Makes sense to me, though I've noticed that it's surprisingly hard to find a good alternative test image. This one has:
- Fine directional texture (the weave of the hat, hair)
- Fine non-directed texture (the feathers)
- Fine detail (eye glint, lashes)
- Medium texture (reflected hair)
- Sharp edges
- Curved edges (mirror frame, shoulder)
- Smooth gradients (skin, blurred beams on left)
- A closeup face
- Color
- Strong contrasts
I'd love to see a consensus around a good alternative high-resolution test image that has a bit of all of that (and maybe with a Macbeth chart thrown in somewhere too) with appropriate licensing, but none of the suggested alternatives (e.g., cameraman, mandrill) that I've seen quite have everything or are of any better resolution.
Specific modern technical issues with the original scan are:
Lena contains about 250,000 pixels, some 32 times smaller than a picture snapped with an iPhone 6. And then there’s a quality problem: The most commonly used version of the image is a scan of a printed page. The printing process doesn’t produce a continuous image, but rather a series of dots that trick your eye into seeing continuous tones and colors. Those dots, Acton says, mean that the scanned Lena image isn’t comparable to photos produced by modern digital cameras.
and:
[..] Scott Acton, the current editor of IEEE Transactions [..] and two former editors revived the old call for a ban, and proposed to the journal’s editorial board that IEEE Transactions institute a moratorium on Lena research. “In 2016,” he says, “demonstrating that something works on Lena isn’t really demonstrating that the technology works.”
the implication being that too many algorithms were trained on the Lenna image, to the point where the ASCII phrase LENA.JPG can now be expanded to the full original uncompressed image.
It, along with the Mandrill image, are quaint historic footnotes examples of types of images (drum scanned from magazine prints) that are no longer anything close to mainstream examples suitable for reference.
> it's surprisingly hard to find a good alternative test image.
Yes, putting aside the controversy, I agree that its sorely out of date and not very representative of modern images. I remember being amused when first seeing the paper with Fabio, but sadly it too is greyscale and of poor resolution.
Regarding many images being trained, I have mixed feelings. I think that the modern approach of having a solid corpus of images is important for quantitative analysis, but it's also nice to have a well-known common image to eyeball for a quick qualitative check.
I would add the consent of the subject of the photo. Indeed i think it could be a nice way of honoring a pioneer of the field by taking a photo of them that specifically contains the above elements.
Color and contrast are not ideal. There's no pure white or deep black nowhere (shadows are gray). And color... this just contains a dull blue and orange'ish.
I like the kingfisher from your wiki link, winner of 2020. Maybe we need more than one image for tests: one with perfect contrast range, one for human skin, etc. Instead of looking for one perfect image.
Tbh insofar as the problem is the specific image used - recreating the shot with a reenactor doesn’t fix the problems with the model wanting their likeness to not be used for this purpose (and probably with the way some states are going could be considered protected itself, eg the Elvis act in Tennessee), and even opens up the argument that this itself is re-victimization and harassment (eg analogous to CSAM image arguments).
It also fundamentally doesn’t fix the problem with it just being kind of a horny selection of an image in the first place, which is the other half of the complaint.
I’m not saying it’s something that keeps me up at night personally, other than it just being generally a little tasteless. But for those who do argue against the use of Lena, it really satisfies none of the arguments other than the purest copyright one (and it may not even be legal to use in all jurisdictions because of personal likeness concerns anyway).
If you’re gonna get new material, get new material. Not just Legally Distinct Lana.
Unlike in its time, almost everyone now has access to a good camera. Most of the effort would go to good lighting and finding objects that satisfy these criteria. A contrived CGI render could also serve the purpose.
Many colour-correction swatches use a pale woman with a fruit hat due to the colour range, gradual skin tones, and high dynamic range.
I'm surprised it hasn't become the replacement standard image...
If you want your image processing algorithm to be optimized for the real world you should test against real photos. It’s not like we have a shortage of photos so synthetic data is absolutely necessary
I'm offended that you're offended. And I think we can all agree that no one should ever be offended.
Hint: this path or yours? It doesn't work. Feeling offended and asking others not to offend you has to be reasonable within society's moral values. They've changed, obviously. But there is a large group of conservatives (as in: the type who wants traditional values) who loathe that change. The group is significant enough that they can push back changes like these. Case in point: Trump got elected and ensured SCOTUS is now 6-3 conservative-progressive.
I am offended you're offended they're offended. And I believe the best defense against trolling is direct offense
Hint: this little old glory jig of yours? You know why you're offended? Because you have no principles or values worth fighting for. But you want to fight for something. So you fight for an inglorious past. And you can't think of a better way than to skirmish with sjws at random.
We see you, and you are transparent to us. If you were above the struggle, you would say nothing. Yet you want to fight. You NEED to fight. We all do. And yet you have nothing worthwhile to fight for. So you fight us.
The problem with your approach is that your way of thinking will die, since it produces nothing new or worthwhile. To the degree that your views get presidence, there will be misery and gnashing of teeth, stagnation, and eventual failure of the empire built on your non-principles. But the cause of true justice will remain living, until victory.
They should ban it just because it's a poor image. The colors are unnatural, it is low resolution (blurry) and has a bunch of weird line noise, it's just not representative. The obsession with sticking to it has always seemed odd to me.
I 100% respect Lenna's wishes to stop using the image. I have a small tinge of regret based on some of the comments in the subthread, but it is for the better.
I even own a copy of the Playboy this was taken from, but funny thing is, I have never opened it. It is on my shelf next to the Utah Teapot. I guess in a way, I could justify it as one less use of the images.
You're probably jesting; but it'd be more representative of the computing industry if we used a picture of a male. It is an interesting philosophical question of whether that would be an improvement.
I think the most appropriate response to this kerfuffle was when an all-female team of researchers published an image processing paper... using Fabio as a test image.
To be blunt, male don't feel threatened by a poster of a manly topless macho. It won't incite inferiority complex, at least not by much. Else The Terminator would offend and upset a shit ton of men, and it would been a very unpopular movie. So why should it be suddenly problematic the subject of a poster had assumed certain gender that isn't men? If it's biological, why can't it be said? Is arachnophobia and ophidiophobia shameful to admit too?
Well ... it wouldn't. It'd be a bodybuilder shot cropped to the head. The shot, as used, isn't objectification. The original would have been, but it isn't used - because, I would suggest, of the objectification issue.
>One side is going to say the entire existence of an attractive women is amoral
No one said that, is saying it, or will say it. You made it up in your head and keep "quoting" this claim so you can get mad about it and "argue" against it.
Yeah, this whole thread is weird and filled with angry rants against something no one has said.
It's quite ironic that removing a picture for the sake of inclusitivity raises this kind of responses. I wonder how many here are also making their woman coworkers uncomfortable every day, given their apparent lack of empathy and dismissal of their feelings.
Who, you ask? IEEE and the ones complaining that images of "attractive women" should not be used.
That is, quite ironically, discriminatory to women (you're literally arguing to involve less women) and a particularly-vague subset of women at that.
It is also indirectly discriminatory to men, because images of "attractive men" usually don't get as much complaints.
The women complaining using images of "attractive women" makes them uncomfortable also implies something very dark in their line of thought: That men in general are supposedly evil, sexual monsters for daring to like pictures of attractive women. Or the women feel an inferiority complex regarding their physical appearance and want to take it out on others.
It's all just ridiculous and a worthless waste of everyone's time. The model in the image doesn't want it used anymore, that's all the (and arguably only) reason we should use something else.
Where have they complained about attractive women being used? I've only seen complaints about the image being from a soft porn magazine. Maybe you can conjure up someone saying this, but it's not the common complaint.
So your whole rant is off the mark. As I said: a straw man. There is no discrimination going on here.
From the article this thread is about, emphasis mine:
>It is also a sexually suggestive photo of an attractive woman, and its use by men in the computer field has garnered criticism over the decades, especially from female scientists and engineers who felt that the image (especially related to its association with the Playboy brand) objectified women and created an academic climate where they did not feel entirely welcome.
I think it's a reflection of a lot of culture war stuff that so many comments are about the ethics of the image and the opinions of the subject of a photograph and all this other really difficult philosophical argument stuff when it really seems much more simple than that:
40 years ago we used one particular image to test compression and certain DSP operations. Now in the age of CGI, TBs rather than KBs of storage / bandwidth, and the internet, we can use a suite of examples. These can be more varied, more controlled, and less encumbered by copyright or being from an erotic publication.
MP3 was apparently tested against the a capella song "Tom's Diner." Nice song, lots of detail on the voice. But is the benchmark I want to be using nowadays for Opus and AAC? Probably not.
It's a shame rules have to be made to force behavior. But whatever people's philosophical views, it should be a prompt to ensure we do have things to fill this role that have benefited from those last 40 years of development.
It is not as simple as you put because the decision was not technical, it was political/ideological. To discuss its technical relevance is meaningless; everybody knows the image is bad and should not be used in 2024. The fact that it is still used is a testament to the deplorable situation of academia itself, but has nothing to do with this ban. They banned it because (a few, very loud) women felt uncomfortable about it and decided to turn it into a crusade. And IEEE (as with most other organizations nowadays) are rightfully scared to make a fuss over something so small and petty. It's a small, almost meaningless loss for the IEEE, and a big meaningful win for those who actually care about something like this. And so it goes, little by little, they win.
You may have a point, it isn't my fight because it's not my field and it doesn't personally offend me. I would probably feel different if it was porting Doom to every platform ever that was under scrutiny. And if that comes up, I would be more defensive and philosophical about it. I both know about and care about it more. So I'm going to ponder on that for a bit.
> It's a shame rules have to be made to force behavior.
„Have to“ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the sentence. Is this rule really necessary (because Lena’s gaze is just to enticing and leading the whole field astray)? Or is it just a method for moral crusaders to declare victory and their morals as supreme?
Lena is a mainstay of computer imaging calibration. It's silly and stupid to make any claims of harm to anyone from use of the image. Don't let the culture overlords tell you what is right and wrong. Use your common sense.
Ok, I think it’s fair to say it’s not an absolute rule. But there’s a big difference between publishing a picture of a politician against their wishes and a model’s glamour shot. There’s often a legitimate public interest in documenting the activities of politicians, sometimes even their private lives.
In the spectrum of postmodern quasi-meaningless decisions made to give some appearance of action to appease people who are more likely to complain than do something useful, this is on the harmless side. What really bothers me is the underlying idea that a picture of a beautiful woman is offensive. It seems like we’re on a path of “regression to the mean” where only mediocrity is acceptable, and anything remarkable is offensive. If I felt offended every time I saw a picture of a man more beautiful (and attractive) than me I might as well disconnect and go live in the woods.
It’s not about the woman being beautiful. It’s about the in-joke where the cropped image itself is tame but the implicit context is pornographic. This in joke makes (many) women uncomfortable, I think.
Personally I don’t care either way, I just like to understand differing perspectives. Being offended by this one seems fairly reasonable as far as things go though.
Aren't we supposed to be decades past "women has no sexual desire, sex are for men" era? I support the ban, it's kind of weird a cutout porn is the benchmark, but I just don't see how LGBT-era human modeling and anti-porn stancing go together. Hypocritically speaking, the notion that cis-male/bi-person/lesbian-women porn[0] as reference image makes women uncomfortable has to be wrong.
0: and this is very rough edged caricature, no reason gender has to be specified here or subject has to be ignored
Would you bring a copy of Playboy into the office? Would you say it’s okay because you won’t show anyone more than the upper half of an image?
That’s the problem: it’s nothing to do with what people do in their private lives, it’s about bringing pornography into a professional context. In this case it’s also objectively an obsolete choice for anyone working on modern imaging technology so it’s not even defensible on technical merits.
I don't object to removal itself, and I don't find it too appropriate, I just have problems with post-hoc rationalization that comes attached to it. "Images of attractive woman offends other women" shouldn't even be a politically safe statement to make. That'll be one hell of a hallucination if an LLM said it.
It’s not attractive women but pornography. Nobody would care if this was a picture a computer scientist had taken of herself at work because they needed a test image, it’s the “produced for the sexual pleasure of male viewers” part that makes some people worry that their colleagues view them the same way.
> Nobody would care if this was a picture a computer scientist had taken of herself at work because they needed a test image
I've seen, although from great distances, enough of these instances. They WILL come at that person and harder in those cases. Sexual content are less likely to be cancelled when more male is involved, contrary to superficial reasoning. This applies even if gender of creators are not apparent at all. It's a really gross primal phenomenon.
I guess being offended or not by this is entirely subjective, as we can see from our wildly different perspectives on the matter. I guess that’s why we should never base a ban on it, right?
Trying to imagine the reverse, if I were in a field dominated by women and there were "Lenny" images used frequently and used as an in joke or commonality, I think I'd feel uncomfortable too as would many of us. From the comments I'm seeing though, I don't believe we're exercising the empathy needed to understand.
I dunno; that sounds very hypothetical. Do you have a more specific example? I don't see why I'd be unhappy about, eg, working with a group of nurses with a fireman calendar in the lunch room [0]. Even though it is unprofessional, since that is active sexualisation, this is just a girl with a pretty face.
Very attractive people of both the equivalent and opposite gender exist. I can't speak to your instincts and interpretations, but objectively they are not a threat to my emotions.
This is also sexualization: Playboy isn’t a fine art magazine or anatomy textbook where you’d at least have some plausible professional context. If someone just took a picture of a pretty woman which wasn’t intended to be pornography, nobody would be talking about this.
I too think we're growing hypersensitive, but that's not the only argument for switching to a different picture: the the model has requested the image not be used, long ago IIRC.
AND found a way to sound cool while doing that. (My fingers are itching to add some comment about the fact that she’s Swedish but I’m sure that has no correlation whatsoever with jumping in on meaningless postmodern cancel culture bandwagons)
If Playboy objectifies women (Playboy falls firmly in the category softporn) then I guess some people are really worried about websites like Xhamster, Pornhub, and Onlyfans.
Playboy shows no intercourse (AFAIK, been a while), it contains stories and background info, and professional and entertaining poses. It falls firmly in the category of softporn.
I know this is a Whataboutism 101, and you could say 'it is objectified woman in marginalized profession'. I'm not saying I disagree. What I am saying is that there must be a long road ahead. It seems the cat is out of the bag?
Now, my daughter is in pre-puberty. Back when I was in puberty, I bought a Playboy or two and one Penthouse. Would I have an issue if my daughter bought a magazine with men (and/or women) posing (half-)naked if she were in puberty? I'd be surprised, given what you can find for free on the internet, with [much] worse curation. No, that seems normal to me, even healthy to be curious like that. But I am honestly scared shitless of all the crap which can be found on certain websites, as well as things happening in school like revenge porn (which recently became illegal within its own category in my country; a step I very much agree with).
My point being that, to me, there seem to be much worse issues ahead worth tackling.
And that's where I say leaving HTTP 402 as a warning sign that the Internet should not be used for economically significant purposes was a grave mistake; those people ARE worried, and Internet censorship enforced through advertisement, credit card payment processing, and App Store reviewing process, driven by those people, is getting us barreling down that road towards 1984/BNW.
Pornography aside, YouTube had effectively removed "die" from vocabulary in some languages through that, and people are adapting by changing accents. Soon it'll be a shibboleth. We're literally living 1984.
You're missing the point entirely. It's not that this image or porn is bad (or not), but that an image from a soft-porn magazine is used in a professional setting when you're not explicitly wanting to go down that road. What others do on their own is fine. But this image gives porn-connotations to people just wanting to do their job.
It's equivalent to having a poster of a woman in the office bathroom. Have it in your own home, it's fine, but don't push it on others.
I'm not for or against cancel culture, btw. I understand pros, but also cons.
A poster of a woman, would depend on what that entails. If it is a poster with a function, with the face of a woman, it'd be OK. No matter the source. The source ought to be OK with it (with regards to copyright) but other than that, I don't find it relevant. Because people don't see the source; they see the derivative.
As an analogy, would you run code by a convicted murderer? As in, would you be opposed to run code programmed by Hans Reiser? Ie. would you use Btrfs? Would you run code by a company who are morally bankrupt?
No, it's not cancel culture. You're just making things up to fit your outrage.
Your last whataboutisms aren't relevant. If people don't like having to work with an image whose origin is from a porn magazine and which the woman has asked people to stop using it, that's a perfectly valid feeling.
Oh it absolutely is cancel culture 101. It just that in this case the person isn't cancelled but society moral values have changed, and this is somehow an important hill to die on (I think not). Ie. there were 2 artists: the model and the person shooting the picture.
If they're not fine with it they can pick an alternative. One was posted in this very thread.
The woman in question and the author of the picture were also OK with it in past, right? Not like it was a case of copyright infringement?
I'm sure there are also people who deeply care about not using programs written by a convicted criminal. Most people don't realize that when they use Linux because it is hidden in plain sight. Just like the fact that this photograph is from a pornography magazine, and that the woman in question was naked (softcore still), is obscure as well. Obscure in this context also means harmless. Ie. I can show this portrait picture of this woman to my pre-puberty daughter, and it'd be completely OK. Just like running Linux kernel with code by a convicted murderer is also OK. OK, as in harmless.
My pre-puberty daughter is a great case of where I draw the line between NSFW, ie. with regards to recent terrorism in Russia and torture of suspects. Would I feel ashamed if she saw this picture of Lena? Not at all. If needed, I could tell her the context of it being a picture from a different time in our past with different society moral values (though they're still very much alive in some areas in the world).
There is also a huge difference between hardcore intercourse and a (half-)naked, posing woman. And of the former, with women who are exploited, is much more rampant on the internet. That seems to be a valid hill to die on.
It's not obscure for the scientists working in this field, so what you deem moral or not for your teenager is irrelevant. Especially so when the scientists in this field have voiced their opinion which should count far more. Why should they not be heard? Why are you the one trying to cancel the opinions of these female scientists?
Except "people" didn't make this ban, IEEE did. If people don't want to work with this image, then they might as well not work with it?
Look, the point here is not whether using the image is a good idea or not; it's about whether an organization such as IEEE should ban it. The fact that using this image is technically a disaster (for all the technical reasons presented by so many people) only makes it easier for the ban to be instated and convince people like you that it's ok to do that. But the fact is that the technical reasons were not what supported the ban, and when you keep defending it using other arguments which are not the ones that led to the ban, you're just feeding a monster.
> If people don't want to work with this image, then they might as well not work with it?
Lucky for you that you're oblivious to these kind of issues, but it's not as easy as you portray it to be. Most people will shut up and "just accept it" to not stir the pot. People aren't writing a paper in isolation using this, so can't easily just switch if the rest of the community uses it to benchmark, the co-authors want to use it etc.
> and convince people like you that it's ok to do that.
Please define "people like me". Tread carefully.
> and when you keep defending it using other arguments which are not the ones that led to the ban, you're just feeding a monster.
Don't lie. I've only used the arguments put forward by IEEE in the article.
"It is also a sexually suggestive photo of an attractive woman, and its use by men in the computer field has garnered criticism over the decades, especially from female scientists and engineers..."
I'm offended by the notion that any woman depicted nude is somehow pornographic. I'm also offended that people say it objectifies women- as if they lack agency.
Being offended by cropped image of something that viewers may not know is a nude image is just another level of discovery of what can potentially be rated offensive.
I remember this article where some girl dropped her PhD to do onlyfans and made like millions in very short time. Wonder what she was offended by? Perhaps offensively expensive tutoring costs, or generally non-competitive pay in academia which it seems is not to be discussed as something researchers from all genders are usually put off by?
Sorry, this is such a hypocritical nonsense to ban the Lena image, that it really amazes me somebody cared to be so politically correct while on a daily basis a researcher around the world is marginalised by their seniors by not being listed as the first author of an article. THAT is offensive, not some pixels in the age of TikTok and Insta.
Thats another story, and while my previous comment on a general basis stands (or rather I stand firm with this position), because the same twisted logic gets applied to other "bans", I stand corrected in the light of your note. Lena has a right to demand the image to be retired. But last time I read interview with her this demand was not included in her responses. thanks for update.
That’s misleading. She has been quoted multiple times saying she was amused and thought nothing of it. Until a bunch of activists came and told her she should be offended, and that the matter was of great importance to the future of mankind. Then of course she changed her mind, why not.
I would assume that as an adult she’s capable of making her decisions and we should respect that. Even if you disagree, there is no reason why we need to continue using it and it’s not a good choice purely on technical grounds, so a better question would be asking why anyone would be so committed to continuing to use an objectively obsolete image over the objection of its subject.
She's capable of making her own decisions now, but not when, for many years, she thought it was harmless?
It's weird that papers are banned based on which sample images they pick, rather than technical merits.
When will the HeLa cell line papers be cancelled? To this day scientific experiments are being carried out on cells take from a black woman without her consent.
> She's capable of making her own decisions now, but not when, for many years, she thought it was harmless?
The IEEE is acting now, so her current position seems most relevant. It’s not the primary reason - that’s the technical limitations and general wisdom of using pornography in professional publications – but it’s a good third point. Switching is trivially easy, why not do what the subject requests?
Your comparison with HeLa is interesting because it directly highlights the difference: nobody’s work depends on LENNA.JPG - anyone doing serious work is using multiple images, and there are many easy alternatives so nobody’s paper is getting rejected unless they throw a performative tantrum trying to get an interview with Tucker Carlson.
HeLa is different in several ways: it does things which other cell lines could not, allowing some fundamental research to be performed which wasn’t possible when cell lines could only survive for a few days, and the owner isn’t around to tell us how she feels about this. Most relevant, of course, is the reaction in the field: you know about that because it’s been widely recognized as an ethical failure, it’s taught as such in schools, there’s going to be a building named after her on Johns Hopkins’ campus, and there’s a scholarship fund in her honor.
Lenna’s contribution is far less significant from an academic standpoint but I can’t help but notice that none of the people complaining are actually doing anything which would benefit her – it’s all about personal entitlement to continue using her photo without compensation.
Maybe you should learn from her. Updating your position on something when you get more knowledge is laudable. Instead of digging your heels in.
I wonder why you mean she's incapable of making her own decisions? I hope it has nothing to do with her sex, but I do feel it's weird how you and others in this thread are very quick to dismiss both her and the women scientists not wanting to use the picture. It paints a picture..
Somehow I think a true researcher knows enough about STEM and the reason for existence of certain bodily processes and attributes to not be offended by an image of testicles or clitoris. Otherwise we would not have such images in the schoolbooks for children (at least in most developed countries these images are part of the education).
Indeed you can argue that usage of pornographic material in academic articles is similarly offensive as going to school with horn implants. Or perhaps the horn implants are not so offensive? But then the question here is whether the image of someone's face, which originates from a pornographic material is offensive. I find it hard to make a concrete decision about this, because Lena's face (and many other women and men's faces) is very very lovely taken out of the pornographic context. Besides pornography seems offensive only to few people as a percent of the world's population...
This also reminds me how children across the world answer the question whether a drawing of a head is image of a person or image of a head. If I remember this correctly, a story was told by psychology teacher back in school, so long time ago, the children in Europe see a person, the children of natives in Northern America see a head. So this all is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it? Thus being offended by the usage of Lena image implies the author knows the source of it and imagines the missing pornographic part.
I think you're getting hung up on the "bunch of activists being offended" bit of the story here. I'm just trying to respect the original models wishes, I don't care about the activists.
From my understanding part of the issue is that people would use it as a test image for the sake of using Lena as a test image rather than actually picking a suitable image for their testing.
I mean also this is a scientific publication which should try to stray towards neutrality and this image is a cropped playboy still. This is blatantly not an appropriate image to use in an academic publishing not even getting into copyright issues. If you absolutely need to use a photo of a beautiful woman for your testing you could use literally any photo taken in a standard photo shoot which isn’t overly sexualized that is appropriately licensed.
Aren’t there more technical solutions to DSP/image processing reference images that enable readers to get a more accurate assessment of results in a shorter time span?
Or are humans naturally that hard-wired to commonplace imagery?
I know colour perception for instance is extremely biased based on the context around it, so a Monet is perceived radically differently than for instance, a Pantone Catalogue in isolation
What the heck is an advertising documentary? Sounds like Orwellian Newspeak for plain old propaganda / astroturfing.
Nothing of importance has changed here. Looking at the picture, I fail to see why this is so controversial. I guess somebody doesn't like that it was in Playboy at one point? This is a picture people, not a mountain to die on.
True. In 2019, at the prompting of a film crew making a documentary about how damaging it was for her image to be in wide circulation, and who presumably paid for her time, Lena asked for her picture to be taken out of circulation.
As recently as earlier that year, her views were much closer to my own [0]:
>When I asked [Lena] if she had heard anything about the recent controversy around her image, she seemed alarmed at the thought that she could have a part in hurting or discouraging young women. I sent her some articles about the Lenna and later gave her a call to see what she made of them. The photo, she said, doesn’t show very much—just down to her shoulders—so it was hard for her to see what the big deal was.
She still doesn't say that the photo is a big deal.
"presumably paid for her time" is an interesting insinuation, as it disenfranchises her of her voice just because somebody put a camera in front of her. Do you think she wasn't paid some consultancy fee for dealing with that Wired journo? Do we have to figure out now who paid more?
One of the reasons IEEE mentioned is that it's a bad representative for contemporary digital imagery (resolution, color range, etc), so that alone is reason enough to look for alternatives. The most recent statement of the model is "let's retire [it]," even before she didn't seem to care much.
I suppose the interesting question is why you're so hung up on having that photo in new scientific publications.
>She still doesn't say that the photo is a big deal
Well, she participated in a documentary, knowing that its premise is that the photo is a big deal.
>Do you think she wasn't paid some consultancy fee for dealing with that Wired journo? Do we have to figure out now who paid more?
I agree that it would be interesting to know how much she was paid in both cases, as how much someone is paid before offering their opinions is always relevant in interpreting what they are saying. My feeling here is that the Wired reporter was also fishing for offence, but found such a stark absence of it that she did the noble thing and reported Lena's near-indifference accurately. If that's what happened, then Lena overcame whatever temptation might have been created by the consultancy fee, so there's no reason to be interested in how much it was. But I suppose you could make the case that the Wired reporter was actually fishing for indifference, in which case the amount becomes relevant again. Is that the case you wish to make? Because if so: It's curious how far the Wired reporter went to try to elicit offence from Lena, don't you think?
>I suppose the interesting question is why you're so hung up on having that photo in new scientific publications.
Interesting insinuation. Another explanation might be that I'm not very interested in whether the photo is used in publications or not, but that I'm quite interested in why some people are so hung up on it not being so used. If that reason turns out to be solely that the woman in question asked for it to be removed from circulation, I'm also interested in exploring whether that appears to be a position she has consistently and vociferously held over the years, or whether it might be a recent change of heart. And if turns out to be a recent change of heart, I'm interested in exploring what might have prompted it.
That’s not what happened; the actual story is very well known and so I won’t repeat it here but between the consent, and copyright issues it should have never been used in this way.
It’s been controversial vigorously years a symbolic of much wider problems; this is an overdue, but decent, decision.
Would mention a this comment from the actual Lena in a 2019 film about all this, “ "I retired from modeling a long time ago. It's time I retired from tech, too... Let's commit to losing me."”
That quote is supposedly made for an advertising documentary with that specific purpose, so she was likely paid for it. The real, unpaid quote is also in the article, "I’m really proud of that picture,".
That being said, I support OP's sentiment, because the only other person quoted in the article is a man, who gets offended in the name of women.
> so she was likely paid for it. The real, unpaid quote is also in the article, "I’m really proud of that picture,".
Let's not pretend low-budget documentary have the money to make somebody talk shit about something they like. There's also no contradiction between the two quotes: she is proud of the picture, but not very happy to see it being used like this decades after.
This is also not what happened. I remembered that she once was proud of her work and the fact that her image was used so widely. Then FOSS and engineering in general was targeted by a wave of cultural marxist psyops that brought us useless stupid things like CoCs. And within that wave she was convinced by "activist" (=operatives) to demand the retirement of her image.
It's the perfect angle to cause division and cause endless discussions about irrelevant BS. Congrats Psyop successfully deployed! (Probably CCP behind this in order to weaken western Engineering)
I know, I read the article. So what? She got paid for the image (according to the article) and she was a model.
If you sell a picture to me you can't come back 40 years later demanding me to stop using it just because it was successful, even if the picture is of you.
People accuse me of not reading, while seemingly not reading the entire thing themselves.
If those were the only benefits nobody would think it was remotely sane. The extra work supporting `main` and dealing with the confusion far outweighs that.
It would be like renaming `creat` to `create`. Yeah it should have been `create` in the first place but it would be completely insane to change it now.
I agree that it was vastly overblown in importance and was mostly the usual token "somebody must do something" thing with no practical meaning.
But I also think that repeatedly ranting about it now, when the transition has largely already happened, is equally a waste of time. Me, I just use "main" going forward for the reasons I listed above.
Right, fewer letters equal better! Very professional.
Honestly though, it doesn't matter to me what you or I name branches or what test images we use. I'm going to objectify women and own slaves in any case.
What makes that even more ironic are the number of people involved in that spat that were probably happily wearing cheap cotton products of dubious origin at the time.
Actual modern slavery still exists and is sadly wide spread.
There have been issues with git's master->main transition as well, once automated systems came into play that expected to find a master branch. This is also my main complaint about that particular episode: Too much "somebody needs to do something" mandates, and too little "how to do it properly" (which would provide benefits for other situations as well.) When the two parts of the activity are split between two different groups, there's no incentive, either: The mandate group checks a box and walks away happily, having reached their OKR. The implementation group doesn't get the devops time to implement proper aliasing and what-have-you, so they just wing it until everything works again.
That said, it's mostly water under the bridge right now, and it isn't applicable at all for the "reference image for computer graphics papers" situation unless somebody starts rewriting all the old papers to reference a different image:
A "somebody needs to do something" mandate would likely lead to new versions of the old papers in which the image is removed without replacement. The "do it right" solution would lead to people replicating the research with different material, which might not even be for the worst - but I see no chance that will happen at scale.
- Fine directional texture (the weave of the hat, hair)
- Fine non-directed texture (the feathers)
- Fine detail (eye glint, lashes)
- Medium texture (reflected hair)
- Sharp edges
- Curved edges (mirror frame, shoulder)
- Smooth gradients (skin, blurred beams on left)
- A closeup face
- Color
- Strong contrasts
I'd love to see a consensus around a good alternative high-resolution test image that has a bit of all of that (and maybe with a Macbeth chart thrown in somewhere too) with appropriate licensing, but none of the suggested alternatives (e.g., cameraman, mandrill) that I've seen quite have everything or are of any better resolution.
One source that I have recently been using for test images for my experiments, though, is the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year finalists collection: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Ye...