely segregate the sexes in school. Send boys to one, and girls to another. At that point, there will be no male harassment to dissuade the young ladies, and the field should quickly even out in a gender equitable mode
You're ignoring 3, just don't use the damn picture. There are plenty of other pictures. The world is not gonna end if you use a picture shot by the photography club. One of the kids finds it on his own, and tries to use it because it's "standard," you cross that bridge when you come to it. Depending on how you designed the assignment maybe you have to let him use another picture. But you do not announce to the class they should look for Lenna. If you don't get caught using Lenna you've pissed off several of your students to make the most obnoxious boys gleeful. If you do get caught you'll get written up in the Washington Post as "that guy," and thanking the author for not a) using your name, and b) insisting you be fired.
BTW, it's interesting how you've defined STEM. I'd say Veterinarian is one of the most STEM fields possible. And yes, for the record Veterinary schools try to figure out how to get guys to apply.
First a totally off-topic question, which you (or may not) be able to answer: How common is it for a High School Ice Hockey team, to have a couple of girls on defense because they're the only ones who know how to skate backwards?
The girls tend to play a little "smarter" than the boys do early on. And the Before puberty, the girls tend to be a bit bigger, and faster. It's when the boys start really really growing.
But that smarter thing is important, as a defense player has to be smart. A rule of thumb is that the Wingers tend to play better when they ar ea little pissed, the center has to have alittle control over emotion, but still being "wound up". But the D needs to be calmer and smarter, and needs to think a lot more on the ice. And there is that backward skating.
Which is to say that especially early on, the girls tend to be rather better.
What happens though, is after puberty has kicked in for the boys, they become incredibly strong and fast. So they can make up for some mistakes with speed. Though we always try to impress on anyone who wants to Play D that they have to skate backwards as much as they skate forwards.
So while the girls can still skate pretty well backwards, they aren't fast enough as they get ot the higher/older levels.
And then there is that mass thing. Someone like my son, who was 6 foot 4 and a something over 210 pounds as a senior, versus say someone like a young lady we had on our team who was areound 5 foot 4, and maybe 110 pounds, and a slower skater to boot, it was nasty. We allowed her to play as long as she wanted - even though her parents ended up wanting my help to convince her to quit. As a President of a youth hockey association, that is a minefield, so I couldn't do much but keep close tabe on her health. The association didn't carry several multi-million dollar liability insurance policies on me for nothing, and anything that even remotely resembles discrimination can get a lawsuit that you won't win, so if a female wanted to stick it out, she would get preferential treatment over a possibly more qualified male who was near the bottom of the talent roster - that's just the facts of life today.
But the poor girl was just head to toe bruises, and it was really pretty heartbreaking - I gotta give her credit for trying, but you we actually do like our players.
Fortunately, we went to a tournament in a city where she came form, and her friends on the team she was on before ours managed to talk her into joining up with them again. Playing with people her own mass and speed, she tore it up. Happy ending.
Now back to on-topic (or at least the off-topic we were discussing before), as I mentioned another time on one of these (it may even have been to you) I'm not sure you're maturity was actually emotional maturity.
Yeah, that's true, but its kind of like how I'm more mature now at my age than I was even ten years ago, and I'm as old as dirt. A person 18 years old isn't as mature as one that's 21. But we gotta start someplace to call them adults.
The 2015 economy is not that simple. Jobs for High School guys who will show up guaranteed are almost all part-time/minimum wage deals. The maturity level is irrelevant, no girl's gonna marry that. Much less settle down to be a stay-at-home mom. Jobs for college graduates (including two-year Associates programs) can be much better, and a college grad is pretty much by definition demonstrating a significant amount of maturity just by getting through a four-year-program that they had to design themselves.
Wow, we're all over the place - that's okay, its good to have a mature conversation here - Yes, I agree with what you say there.
But unless you have the exact right major and/or are great at marketing/networking you can easily end up having student loans greater then 10% of your monthly income, which you deal with by getting on a payment plan, and
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Listening to someone talk hockey brings back memories...
As an ex-Detroiter in Cleveland it's very rare for me to encounter anyone who knows what a Left Wing is, much less understands anything about the game.
You're ignoring 3, just don't use the damn picture. There are plenty of other pictures. The world is not gonna end if you use a picture shot by the photography club.
The problem though, as I see it, is not necessarily the original photo. It's the whole clusterfuck of the photo as proof that men are sexist pigs, and that is an acceptable reason to call them pigs, and that somethig has to be done. Yes, you can use a different photo. But do you have to make it a national story, broadly calling all men sexist pigs? We get very very close to saying that young men should not ever be around young women. Because both sexes spend a lot of time thinking about the other sex at that age, yes boys, but girls too. We will not scrub sex from any career.
You're reading the "all men are sexist pigs" bit into her piece. She's not denigrating all men, or even a particular man, she's denigrating using a pic from Playboy in High School. And given a) the maturity level of all teenagers, b) the probable reaction of some of them (mostly boys) to be being able to use the pic, and c) the probable reaction of others (mostly girls) to said reaction it's hard to argue with her case.
She's 17. The article was written about a class when she was 16. his is a country where most teenagers go through abstinence only sex ed. Sex-positive is controversial, and having your 10th graders use a Playboy pic is one of the most sex-positive things you could do.
BTW, it's interesting how you've defined STEM. I'd say Veterinarian is one of the most STEM fields possible. And yes, for the record Veterinary schools try to figure out how to get guys to apply.
You see, I'm not the one defining it . Despite the 80 percent females in Veterinarian schools, how much do we hear about "Veterinarian careers ar ea shinig example of success in getting young women into science fields" How do we emulate that success in other careers?
If you read articles on Veterinary medicine you'll find plenty of talk about it. But if you read articles about STEM in general it gets one line because it is one line, and since the field was male-dominated for so long even roughly a decade of 3/4 of new vets being female means it's still quite close 50/50.
Cornell did an article on this a ways back:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/st...
Is that guys have simply stopped applying. Which makes sense. It's very difficult to get into Vet School (in many cases more difficult then Medical School), it's as hard as Med School, and when you get out your salary is comparable to an MD during his residency. Which is more then I will ever make, but don;t try telling an MD his residency salary was anything but a pittance.
Which means you only apply if you have a true passion for making pets feel better from childhood, and the people like that are mostly girls.
I have never heard that. In fact, I have heard some women complain about that, saying it still isn't "right". There will soon be no male veterinarians. Hell where we take our pets, there is a staff of 25.
1 male staff person, the guy who cleans up. That's a sample of 1, but it meshes well with the statistics if a little worse (unless the goal is no males
Young vets are female. The ones in a large practice like that are going to be mostly young, and probably disproportionately female for their generation because guys are less risk-averse and thus more likely to hang out a shingle of their very own.
My point in all of this, is that we have to be careful who we listen to. And what we have been listening to is a tremendous amount of n