Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
Speaker 1: tech are you today? I want to tell the story
Speaker 1: of Lenna orsin her role in the history of image
Speaker 1: processing and technical papers, and why some publications and organizations
Speaker 1: are now banning papers that contain her photograph. Because I
Speaker 1: hadn't actually heard of any of this before I read
Speaker 1: an article in Ours Technica by BINGJ. Edwards titled Playboy
Speaker 1: image from nineteen seventy two gets banned from I Tripoli
Speaker 1: computer Journals. Yeah, we're going to be telling you about
Speaker 1: Playboy and nude modeling as well, because that all is
Speaker 1: involved in this story, all right. The first up, who
Speaker 1: is Lena for Senne? Well, she's a model from Sweden.
Speaker 1: She moved to America and in her early twenties she
Speaker 1: was a model and Playboy discovered her and she became
Speaker 1: Miss November nineteen seventy two. The centerfold photo of her
Speaker 1: pictorial would become entwined with tech history, and not just
Speaker 1: because some tech heads were subscribed to Playboy, although I
Speaker 1: suspected that played a large part in it, and her
Speaker 1: image is one that you've probably seen at least the
Speaker 1: portion of the image of her centerfold that has been
Speaker 1: used in the tech sector, because it's literally been used
Speaker 1: thousands of times. I know that when I saw the picture,
Speaker 1: I thought, oh, that's where that's from, because I had
Speaker 1: never thought to look any further into it. So a
Speaker 1: photographer named Dwight Hooker took the photo in question, and
Speaker 1: in the photo, Lena Foceen stands facing a mirror and
Speaker 1: her back is to the camerage. She's turned her head
Speaker 1: so that she's looking back over her shoulder to look
Speaker 1: at the camera lens. And the centerfold version of this
Speaker 1: photo is full body, you know, from head to toe,
Speaker 1: well technically hat to toe, because she is wearing a
Speaker 1: hat and a boa and really nothing else. The section
Speaker 1: of the image that matters the most to our story
Speaker 1: is from her shoulders up shoulders to the top of
Speaker 1: the feathered hat she is wearing, because that's the part
Speaker 1: of the image that we play a huge role in
Speaker 1: the development of image processing in general, and the fact
Speaker 1: that it was a cropped image from a centerfold photo
Speaker 1: in Playboy would become a source of debate and I
Speaker 1: hesitate to use the word controversy. I'm not sure that
Speaker 1: it was that controversial as much as it was concerning.
Speaker 1: But we'll talk all about that when we get toward
Speaker 1: the end of this episode. But let's go back to
Speaker 1: the early nineteen seventies, more specifically the summer of nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three. Getting more specific than just the summer of
Speaker 1: seventy three is a bit tricky because the folks who
Speaker 1: have related the story as it unfolded about using this
Speaker 1: image in the first place, we're all working from memory,
Speaker 1: so they were just like, it's June or July nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three. That's about as specific as we can get.
Speaker 1: The place, however, we can narrow down. The place was
Speaker 1: the University of Southern California, and specifically the Signal and
Speaker 1: Image Processing Institute or SIPI or SIPPY as I will
Speaker 1: call it. The institute at that point was pretty darn young,
Speaker 1: so an alumnus of USC named William Pratt led a
Speaker 1: group of alumni to establish this institute in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: and they had the goal of tackling three big challenges
Speaker 1: in computing and digital images. So, according to the organization's
Speaker 1: fiftieth anniversary celebration page because they just recently celebrated that
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago. The challenges were to solve quote,
Speaker 1: image code, image restoration, and image data extractioned. So remember
Speaker 1: this is decades before we would get industry standards like JPEG,
Speaker 1: and even still more than a decade before the bitmap
Speaker 1: image file format. So the folks at USC SIPPY, which
Speaker 1: back then was just called IPPI, they were doing work
Speaker 1: that would inform these later standards. So this is like
Speaker 1: the early work where they're coming up with the methodologies
Speaker 1: that ultimately would find their way into various file formats
Speaker 1: much further down the line. So they were laying the
Speaker 1: groundwork now. In that summer of nineteen seventy three, an
Speaker 1: electrical engineering assistant professor named Alexander Sawchuk was working with
Speaker 1: grad students to find an image that they were going
Speaker 1: to scan. So Sawchuk had a colleague who was preparing
Speaker 1: a paper for a conference, and this paper was all
Speaker 1: about the process they were using at USC to scan
Speaker 1: images and to digitize them. And Sawchuk wanted to grab
Speaker 1: something that they hadn't already used a dozen times in
Speaker 1: various test scans, like they had some stock photos that
Speaker 1: were their go to, but everyone had seen those already,
Speaker 1: and moreover, the folks in the lab were just sick
Speaker 1: of them, so they wanted to get something new. Plus,
Speaker 1: they wanted something that would really show off their methodology
Speaker 1: to good effect. So they wanted something that was special.
Speaker 1: They wanted a glossy photo that had a lot of
Speaker 1: intricate detail inside of it and also a high level
Speaker 1: of contrast in it. They wanted something that had a
Speaker 1: lot of dynamic elements so that their methodology could be
Speaker 1: shown off in the best light, so to speak. So
Speaker 1: he also wanted the photo to be of a person's face,
Speaker 1: to really, you know, have something that people could see
Speaker 1: and recognize immediately as oh, that's a human being, and
Speaker 1: thus be able to tell how well the process worked.
Speaker 1: Now history has lost the name of the heat Row
Speaker 1: who walked by carrying an issue of the November nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy two Playboy magazine. Let me just say, the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies were definitely a different time. But even as someone
Speaker 1: who was born in the nineteen seventies, as an I
Speaker 1: was born in the seventies, y'all, it is hard for
Speaker 1: me to imagine just casually bringing a Playboy magazine into
Speaker 1: an academic lab like that, or just carrying it around
Speaker 1: at a college campus. It's hard for me to imagine
Speaker 1: doing that. But then I'm also not an electrical engineer,
Speaker 1: so maybe I just I'm just built different. The scanner
Speaker 1: that the team was using was a mirror head or
Speaker 1: mir head muirhad, I'm butchering the pronunciation, but he was
Speaker 1: a wire photo machine and had a scanning resolution of
Speaker 1: one hundred lines per inch. Their plan was to scan
Speaker 1: a five twelve x five twelve image, So five hundred
Speaker 1: and twelve lines by five hundred and twelve lines I
Speaker 1: meant the photo that they scanned could only be five
Speaker 1: point one two inches to a side right one hundred
Speaker 1: lines to an inch. So that would mean that they
Speaker 1: could not do a full scan of the centerfold, and
Speaker 1: they shouldn't even have thought of it anyway, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure they didn't because it would have been incredibly inappropriate
Speaker 1: to present the centerfold as a scanned image in a
Speaker 1: conference paper, considering the nudity. That would just be inappropriate.
Speaker 1: So they just went the top five point one two
Speaker 1: inches of the image showing, which would crop the photo
Speaker 1: at Lenna's shoulders, so it would just be the shoulders up. Well,
Speaker 1: let's talk about the actual scanning technology for a minute.
Speaker 1: So we're in the early nineteen seventies, and you might
Speaker 1: wonder how old was wire photo technology. Believe it or not,
Speaker 1: wire photo services had been in operation for around fifty
Speaker 1: years by the time we're talking about making computer scans. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, in the early twentieth century, people were not
Speaker 1: scanning photographs into computers. That wasn't happening. But what they
Speaker 1: were doing was they were using technology to turn photographs
Speaker 1: into electrical signals that could then be transmitted over wire
Speaker 1: or over radio waves. Now, there were different particulars for
Speaker 1: the various methodologies. There wasn't just one device out there
Speaker 1: that did this. But generally speaking, a typical approach with
Speaker 1: a wire photo scanner would have a machine that consisted
Speaker 1: of a drum, and on this drum you would place
Speaker 1: the image because kind of similar to like a photocopier
Speaker 1: in that respect, and the drum would rotate and as
Speaker 1: the drum rotated, there would be this tiny dot of
Speaker 1: light that would hit the photograph and slowly make its
Speaker 1: way across the width of the photograph. So as the
Speaker 1: light was moving, the drum would rotate fast enough so
Speaker 1: that the light would scan the entire length of the photograph,
Speaker 1: and the photograph would reflect some of that light onto
Speaker 1: a photovoltaic cell, so kind of similar to what you
Speaker 1: would find in the solar cell right now. The intensity
Speaker 1: of the light that hit that photovoltaic cell would determine
Speaker 1: the amount of electrical charge that the cell could generate.
Speaker 1: So that means you would end up with this variable
Speaker 1: electrical signal, and that signal would represent the amount of
Speaker 1: light that was reflected off the photograph. You can think
Speaker 1: of it as a really strong signal shows a bright
Speaker 1: part of the image, and a weak signal would show
Speaker 1: a dark part of the image. To oversimplify it. Now,
Speaker 1: you could then take this electrical signal and you could
Speaker 1: send it to a destination. You could do so directly
Speaker 1: over a wire, it's like a power line or phone
Speaker 1: line or something. Or you could further transform the information
Speaker 1: by converting the signal into radio waves and then broadcast
Speaker 1: the radio waves to a receiver which would then reverse
Speaker 1: the process to capture the radio waves, convert them back
Speaker 1: into an electrical signal, and then send them on. So
Speaker 1: either way this electrical signal would make its way to
Speaker 1: the other end, where you would have a similar device
Speaker 1: to the scanner. It would also have a drum on it,
Speaker 1: but instead of a photo on it, you would have
Speaker 1: photoreactive paper or film on it, and the drum would
Speaker 1: rotate in synchronization with the rotation of the original drum,
Speaker 1: synchronization of what it was going at when it was scanning,
Speaker 1: that is, and it would also project a light, and
Speaker 1: that light the projection of that light would depend upon
Speaker 1: that varying electrical signal, So in strong parts of the signal,
Speaker 1: the light would be more intense, and in weaker parts
Speaker 1: of the signal it'd be dimmer. And so this light
Speaker 1: would hit the photoreactive film on the drum. As the
Speaker 1: drum rotated, the light would also scan across the width
Speaker 1: of the film. And then you would take the film
Speaker 1: and you would develop it, and you would end up
Speaker 1: with a copy of the original image that was used
Speaker 1: on the first device. This was really clever. It's a
Speaker 1: clever way to take an image, transform it into a signal,
Speaker 1: and then take that signal and transform it back into
Speaker 1: a copy of the image. All Right, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick break here. When we come back, i'll talk
Speaker 1: more about how this centerfold image found its way into
Speaker 1: tech history, but first let's take a break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsors. Okay, we're back. So I talked before the
Speaker 1: break about the actual technical approach toward wire photo scanning,
Speaker 1: and it's a very clever approach. However, it's also an
Speaker 1: analog approach, so, in other words, it's not directly compatible
Speaker 1: with the world of computers, which is a digital world.
Speaker 1: It's built on top of the concept of binary right
Speaker 1: zeros and ones. You can think of the computer as
Speaker 1: viewing the world as stuff that's I off or it's on,
Speaker 1: whereas analog is more like a continuum. This, by the way,
Speaker 1: is one of the many bases of arguments that audio
Speaker 1: files make that analog audio is inherently better than digital audio,
Speaker 1: because analog is a representation of an unbroken signal, whereas
Speaker 1: digital is a bunch of zeros and ones that give
Speaker 1: you little, tiny steps. And yes, the steps can be
Speaker 1: very very tiny, so tiny that to our perception it's
Speaker 1: no different than an unbroken signal. But if you get
Speaker 1: down far enough, it is it's broken up. And apparently
Speaker 1: that's enough to make digital worse than analog. Not every
Speaker 1: audio file believes that. By the way, I don't want
Speaker 1: to paint everyone with the same brush, but that is
Speaker 1: one of the arguments that audio files make. I don't
Speaker 1: personally buy into it. I do think you can reach
Speaker 1: a level of fidelity that is so indistinguishable from any
Speaker 1: other format that it makes no difference, but that's my
Speaker 1: own personal opinion anyway. The wire photo scanning approach is
Speaker 1: an analog technology. You're getting this variable electrical signal that's
Speaker 1: a continuous thing, not a bunch of zeros and ones.
Speaker 1: So in order to be able to process this in
Speaker 1: a computer and to be able to make a computer
Speaker 1: scan of this, the lab actually had to use analog
Speaker 1: to digital converters to connect to the scanner in order
Speaker 1: to change those signals into binary data that a computer
Speaker 1: could make sense of. Actually, the lab had three analog
Speaker 1: to digital converters. They had one for red, one for green,
Speaker 1: and one for blue, and collectively these three converters would
Speaker 1: supply all the information needed to recreate the image on
Speaker 1: a computer with the proper colors, because obviously if you
Speaker 1: didn't have that then you would have to work with
Speaker 1: a monochromatic digital image, right you would just have information
Speaker 1: as to the brightness or darkness, but you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: that related to things like what color that was. By
Speaker 1: using filters and three different digital analog to digital converters,
Speaker 1: they could recreate that. Now. The computational side of their
Speaker 1: work was handled by a Hewlett Packard twenty one hundred
Speaker 1: mini computer. Now we don't tend to use the term
Speaker 1: mini computer anymore these days, and the name might give
Speaker 1: you the wrong impression if you aren't aren't ancient like
Speaker 1: I am. Many computers were not teeny tiny machines despite
Speaker 1: the name mini computer. Many computers were still honking big computers.
Speaker 1: They could weigh more than two hundred pounds easy. Now
Speaker 1: they were called many computers because despite their size, they
Speaker 1: were smaller and less powerful than the giant mainframe machines
Speaker 1: you might find in some places. Many computers came out
Speaker 1: before the era of personal computers, but there was quite
Speaker 1: a bit of overlap between the era of many computers
Speaker 1: and the era of PCs did come out. While many
Speaker 1: computers were still very much the regular type of machine
Speaker 1: you would encounter in say a scientific lab, a research lab,
Speaker 1: or maybe a financial institution. That kind of thing you
Speaker 1: were more likely to run across a mini computer than
Speaker 1: a personal computer because for lots of years, PCs just
Speaker 1: couldn't match the performance of many computers, and a lot
Speaker 1: of organizations had higher needs than a PC could provide,
Speaker 1: but they didn't have such high demands that they needed
Speaker 1: to invest millions of dollars into a mainframe computer, So
Speaker 1: the mini computer was kind of the best solution. Now,
Speaker 1: by the time you get to the late nineties early
Speaker 1: two thousands, personal computers were at a performance level where
Speaker 1: many computers weren't really relevant anymore. Many computers also were
Speaker 1: reducing in size. There was kind of this convergence happening
Speaker 1: where PCs were essentially being able to do the stuff
Speaker 1: that the mini computers of the past could do. But
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen seventy, if you were doing serious
Speaker 1: scientific research on the computer, chances are it was a
Speaker 1: mini computer unless the geeks and the college mainframe center
Speaker 1: really liked you and gave you time to use on
Speaker 1: their machines. But time on a mainframe was a really
Speaker 1: sought after commodity anyway. The HP twenty one hundred was
Speaker 1: a sixteen bit machine that means it could handle data
Speaker 1: units that were sixteen bits wide. That means it could
Speaker 1: store two to the sixteenth power of values, which is
Speaker 1: sixty five, five hundred and thirty six values. These days,
Speaker 1: you probably own a PC running. I mean, at least
Speaker 1: it's a thirty two bit mode, if not a sixty
Speaker 1: four bit mode. So we have come a very long
Speaker 1: way from those days in the early nineteen seventies. Now,
Speaker 1: the scanning process itself took quite a bit of time,
Speaker 1: and it was a little bit finicky. In fact, during
Speaker 1: that first scan there were a couple of errors in
Speaker 1: the process. For one thing, there was a software issue,
Speaker 1: which meant that at the end of the day there
Speaker 1: was a single line missing from the scanned photo. It
Speaker 1: only had five hundred eleven lines, not five hundred twelve.
Speaker 1: So the team decided that in order to fix that,
Speaker 1: they would just copy the very top line of the
Speaker 1: image and then place it at the very top of it,
Speaker 1: so the top line of the image was there twice,
Speaker 1: and that way they got the five hundred and twelve
Speaker 1: lines that they wanted. They also found out that their
Speaker 1: analog to digital converters were not properly synchronized with the drum,
Speaker 1: so the image they had was just a touch distorted,
Speaker 1: not like to a terrible level, but it was a
Speaker 1: tiny bit elongated. Now, from what I understand, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: really know it unless you were comparing the scanned photo
Speaker 1: to the original photograph. It wasn't like it was to
Speaker 1: a point where it was, you know, disturbing or something.
Speaker 1: But you know, if you were going to compare it
Speaker 1: to the original, it means that you just brought a
Speaker 1: copy of Playboy into the conference and that probably is
Speaker 1: a reflection on your own sense of propriety. But who
Speaker 1: am I to judge. I'm somewhat amused that the team
Speaker 1: felt that replicating a top line and accepting a little
Speaker 1: deformation in their copied image were both within acceptable limits
Speaker 1: for their colleague's conference paper. So my guess is they
Speaker 1: must have really been under the gun to meet a deadline. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: I can't imagine that they wouldn't just try the scan
Speaker 1: again to get a better result. Then again, maybe the
Speaker 1: process really was so slow and cumbersome and unpredictable that
Speaker 1: no one really had the desire to give it another
Speaker 1: go without a guaranteed success. Right, So maybe the scan
Speaker 1: was actually better than what they normally got out of
Speaker 1: the process, and there, they felt they were lucky getting
Speaker 1: away with what they got. Whatever the reason, this imperfect
Speaker 1: scan was what made it into that conference presentation, and
Speaker 1: ultimately it's what would make Lenna something of a celebrity
Speaker 1: within the image processing world. Well, that and the fact
Speaker 1: that Lenna's photograph showcased her youth and beauty, and you know,
Speaker 1: the jaunt tilt of her hat with the long purple
Speaker 1: feather added some flare to it. And there's no denying
Speaker 1: that the photograph has just got great composition in lighting
Speaker 1: and that it captures Lenna's looks really well. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a picture of a beautiful young woman, so it
Speaker 1: obviously had some captivating factors all by itself. Now, the
Speaker 1: story goes that attend days at this conference wanted to
Speaker 1: be able to test their own processes and methodologies against
Speaker 1: the Sippy Labs version. But to test like against like,
Speaker 1: you know, they would need to have two things. They
Speaker 1: would need a copy of Sippy's version of the scanned image,
Speaker 1: and they would need access to the original image so
Speaker 1: that they could perform their own scans and then compare
Speaker 1: them to Sippy's results. Well, access to the original was
Speaker 1: pretty easy because it was in a published magazine, which,
Speaker 1: from what I gather, was a pretty large circulation in general,
Speaker 1: but seemed particularly popular in computer engineering circles. So apparently
Speaker 1: there was no shortage of that original centerfold. The scanned
Speaker 1: version they would need to get from Sippy, but Sippy
Speaker 1: chose to share it liberally. They said, sure, yeah, well
Speaker 1: absolutely share this image of our scan. You can have
Speaker 1: a copy of it now. The result of all this
Speaker 1: is that Lenna's image became a de facto standard for
Speaker 1: testing scanning technologies and compression algorithms, and her photograph were
Speaker 1: rather more specifically, a scan of her photograph would find
Speaker 1: its way into countless journals and papers about the different
Speaker 1: methods for creating digital image files. This actually reminds me
Speaker 1: a little bit about the history of the MP three format.
Speaker 1: So you might remember that the engineers behind the MP
Speaker 1: three algorithm, you know, when they were trying to figure
Speaker 1: out the compression algorithm to use, they used a version
Speaker 1: of Suzanne Vegas Song Tom's Diner to calibrate their approach,
Speaker 1: so they would make tweaks to how the algorithm would
Speaker 1: choose which information to keep and which information could be
Speaker 1: tossed aside. That's how the MP three file format really works.
Speaker 1: The compression algorithm, and I'm talking about file size compression,
Speaker 1: not audio compression. The filesize compression algorithm looks at the
Speaker 1: elements of a sound file and says, what can we
Speaker 1: get rid of that isn't going to compromise the quality
Speaker 1: of the audio to such a degree that it's undesirable.
Speaker 1: So they would make changes to their algorithm. Then they
Speaker 1: would put Tom's Diner through the algorithm. Then they would
Speaker 1: listen to the compressed song and find out if the
Speaker 1: changes they made were manifest, if they were obvious when
Speaker 1: the song is played, they were perceptible. So the goal
Speaker 1: obviously was to maintain the song's quality as much as possible,
Speaker 1: even as they would reduce the file size. Well in
Speaker 1: some ways, this play always centerfold photograph of Lenna served
Speaker 1: much the same purpose, but in image research labs, you know,
Speaker 1: the labs that we're working on the future of digital imagery.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting to me about this part of it
Speaker 1: is that Playboy found out about this. The magazine found
Speaker 1: out about this, and in a move that is a
Speaker 1: little bit surprising considering how we typically see companies really
Speaker 1: move swiftly to protect their intellectual property. Playboy chose not
Speaker 1: to do anything about it. For one thing, the distribution
Speaker 1: of Lena's scanned image was pretty good publicity for the magazine. Plus,
Speaker 1: the various labs that wanted to test their own processes
Speaker 1: would need copies of the nineteen seventy two November issue
Speaker 1: to measure their results against what Sippy produced, So you
Speaker 1: had some guaranteed magazine sales out there. So Playboy's like,
Speaker 1: you know what, this is not bad for us. We're
Speaker 1: not gonna pursue the fact that this image that we
Speaker 1: owned the copyright too, is being used in various academic papers,
Speaker 1: in thousands of journals. As for Lena, she got word
Speaker 1: that her picture was being used by computer labs to
Speaker 1: advance digital imagery technology, and it sounds to me like
Speaker 1: she was pretty tickled by the whole thing. She certainly
Speaker 1: was happy to appear at a nineteen ninety seven conference
Speaker 1: in Boston. Playboy actually helped track her down so that
Speaker 1: she would be invited to this engineering conference. So there
Speaker 1: she goes, a former Playboy model appearing at an electrical
Speaker 1: engineering conference in Boston, Massachusetts, where she signed autographs for
Speaker 1: people who had been using her photograph while working on
Speaker 1: their own imagery projects like she was a celebrity. There. Okay,
Speaker 1: we've got more to say about this iconic image and
Speaker 1: its place in the tech sector and how that place
Speaker 1: is changing. But before we get to all that, let's
Speaker 1: take another quick break to thank our sponsors. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're back now. According to numerous sources that I came
Speaker 1: across when I was researching this, the image of Lenna
Speaker 1: found its way into literally thousands of papers and articles
Speaker 1: over the following decades, in the nineteen seventies, the eighties,
Speaker 1: the nineties, the two thousands. I mean, it's it's still
Speaker 1: found in circulating articles and papers to this day. And
Speaker 1: not only was it essentially ubiquitous in the tech literature
Speaker 1: and often used by people who had no idea of
Speaker 1: that image's history, it also became sort of an icon
Speaker 1: for an ongoing conversation that's really nuanced and complicated and
Speaker 1: important in the tech space, and it was an easy
Speaker 1: way to kind of point to this one image and
Speaker 1: use it as sort of the entry point for that conversation.
Speaker 1: And there's been a movement now to really call a
Speaker 1: stop to using this picture in academic papers and articles
Speaker 1: because it reinforces an aspect of a harmful environment in
Speaker 1: the tech space. Again, this is nuanced, This is complicated.
Speaker 1: So I don't want to just say using a picture
Speaker 1: that originated from Playboy magazine is already inherently bad, and
Speaker 1: that's the start and end of it. It's not the
Speaker 1: start and end of it. It's one aspect of a
Speaker 1: much larger conversation. There is no denying that historically the
Speaker 1: field of computer science has been dominated by men. Now
Speaker 1: this is despite the fact that many women, incredible intelligent
Speaker 1: women have made phenomenal contributions to computer science. Some of
Speaker 1: the most important contributions to computer science came from women,
Speaker 1: women like Ada Lovelace. Ada Lovelace envision that numbers in
Speaker 1: mathematics could be used to re present everything from paintings
Speaker 1: to music. She was arguing for computer science before a
Speaker 1: computer existed. Or you had women like Grace Hopper who
Speaker 1: led teams developing early computer programming languages. Or you had
Speaker 1: the women who worked for the US military who calculated
Speaker 1: ballistics charts for artillery. Again for the military, these women
Speaker 1: were actually the first computers. That was their job title.
Speaker 1: They were computers. They computed those ballistic charts. So they
Speaker 1: clearly have made some massive contributions to the field. However,
Speaker 1: when you looked at a typical computer lab, especially like
Speaker 1: in the nineteen seventies, that was a space that was
Speaker 1: almost filled exclusively with young men. In the United States,
Speaker 1: it was usually young white men at that point, and
Speaker 1: this homogeneous group of people fell into a tendency that
Speaker 1: typically happens when you get a bunch of people together
Speaker 1: who all share the same backgrounds. It doesn't just happened
Speaker 1: with white guys, like it happens with any group of
Speaker 1: people who are all very similar to one another. Certain
Speaker 1: things are going to rise to the top and become
Speaker 1: norms within that group. And if you didn't belong to
Speaker 1: that group, those norms might not be very welcoming. In fact,
Speaker 1: they could feel downright hostile or demeaning. And again, this
Speaker 1: happens with any group of homogeneous folks, like these norms
Speaker 1: just kind of establish themselves over time. Now, that was
Speaker 1: a large part of what would become the Losing Lena movement.
Speaker 1: You had a lot of different organizations that took part
Speaker 1: in this. In fact, there was a documentary called Losing
Speaker 1: Lena Women, and these organizations really began to push for
Speaker 1: publications and the various technical societies to abandon the use
Speaker 1: of Lena's image as a testing standard. They argued that
Speaker 1: the tech world is far more diverse than that, that
Speaker 1: there are lots of different voices in the tech space,
Speaker 1: and his image taking such a prominent role in tech
Speaker 1: was really a byproduct of bias from these homogeneous groups
Speaker 1: of mostly white guys who really kind of created the
Speaker 1: culture of the tech space, and they felt that this
Speaker 1: was something that they could actually address and maybe start
Speaker 1: a conversation about all of that. As for Lenna herself,
Speaker 1: she came out in favor of retiring her photos. In
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen. She made a statement saying she had retired
Speaker 1: from modeling and it was time for her to retire
Speaker 1: from technology as well. Now she remains proud of her work,
Speaker 1: and she should, but she also recognizes how the almost
Speaker 1: mandated use of her photograph in digital imagery could reinforce
Speaker 1: an unwelcome environment considering the origin for that picture, Playboy,
Speaker 1: And this is where the conversation really needs to get nuanced.
Speaker 1: I think most folks who criticized the use of Lenna's
Speaker 1: photograph in technology, they don't harbor any animosity toward Lenna herself.
Speaker 1: They aren't saying that she was a bad person for
Speaker 1: taking the job or working with Playboy or anything like that.
Speaker 1: I don't think most of them are even calling out
Speaker 1: Playboy beyond the fact that Playboy was catering to a group,
Speaker 1: a demographic that also happened to be the same demographic
Speaker 1: that kind of defined the culture of the tech space.
Speaker 1: So that's really the problem, right, There's this deep culture
Speaker 1: in tech space that has at best been unwelcoming toward women,
Speaker 1: and at worst, it has been downright hostile. Now, this
Speaker 1: does not mean that every tech department in every business,
Speaker 1: or every school or organization or whatever is bad or
Speaker 1: just staffed entirely with misogynists. That's not what that means.
Speaker 1: But there's also no denying that many of the institutions
Speaker 1: in tech are male centric and male dominated, and this
Speaker 1: poses a challenge. How do you address a male dominated
Speaker 1: industry in a way that opens it up and makes
Speaker 1: it more welcoming to people who aren't male. And to
Speaker 1: be clear, I really do think opening up is a
Speaker 1: good thing. I think welcoming people from different demographics ultimately
Speaker 1: it results in better output, whether it's a service or
Speaker 1: a product. Bringing people from a diverse collection of experiences
Speaker 1: and backgrounds helps you get new ideas and approaches that
Speaker 1: wouldn't have occurred if you're just working with a homogeneous group.
Speaker 1: You find perspectives that you hadn't considered before. And I
Speaker 1: know that the whole diversity, equity and inclusion topic, the
Speaker 1: DEI topic, is a hot button issue, and often folks
Speaker 1: will weaponize the idea to suggest that the real goal
Speaker 1: of DEI is to water everything down. For some reason,
Speaker 1: I don't know why that's the go to. I don't
Speaker 1: think most people are like, hey, I want everything to
Speaker 1: be crappy. In fact, I think that's exact opposite. You know, personally,
Speaker 1: I do not believe that making DEI a focus is
Speaker 1: a bad thing. However, I do understand that other folks
Speaker 1: have a very different opinion. And certainly there are instances
Speaker 1: in which a company or organization might make token gestures
Speaker 1: toward DEI but ultimately cause more harm than good in
Speaker 1: the process. I've seen that happen a lot. I've seen
Speaker 1: companies that have done these sort of token gestures, and
Speaker 1: ultimately it is demoralizing, it can harm their output, and
Speaker 1: it's because there's no genuine commitment toward improving diversity and representation.
Speaker 1: It's more about how can we look good on the
Speaker 1: surface level without having to take the hard work of
Speaker 1: addressing the underlying issues. But that's a topic for another time. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I feel it really does benefit a group to consider
Speaker 1: the opinions and expertise of folks who come from other
Speaker 1: backgrounds and points of view. But to do that, you
Speaker 1: first have to make sure that you're not just discouraging
Speaker 1: these people from participating in the first place. And that's
Speaker 1: what the Losing Lina movement was really about, using just
Speaker 1: one component of a much larger cultural issue in technology,
Speaker 1: and there's been some progress on that front. I mean,
Speaker 1: just this week, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Speaker 1: or I Triple E, or as I like to say
Speaker 1: I E, they just announced that they would no longer
Speaker 1: accept papers that included the Lena image in them. In fact, editors,
Speaker 1: if they find the image in the paper, are supposed
Speaker 1: to reach out to the producers of that paper and
Speaker 1: work with them to select a different image to go
Speaker 1: in that place, rather than just an outright rejection. So
Speaker 1: the IEE or send out an email to their members that,
Speaker 1: among other things, stated quote in alignment with this culture
Speaker 1: and with respect to the wishes of the subject of
Speaker 1: the image, Lena for sen IEEE will no longer accept
Speaker 1: submitted papers which include the quote unquote Lena image end
Speaker 1: full quote. So the I Triple E is not the
Speaker 1: only organization to announce this kind of a ban. In fact,
Speaker 1: a year before or Lenna herself came out to support
Speaker 1: her removal or the removal of her image rather in
Speaker 1: various papers and journals, the scientific journal Nature said they
Speaker 1: were banned any papers that were submitted that included the
Speaker 1: Lena image. So this has been going on for a
Speaker 1: few years. And again I do think this is a
Speaker 1: very complex issue and it requires compassion and critical thinking
Speaker 1: to approach it properly. I see really the whole Lena
Speaker 1: image thing as an opportunity to start having deeper, more
Speaker 1: meaningful conversations about the cultural climate in the tech sector
Speaker 1: in general, and really to examine what is and isn't
Speaker 1: working on that cultural level. And yes, that might mean
Speaker 1: that ultimately you might have to make some changes in
Speaker 1: how your organization does stuff. Those changes might to some
Speaker 1: seem to be arbitrary or irritating, but if it means
Speaker 1: creating a more welcoming environment where innovation can come from
Speaker 1: news sources. Ultimately, every every body benefits from that. So
Speaker 1: that's one reason to support these kinds of changes, at
Speaker 1: least the ones that are made at a genuine level
Speaker 1: and not just a way to get good quote unquote optics,
Speaker 1: since we're talking digital imagery here. Plus, if you're really
Speaker 1: upset about the Lina image being phased out of the
Speaker 1: whole tech sphere, that picture's everywhere on the web. It's
Speaker 1: not disappearing like. You could do a quick Google image
Speaker 1: search and you're gonna find countless examples of the Lina
Speaker 1: image out there. I mean, if you wanted to, you
Speaker 1: could probably even track down a vintage copy of the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two November issue of Playboy if you look
Speaker 1: hard enough. It's okay if the imagery world moves on
Speaker 1: to adopt other pictures as a means of testing technologies
Speaker 1: and algorithms. I mean, Lenna said, So, all right, that's
Speaker 1: it for this episode of tech Stuff. I hope you
Speaker 1: are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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