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posted by chromas on Monday February 18 2019, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the controversial-memes dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

NB The correct spelling of her name is "Lena", but she asked Playboy to spell it "Lenna" because she did not want people to call her "Leena".

Finding Lena, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

Among some computer engineers, Lena is a mythic figure, a mononym on par with Woz or Zuck. Whether or not you know her face, you’ve used the technology it helped create; practically every photo you’ve ever taken, every website you’ve ever visited, every meme you’ve ever shared owes some small debt to Lena. Yet today, as a 67-year-old retiree living in her native Sweden, she remains a little mystified by her own fame. “I’m just surprised that it never ends,” she told me recently.

Lena’s path to iconhood began in the pages of Playboy. In 1972, at the age of 21, she appeared as Miss November, wearing nothing but a feathered sun hat, boots, stockings, and a pink boa. (At her suggestion, the editors spelled her first name with an extra “n,” to encourage proper pronunciation. “I didn’t want to be called Leena,” she explained.)

About six months later, a copy of the issue turned up at the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute, where Alexander Sawchuk and his team happened to be looking for a new photograph against which to test their latest compression algorithm—the math that would make unwieldy image files manageable. Lena’s glossy centerfold, with its complex mixture of colors and textures, was the perfect candidate. They tore off the top third of the spread, ran it through a set of analog-to-digital converters, and saved the resulting 512-line scan to their Hewlett-Packard 2100. (Sawchuk did not respond to requests for comment.)

The USC team proudly handed out copies to lab visitors, and soon the image of the young model looking coquettishly over her bare shoulder became an industry standard, replicated and reanalyzed billions of times as what we now know as the JPEG came into being. According to James Hutchinson, an editor at the University of Illinois College of Engineering, Lena was for engineers “something like what Rita Hayworth was for US soldiers in the trenches of World War II.”

For almost as long as the Lenna has been idolized among computer scientists, however, it has also been a source of controversy. “I have heard feminists argue that the image should be retired,” David C. Munson Jr., current president of the Rochester Institute of Technology, wrote back in 1996. Yet, 19 years later, the Lenna remained so ubiquitous that Maddie Zug, a high school senior from Virginia, felt compelled to write an op-ed about it in The Washington Post. The image, she explained, had elicited “sexual comments” from the boys in her class, and its continuing inclusion in the curriculum was evidence of a broader “culture issue.”

Deanna Needell, a math professor at UCLA, had similar memories from college, so in 2013 she and a colleague staged a quiet protest: They acquired the rights to a head shot of the male model Fabio Lanzoni and used that for their imaging research instead. But perhaps the most stringent critic of the image is Emily Chang, author of Brotopia. “The prolific use of Lena’s photo can be seen as a harbinger of behavior within the tech industry,” she writes in the book’s opening chapter. “In Silicon Valley today, women are second-class citizens and most men are blind to it.” For Chang, the moment that Lena’s centerfold was torn and scanned marked “tech’s original sin.”

One voice that has been conspicuously missing from the Lenna debate is that of Lena herself. The first and last time she spoke with the American press was in 1997, at the same conference where she was given her beloved mantel clock. (WIRED ran a short article on the visit titled “Playmate Meets Geeks Who Made Her a Net Star.”)

[Continue reading at Wired]


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @04:18PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @04:18PM (#803020)

    This is (probably, I didn't put any effort into checking) the image in question, cropped as usual: http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17wk3pbcxeh54jpg/original.jpg [gawkerassets.com]

    I straight up don't believe that this elicited inappropriate sexual comments. Perhaps one student in conversation with others said she was hot, which I suppose qualifies as a sexual comment, but provided they didn't announce it to the lecture theater I don't see anything inappropriate about that at all. Given the context it's clear we're meant to believe the comments were inappropriate. I could buy it eliciting, in private conversation, comments appropriate to that context. I do not believe the author when they say it elicited inappropriate sexual comments from multiple students as they claim it did.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by pkrasimirov on Monday February 18 2019, @04:42PM (1 child)

    by pkrasimirov (3358) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 18 2019, @04:42PM (#803036)

    > Finding Lena, the Patron Saint of JPEGs
    Found her:
    https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/i64AAOSw17pawoYT/s-l300.jpg [ebayimg.com]

    https://medium.com/five-guys-facts/lenna-e802b18d9ddc [medium.com]

    Doesn't look like a saint :)

    • (Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 18 2019, @05:20PM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 18 2019, @05:20PM (#803050) Journal

      That kinda puts the lie to the bit in the PDF (linked to in TFS). It said no breasts or butt, but it was still far too sexy. The original photo shoot showed plenty of breast, and butt. Unlike Penthouse, Playboy never felt it necessary to exhibit any more intimately than breasts and butt. But, I believe that old Hugh may have kept some images for himself.

  • (Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Monday February 18 2019, @05:35PM (4 children)

    by nobu_the_bard (6373) on Monday February 18 2019, @05:35PM (#803055)

    I'm 100% sure it elicited comments like that from boys in her class. She is 19. That means the boys are in the 18-20 range. Literally anything will elicit comments like that from boys in that age range.

    The girl's thinking about it the wrong way. Nobody's mentioned that it's a copyrighted image used without permission. If she wants to quash it, convince Playboy to get aggressive enforcing this instead; even if it's not 100% successful it'll probably get faster results on someone else's coin.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @05:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @05:50PM (#803065)

      Comments made between friends in conversation are probably not inappropriate. I am not doubting sexual comments being made, I am doubting that they were inappropriate in the context they were made.

      If the students were talking amongst each other during a lecture loudly enough to be overheard by those not attempting to listen in, then the comments are still appropriate, it's just that the conversation per se was conducted inappropriately. The problem here isn't the comments at all, but the disturbance, and it would be just as bad if they commented on the font choice for the slides or the colour of the walls.

      The comments are appropriate in either of those two cases, though in the second they obviously need to be told to STFU due to their convo disrupting the lecture for those nearby.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @06:18PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @06:18PM (#803081)

      I'm 100% sure it elicited comments like that from boys in her class.

      You forget the girls? They make comments too. Probably less flattering than the boy's comments.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @07:46AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 19 2019, @07:46AM (#803401)

        Why would women describe it less flatteringly? Aesthetically the full portrait is high art. The crop, where she unabashedly, unreservedly, confidently looks dead-centre, simultaneously in no way does she back down or seem submissive - the crop has other nice details, but it delivers a superb performance. This level of emoting wins awards in motion pictures, and if she was able to deliver consistently in real-time then it's a shame she wasn't in theatre or (moving) film.

        Or do you think that expressive art with a sexual component is less worthy? Yes, sure; girls and boys with that position might indeed be less gushing. With their words. But that's rather like saying one doesn't like any contemporary abstract art, or any renaissance sculptures, only likely with a moral or prudish cause. Not everyone buys into "sex work is work."

    • (Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday February 19 2019, @03:31AM

      by driverless (4770) on Tuesday February 19 2019, @03:31AM (#803324)

      I'm 100% sure it elicited comments like that from boys in her class. She is 19. That means the boys are in the 18-20 range. Literally anything will elicit comments like that from boys in that age range.

      If she's now 19 that means she was also 14 at some point, in school with boys of a similar age. The shapes of the leaves of the potted plant on Matron's desk are sufficient to elicit comments of a sexual nature from that lot. Alongside the letters of the alphabet (look at the blatantly sexual nature of B, or O, or the suggestive letter combination "bj"), the shapes of clouds, and anything else man-made or natural.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @06:09PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @06:09PM (#803076)

    I remember dating her... I was 12.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @06:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @06:46PM (#803087)

      Me Too