[SIGCIS-Members] real doctors, dirty pictures

[Nathan Ensmenger]

My apologies if this comes through twice.  I am having trouble posting directly to the list.

On Nov 30, 2012, at 12:43 PM, "M. Hicks" <mhicks1 at iit.edu> wrote:

> One quibble: shouldn't they have referred to you as Dr. or Prof. Medina, rather than Ms.? Or is that how the NYT always does things?

Tom has it correct about the NY Times style guides: according to them, PhDs aren't "real doctors" (this also happens to be my mother-in-law's policy, which she reminds me of not infrequently...)

As for the inappropriate picture:

While the inclusion in the promotional film may or may not be intentional, the pervasive presence of such images is, of course, not usual or coincidental.  I have always wanted to do a little history of the pin-up photo in the computer industry, with its attendant implications for the gendering of the computing professions:

One of my favorite images of the SAGE system is of a test program that technicians ran to test the CRT displays, which produced a crude outline of a pin-up girl.  Here it is: [http://thecomputerboys.com/?attachment_id=482]

And, of course, there is the infamous "Lena" image, which was a Playboy centerfold that became the reference image for academic computer scientists (and others) working on image processing technologies.  It remains so to this day, and was just recently featured in an article in Nature Nanotechnology.  There is a nice little piece in the IEEE Professional Communication Society newsletter that details the history of the Lena image, although it focuses on the copyright angle, rather the sexual harassment issue. [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/pcs_mirror/may_june01.pdf]

Here also is a copy of the letter that the departing editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processsing sent out in 1996 in response to the controversy.  He was not too concerned. He even quotes a feminist friend of his who was not at all offended! [http://ndevilla.free.fr/lena/]


-Nathan

--
Nathan Ensmenger
Associate Professor of Informatics
School of Informatics and Computing
Indiana University, Bloomington
homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/