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The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (1995)

nytimes.com

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Re: The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (1995)

#41

Post by igravious »

verisimilidude wrote: post #39
hawkharris wrote: post #35

It's interesting how the word "nude" boosts posts to the top of the social hierarchy on HN, Reddit and YouTube, among other sites, even in cases when the content would be otherwise irrelevant or uninteresting to the communities.

At an old job, I once wrote an internal library for working with RDF. Very unsexy stuff, nobody cared. When I changed the name of the library to "Graphic Nudity" (it exposes your graphs!), suddenly a lot of people took notice.

mmm RDF, tell me more ... resources ... descriptions ... frameworks ... mmm ... just this very day I taught this in class ... mmm ...

Re: The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (1995)

#42

Post by duaneb »

yongjik wrote: post #40
stephencanon wrote: post #28

This story comes up every now and then; I have a hard time seeing it as a “scandal”. It’s nothing more than a piece of historical anatomical pseudoscience that happens to tickle the salacious fancies of puritan America with the proximity of “nudity” and the names of recognizable celebrities. Might as well be phrenology otherwise.

Taking nude photos of an entire generation of college freshmen (without proper consent) is not scandalous? Sure, it's not at the level of secret Plutonium injection, but still...

I don't think it's been scandalous for about four decades. Even when it was happening it was an open secret. I don't think 'scandal' ever truly applied; that implies surprise.

Re: The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (1995)

#43

Post by stephencanon »

yongjik wrote: post #40
stephencanon wrote: post #28

This story comes up every now and then; I have a hard time seeing it as a “scandal”. It’s nothing more than a piece of historical anatomical pseudoscience that happens to tickle the salacious fancies of puritan America with the proximity of “nudity” and the names of recognizable celebrities. Might as well be phrenology otherwise.

Taking nude photos of an entire generation of college freshmen (without proper consent) is not scandalous? Sure, it's not at the level of secret Plutonium injection, but still...

The phrase "nude photos", for better or worse, tends to make people think that there was some prurient interest in taking them. As far as any of the published accounts go, there wasn't; this was simply Not Very Good Science.

It's certainly preferable to have consent before gathering clinical data, but I wouldn't make too big of a deal out of this. In the annals of things done without proper consent, this barely registers.

Re: The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (1995)

#44

Post by pak »

rayiner wrote: post #33
lnanek2 wrote: post #32

Not exactly strange. We still employ people to stare at nudes at the new airport scanners after all.

We do not: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/tsa-completely-remo...

So the machine takes the same picture, but simply pre-processes it into a cartoon image using "Advanced Imaging Technology" (now there's a hilarious non-description) before throwing it up on the monitor? Where do the originals go? Do they ever get audited or offloaded for quality control purposes--how else can they expect to be sure the algorithm works?

The news reports on this switch are all over the place in terms of quality, and you happened to pick one of the worse ones. I'm not the only one asking these questions: http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/29/travel/tsa-backscatter

"We'd like to see clearer rules about the collection of the images," Rotenberg said. "Are they deleted? Are they saved? Is some analysis being done and can they be linked to passengers?"

Not to mention the enormous waste of money it must have been to install and then remove the old machines. And what now happens to all the pictures they took, which are probably accumulating dust on some DHS subcontractor's hard disk somewhere in America?

Re: The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (1995)

#45

Post by pak »

stephencanon wrote: post #28

This story comes up every now and then; I have a hard time seeing it as a “scandal”. It’s nothing more than a piece of historical anatomical pseudoscience that happens to tickle the salacious fancies of puritan America with the proximity of “nudity” and the names of recognizable celebrities. Might as well be phrenology otherwise.

It draws my interest because of the obvious parallels to the millions of backscatter pictures taken by the TSA over the past decade, many of which are naked pictures of children and the elderly. The overwhelming majority of Americans consent to having these pictures taken before getting on a plane.

The sort of group psychology and doublethink that allows us to ridicule this dated pseudoscience on one hand, while walking right into a similar situation in every American airport today, is inherently fascinating.

Re: The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (1995)

#46

Post by munificent »

hawkharris wrote: post #35

It's interesting how the word "nude" boosts posts to the top of the social hierarchy on HN, Reddit and YouTube, among other sites, even in cases when the content would be otherwise irrelevant or uninteresting to the communities.

> It's interesting how the word "nude" boosts posts to the top

We're mammals. Despite our large cerebrums and ability for abstract reasoning, we're still primates. Of course we're drawn to sex, food, and emotion.

I think it's more interesting that we're surprised by this. Sure, it's good to try to overcome your bestial nature, but pretending it isn't there at all seems a bit silly.

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