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The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (1995)
- Pxtl 13y agoWhy am I not surprised that Paglia loves this stuff? Wherever there's a well-bred controversy, she's in the thick to concern-troll with grotesque absurd sophistries.
- sp332 13y agoSo, why are you publishing the photos?
- john_b 13y agoNote: article is NSFW.
- tlrobinson 13y ago...in America.
- jMyles 13y agoNot even most places in America. This is not obscene in any way, there's just a bit of nudity.
- magnet_ball 13y agoThere is one penis. And some medical looking photos of men, all easily explainable so long as your workplace permits you to browse HN.
- jamesrom 13y agoSo you'd be fine with co-workers seeing that on your screen?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jff 13y agoAh yes, I must be careful as an American, because my employer and everyone I work with is literally this guy: http://wikihistoria.wikispaces.com/file/view/purtian_pic_2.jpg/43663939/375x402/purtian_pic_2.jpg http://wikihistoria.wikispaces.com/file/view/purtian_pic_2.j...
- antonius 13y agoFrom the article: "No written permission of any kind was ever given by the students." What's the statute of limitations on something like this? I'm guessing since this occurred so long ago, nothing can be done.
- at-fates-hands 13y agoIt usually varies by state law. Here's some good information: http://www.photoattorney.com/2009/07/q-statute-of-limitations-for-use-of.html http://www.photoattorney.com/2009/07/q-statute-of-limitation... "Because copyrights are governed by federal law, there is only one statute of limitations for copyright claims. Copyright infringement claims are rights of the copyright owner of the photograph and have a three-year statute of limitations from the date of the infringement. See 17 USC 507(b). Some courts start counting the three years when you had a reasonable chance to discover the infringement."
- phantom784 13y agoThe subjects of the photos wouldn't have a copyright claim on the photos, as they did not take them (the university did, and would own the copyright). I'm sure there's other laws at play though, such as personality rights.
- sliverstorm 13y agoMy rule of thumb when I wonder that sort of question is 7 years. Nearly all statute of limitations fall at or below that point. By which I would then conclude, no chance could they still be prosecuted. There are certain violations that will be exempted from the statute of limitations, but a moderate scandal/invasion of privacy isn't going to qualify. Wikipedia lists fraud against the court, international crimes, and heinous crimes, e.g. heinous violence
- dsugarman 13y ago>But if you ever see a black and white nude photograph like this floating around at a flea market, you know what to do. maybe I missed this part. what do I do?
- brador 13y agoI have a vague feeling of reading this on the new york times website years ago, it was a huge article. Looks like this is a reblogging? Yup, from 1995: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-league-nude-posture-photo-scandal.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-lea...
- ternaryoperator 13y agoSo in lamenting this weird, invasive study, the author decides to publish several of the nude photographs? How unnecessary was that?
- TallGuyShort 13y agoFox News and other agencies do the same thing any time they're reporting that something controversial or offensive took place. It's not because they actually consider it bad, it's that they know it's inflammatory and gets viewership.
- kevinpet 13y agoWhat does Fox News have to do with anything?
- TallGuyShort 13y agoAre you kidding? My response was 2 sentences about how I've seen them especially, and TV news in general, replay things they were saying were so "edgy" for TV, _on TV_. Just like the re-distribution of these images in an article about how inappropriate the taking of these images was. I don't know how to explain that more clearly?
- humanrebar 13y agoFrom my initial reading of your comment, I thought you were defending the posting the photos on the grounds that FoxNews does it too. That is an excuse (a bad one), not justification. It seems that wasn't what you meant. Maybe you would like to rephrase?
- datamart 13y agoHe was providing the reason for why the authors would have published the photos (by using Fox News as an example), not defending or justifying their having done so.
- dec0dedab0de 13y agoDid the title, and the link just change?
- L_Rahman 13y agoLooks like it. In this case, it makes complete sense. The original was intentionally inflammatory leading with a line about nude pictures of Hilary Clinton, and was based on the NYT article to begin with.
- llimllib 13y agoExcept that now the comments here make no sense at all.
- seiji 13y agoSomebody changed the "Soylent has rats and mold" title and link to "Soylent is awesome!" with a link to a less hostile article. (Well, the original article the first post was referencing.)
- greenyoda 13y agoI wonder if anyone actually refused to strip for the researchers, and if so, what the consequences were.
- stephencanon 13y agoThis 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.
- yongjik 13y agoTaking 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...
- duaneb 13y agoI 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.
- stephencanon 13y agoThe 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.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoNonsense. All were essentially volunteers. Nobody held a gun to their head; they just put it on a schedule, and the freshmen lined up to comply. Its actually amusing; these captains of industry were such sheep when they were young. Makes you wonder when they grew a backbone, if at all.
- ics 13y agoIt's hard to reach the top of your game if you're not willing to play.
- lnanek2 13y agoNot exactly strange. We still employ people to stare at nudes at the new airport scanners after all.
- rayiner 13y agoWe do not: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/tsa-completely-removed-full-body-scanners-rep-article-1.1360143 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/tsa-completely-remo...
- staunch 13y agoI saw and opted out of a full body scanner in August on an international flight at LAX. What gives?
- pak 13y agoSo 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 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?
- gizmo686 13y agoI have no idea how it is actually implemented, but it seems like it could be implemented in a perfectly acceptable way. The first step is to define what acceptable is. As I do not understand why nudity is unacceptable in the first place, I will not attempt to do so, and will instead employ the time honored tradition of hand waving. In the new system, a reasonable implementation would be to discard the original image imidietly. Quality control can be done by putting the machine into debug mode and using consenting individuals as test subjects (or seeing if the cartoon image detects when the target things are present). There is also no guaranteed that the old pictures were ever stored. Although in both cases, I suspect they would store the data, in some form, for at least the short term to assist in a post-hoc analysis if their is a security failure. Also, I think it was a software update only, the machines are still the same.
- hawkharris 13y agoIt'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.
- verisimilidude 13y agoAt 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.
- igravious 13y agommm RDF, tell me more ... resources ... descriptions ... frameworks ... mmm ... just this very day I taught this in class ... mmm ...
- munificent 13y ago> 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.
- yeukhon 13y agoI just the whole article and now I wonder what happened to these photos and with this long article a reader would expect to see some photos... any source on this?
- koski 13y agoWhen I hopefully will be 70 one day, I wonder if i would actually like to see such photos of me. I think I might. "Once I was young, and I looked so awesome. Oh, those were the days..."
- etfb 13y agoThis deep underlying assumption that nudity = scandal is amusing. I'm Australian, and I thought my culture was pretty similar to the US in a lot of ways, but the puritanical terror of nudity that pervades ever word of the article seems very odd indeed to me.
- jccc 13y agoFor the benefit of those who have not read the 1995 article all the way through to the end: "As I thumbed rapidly through box after box to confirm that the entries described in the Finder's Aid were actually there, I tried to glance at only the faces. It was a decision that paid off, because it was in them that a crucial difference between the men and the women revealed itself. For the most part, the men looked diffident, oblivious. That's not surprising considering that men of that era were accustomed to undressing for draft physicals and athletic-squad weigh-ins. "But the faces of the women were another story. I was surprised at how many looked deeply unhappy, as if pained at being subjected to this procedure. On the faces of quite a few I saw what looked like grimaces, reflecting pronounced discomfort, perhaps even anger."
- yetanotherphd 13y agoThat quite well illustrates the unacknowledged privilege of women at that time. The men were so accustomed to being denied privacy, either by cultural norms at the time, or by force by the government, that being forced to undress and be photographed was nothing unusual to them. Women, on the other hand, considered this an affront, because they were not subject to either of these. Thank you for pointing this out.
- etfb 13y agoOr you could see it entirely the other way. In fact, I'm rather surprised that you saw it as you do. I guess it takes all sorts to make a world.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
- mkramlich 13y ago"Take off your clothes." slap "No!" "I am an authority figure. I have <good> reasons." "Oh, well then that's fine." strips Humans. We're funny sometimes. Repeat ad nauseum.
- Fundlab 13y agoThis thread is all too interesting. I found myself revisiting the dictionary for definitions of words I never knew.Everyday I learn something new from HN