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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.)
No, I believe you are incorrect. The woman is giving a sexually suggestive glance, with bare shoulders, as expected of any centerfold cover model. Imagine your mother looking directly at you in the same way. Would you be uncomfortable? This is simply inappropriate for K-12, in my opinion. I teach community college. I would never use such an image, and if I did, I would expect many women in the class to be irritated by it.
Honestly it's pretty tame. I was introduced to this image at university and didn't even realise where it came from until years later.
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
The Venus de Milo is showing her breasts. Michaelangelo's David has his cock out.
Countless renaissance works depict nudes.
When they excavated Pompei they found everything from dildos to pornography.
Hell, I was in the National Gallery a while back and it had a famous exhibit of a sculpted goat being penetrated by a man. Just there, in the museum. There was a warning sign that that gallery contains such works, but that was about it. Kids were roaming freely through it and past it and looking at it. No parent did anything more than "Yes, it's very funny, keep moving" and a sly smile between them all.
Nudity is slowly being outlawed, which is ridiculous, given that sex is just as much at the front of the agenda as it ever has been. I'm not naturist and I don't want to go around showing my body (especially not my body, actually) but, fuck, it's a breast or a leg or even a cock, get over it.
There's a line of obscenity, but it's not the very existence or a bare depiction of a nude body. And certainly not the Lena image which isn't pornographic in any way (the others in the series, possibly). You see worse in any historical painting, on TV adverts, and let's not actually get into the dramas, and movies, and videogames, and what they contain because, fuck, we'll be here forever.
I agree it's probably not the best thing to KEEP using but it's used because it has certain properties that aid in the judgement of imagery. Sure there are other images. But you're an adult. It's an adult woman, barely nude. Grow up.
And in any European country you see worse on the top shelf of every single newsagent, and not even in the "pornographic" section. Just things like the men's magazine's front covers.
We can never outgrow wanting to look at beautiful people, male or female, but we can sure as hell outgrow trying to ban it.
Fuck, there was a public protest in London the other month over the banning of depiction of face-sitting, so thousands gathered outside the Houses of Parliament and demonstrated what was about to be banned. We have bigger issues than a picture of a woman.
I mean in the image compression literature... You need to know where to look for defects, so its good to have a standard set of images. Papers will usually have several images, one of the usual one is Lena.
Actually I agree with you. The picture is irrelevant. I'm not fighting for it. My whole point is that if each and every one of us goes out of our way to be offended by something, then nothing will get done.
I remember one of my profs introduced a guest speaker as a long-time personal friend of his, spoke of her professional and academic credentials at length, and mentioned in passing that she was the mother of 3 children and a wonderful cook and he enjoyed going to her house and talking to her over dinner.
One of my female classmates got incredibly offended by this, to the point that she wanted to file a formal complaint of sexism against the prof, for mentioning that his long time friend knew how to cook. This was particularly absurd in that this was an urban studies class where we talked at length about the social implications of modern cities, and being able to go to a friend's house for dinner had been discussed in the class.
There are people who simply look to be offended by something.
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.'"