FTFA:

Sounds like the school saw things her way... at least eventually.

So what? If significantly fewer people find it offensive, then its better.

And I can pretty much guarantee than an innocuous headshot photo I take of perfectly normal woman wearing a hat with a feather on it will prove to be far less controversial than a cropped playboy centerfold from the 70s.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

I am not being obtuse. I am well aware it is both a common and famous image. I've seen it several times over the years.

But the only real objection to dropping it amounts to "In a perfect world no one would think we should have to".

To that I would say "Grow up". The entire so-called standard image collection is extremely low resolution, poor quality color, and dated. Nobody is really doing real science on it anymore. We have libraries with thousands of equal or better images. People don't pick Lenna for their publication to compare it with old research - people pick her because she's like a mascot.

We can pick a new mascot image. It won't break science.

Lots of sports teams in the US have dropped their traditional names and selected new mascots over the years due to being inappropriately offensive to native americans. Even now The Washington Redskin's owner is kicking and screaming to hold onto that name, but the writing is on the wall; and its only a matter of time until that gets changed too.

Lenna is a central story in computer imaging history and that's fine. Let it just become history. It's not a appropriate photo anymore, it never really was.

So, not using the image in a high school assignment will somehow diminish the students education? Absurd.

Yes. That's exactly what we do. There are consequences. In most cases simply altering ones behavior to better meet expectations is sufficient.

This really doesn't need to devolve into politics. No question the world is not remotely fair.

You've essentially said the students shouldn't question authority or express themselves when they see misogyny or injustice etc. Yes they will learn the world isn't a perfect place -- that is part of growing up. But trying to change it, and changing what you can is a part of growing up too.

The point? My version wouldn't be a crop of a nude woman that would belong to playboy. There would be nothing the least bit controversial about it, and it would have all the same technical merits in terms of suitability as a test case for an image processing alogorithm.

What does what "you see" have to do with it? Frankly I agree with you about the image itself. I am not personally offended by it.

But surely you accept the empirical evidence that many other people do find even the idea of the use of a centerfold image lifted (even cropped) from Playboy to be inappropriate in an academic setting.

I see it. I even agree its inappropriate. Its certainly not something I'd knowingly do if I were selecting images to create a sample set of images for high school course.

/shrug

your right. it meets a technical definition of censorship. I withdraw my objection based on it not being censorship.

However, even if I accept its "censorship", so what? There is nothing wrong whatsoever with not doing something that pops into your head because you realize other people would not appreciate it, would not understand, or would be offended by it.

There is nothing wrong with that. Yet you make out like its universally wrong. That's ridiculous.

Or are you really suggesting that a high school computer science teacher is showing good judgement if he goes through his porn collection, crops a bunch of the images of various porn actresses and provides those as his sample data set, with attribution. (Because not providing proper attribution is itself academic dishonesty.)

Does he have the right to do it? Sure. Because otherwise censorship right?

But does everyone else have a right to tell him he's an idiot, and refuse to do the assignment, and complain the administration that they feel the assignment is completely inappropriate, and demand he be replaced with a teacher who doesn't make decisions like this. Why yes, they can, because if they couldn't that would be censorship too. And around we go.

Some measure of reasonable self-censorship is part of normal social lubricant. Whether or not you personally feel the image is offensive you are aware that it controversial. If you select it knowingly you provoke controversy. If if you provoke controversy... then own the consequences.

While you have the right to offend. Other people have the right to be offended.

It's not censorship.

http://www.ringwoodbiology.co....

or take your pick...crop to hearts content...

http://www.bigstockphoto.com/s...
http://www.bigstockphoto.com/s...

Yes, its a suitable image. But its not uniquely suitable. Any of thousands of other images are equally suitable.

Hell, I could recreate the pose with a volunteer model (wife), 10 minutes, and trip to the thrift shop for.

Of course.

You read it in a class where the controversies raised are a central part of the education about american history and american literature.

I respectfully disagree. I wouldn't ban it from the curriculum. Its perfectly appropriate for an American Lit curriculum.

However, if I were teaching calligraphy and wanted to give them practice exercises with n's and g's What possible reason is there to justify selecting "sand nigger" as their practice words? Yes, there are n's and g's ... but innumerable other options are equally suitable to satisfy that objective, There is no reason to select an ethnic slur. Because its a calligraphy class... and we want to focus on calligraphy... brush strokes and technique. You want to focus on how to draw the letters, not get overly distracted by what the practice exercises actually say.

In a class where you want discussions about the book selecting a book that is both suitable for the course (american english lit) incites discussion makes sense.

In a CS image processing course you want discussion about rasterization, antialiasing, edge detection...not on the ethics of porn. Why would you select an image that originates with porn? Its not like there is a dearth of suitable photos to choose from.

My response to THAT issue was in the first part of my reply, to wit: that there is no particular reason to use that image, and that I'd select a different one.

I haven't bought into this bullshit. I don't think the image is the least bit profane.

I have however bought into the unequivocal fact that the image draws controversy and discussion unrelated to teaching computer science.

If I were a teacher, and i wasn't interested in that discussion and controversy distracting the class, I'd pick a different image. Its not like there is any thing technical about that image that makes it especially useful as a test case.

Great points. A good topic for a philosophy course; but it's not computer science.

You've got it upside dowm. I run systemd on emacs.

Peak pricing is based on peak demand. If someone buys a battery to try and get abitrage between peak and offpeak pricing they can.

However as soon as you try to scale it up and "everyone starts doing it" it doesn't work.

Each person that adds on lops a little slice of how much is needed at peak, and adds a little sloce to how much is needed off peak.

Think about that. As soon as enough people jump on the bandwagon the offpeak demand rises and the peak demand falls to equilibrium and the prices will equalize and there will be no more price arbitrage.

So, short term, yeah, it might makes sense - you might even break even or come out ahead depending on how things go. As backup power for your home, maybe it makes sense.

But long term though, I speculate the power company will simply deploy its own industrial scale batteries for a fraction of the price per kwh stored than will be available to me at home and use that to smooth things out at their end. And then peak pricing and off peak pricing will move to equillibrium.

Bad guys have to set the evil bit; the software checks whether or not it's set. Really people, we've thought this through.

Good solve! :) Strictly speaking, it would have been O18.9Neon as I was truncating rather than rounding atomic weights.

That was my thought too. And even that algorithm was relatively simple; requiring the user memorize just a couple simple rules and either know the periodic table; or have ready access to one (which is trivial) in the event he needs to "regenerate" a forgotten password.

I -used- to use techniques in the same general category as this for password generation... but after a few breaches and other forced password change situations it became irritating because I could no longer use the password the 'system' generated with some sites. I switched to using a password manager with random passwords on most sites.

I still use a 'system' for some sites I use regularly and/or have to enter the p/w manually instead of being able to use copy/paste.

I memorize a simple password for each and then some apply some ciphers and transformations to it. So losing one to a phish isn't a threat to the rest, and I can change it easily since it isn't based soley on the domain name.

But it's only suitable for a smallish number of sites; since I still have to remember a basic password.

And honestly, at this stage I feel the so-called security questions (that anyone who knows you can answer) with email or SMS recovery mechanisms are the weakest link. As these are both fairly easy to intercept; especially if you know the target.