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

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