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Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image
- aaron695 8y ago> Yes, there was a team, but that doesn't matter.
- matt4077 8y agoHere's a HN story from a while back titled "The Man Behind Windows PowerShell"[0]. Of the 129 comments on that story, not one discussed how software development at Microsoft is always a team effort. Or checked any repositories counting LoC to quantify the value of his contribution. Meanwhile, in this thread, I see 6 of 73 comments as of now not discussing a woman's relative contribution to a team effort, and how she does or does not deserve praise. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349
- kypro 8y agoThis is why I'd wish we stopped seeing people's individual achievements in relation to the groups they belong to. I've noticed recently whenever a girl or black guy achieves anything some people (often rightly) become suspicious that their achievements are being exaggerated or are due to quotas or affirmative action. And that robs the individual of the credit they deserve.
- kgwgk 8y agoIf you ask people in the know "who is the person behind Windows PowerShell?" it is very likely that they will agree. I wouldn't expect the answer to "who is the person behind the first black hole image?" to be so clear.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ralfd 8y agoNot really a fitting comparison. Snover is describing himself as inventor of power shell, he pushed the project against resistance of his peers/superiors in Microsoft and implemented the first prototype. Without him it simply wouldn’t exist.
- roguecoder 8y agoWithout her, this wouldn’t exist.
- antt 8y agoTop post: >It's a miserable language, full of unexpected behaviors and badly designed features. I agree. That no one is tearing apart the horribly written python in the git repo is extremely sexist. Holy shit, you're using comments as version control, the 70s called and what their code practices back. Oh my god, did you even read the thread? It gets better with each post: >I haven't met a single person who likes PowerShell. It's perhaps the textbook example of ugly design that looks technically consistent but utterly unfriendly and mind bogglingly verbose. [...] The designers of this thing should have been demoted, let alone making them "Distinguished Engineer". >PowerShell is one of the few bits of software which has actually made me throw a computer in anger. The idea has potential but the implementation is just bad. And they go on and on.
- kaitai 8y agoAt least they're talking about PowerShell rather than gender!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- roguecoder 8y agoAlso not one person complained about how the journalist was making Such A Big Deal out of his gender and overblowig his accomplishments by using the word “man”.
- spyckie2 8y agofrom her paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 > Very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) is a technique for imaging celestial radio emissions by simultaneously observing a source from telescopes distributed across Earth. The challenges in reconstructing images from fine angular resolution VLBI data are immense. The data is extremely sparse and noisy, thus requiring statistical image models such as those designed in the computer vision community. In this paper we present a novel Bayesian approach for VLBI image reconstruction. While other methods often require careful tuning and parameter selection for different types of data, our method (CHIRP) produces good results under different settings such as low SNR or extended emission. The success of our method is demonstrated on realistic synthetic experiments as well as publicly available real data. We present this problem in a way that is accessible to members of the community, and provide a dataset website (vlbiimaging.csail.mit.edu) that facilitates controlled comparisons across algorithms. What strikes me as really amazing is the cross functional nature of these modern achievements. I did not realize that this image was created with statistical image models and a Bayesian approach. Also, this link included -> http://vlbiimaging.csail.mit.edu/ http://vlbiimaging.csail.mit.edu/ introduces the field and offers a good explanation for those interested in learning more: > Imaging distant celestial sources with high resolving power requires telescopes with prohibitively large diameters due to the inverse relationship between angular resolution and telescope diameter. However, by simultaneously collecting data from an array of telescopes located around the Earth, it is possible to emulate samples from a single telescope with a diameter equal to the maximum distance between telescopes in the array. Using multiple telescopes in this manner is referred to as very long baseline interferometry (VLBI).
- wallace_f 8y ago>large diameters due to the inverse relationship between angular resolution and telescope diameter. Not trained in this field, but this reads like a certain mistype. Shouldn't resolution increase with telescope diameter?
- blattimwind 8y agoNo. Angular resolution is essentially the angular distance between two points that are still resolved as separate points. So if your resolution increases, angular resolution decreases, because you can resolve two points that are closer together.
- romanovcode 8y agoHow come she is everywhere on the internet but not at the presentation panel on live conference that was yesterday? Jeez why the downvotes? It's a legitimate question I had.
- hjk05 8y agoThe downvotes are typical in gender politics threads. There are two fronts aggressively arguing in a “you are either with us or against us fashion” For the people questioning if she’s receiving unfair attention because of her gender they view you comment as an attack on the establishment ala: “How dare they exclude her!? Is it just because she’s a woman?” And downvote you. For the people arguing that her media coverage is being unfairly criticized because she’s a woman they view your question as an attack on the assertion that she deserves the attention so they downvote you. In either case I think it’s interesting to ask why the proclaimed “woman behind the image” wasn’t there for the unvailing of the image.
- zarkov99 8y agoYes, this is exactly right. The insane identity bullshit that is driving mainstream media (largely left wing and click driven at this point), is making normal people suspicious of the coverage of any STEM achievement by a minority (not Asians or Indian men of course - they apparently do not get a part in the oppression play). What would have in years past been a minor detail, noted and briefly appreciated, now overshadows the entire achievement. What a shit situation for someone like Katie who probably just wants to do good Science, to become a peon in the identity war bullshit.
- coryfklein 8y agoThis is very curious - the OP is functioning like a Rorschach for HN readers.
- melling 8y ago“ 29-year-old computer scientist” She’s not an astronomer?
- Numberwang 8y agoI am amazed at this trailblazer doing all this work on her own.
- ilarum 8y agoRelevant repository - https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging
- darkpuma 8y ago> https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors Huh, I wonder how accurate this is. All the code is beyond me in any case, I'm in no position to judge the relative value of any of it.
- telesilla 8y agoThis is deeply offensive. I'm the owner and founder of my company and I haven't written any meaningful code for our core products in 10 years. Our github repo has barely a scratch from me in it. Does this make my work, my hard long hours in managing my team and designing the product, worthless?
- nightski 8y agoHonestly I'd take satisfaction in what I had built. As a leader I'd greatly enjoy giving credit to the team who committed to my vision and made it a reality.
- vertis 8y agoIt's offensive and frustrating. I don't understand why people have to try and pull holes in this kind of celebration like there is some conspiracy to promote Katie at the cost of others. If I read it right, she mentioned and praised her team as well.
- govg 8y agoI'm not sure what the idea behind posting this is? In a large scale project rarely does someone high up the command chain do any of the "grunt" work (i.e. programming). Also, by training she appears to be dealing more with theory than the actual implementation aspect of this all.
- walrus01 8y agofrom april 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs
- mpfundstein 8y agoIs it me or is the article written like for 5 year olds? It feels like I am reading a child book. However, this is such a great achievement. Would be awesome to learn more about the algorithm.
- inflatableDodo 8y agoWelcome to 99% of the BBC's science output. Outside of Radio4, it has become a barren wasteland where no numbers can increment.
- MultusSalus 8y agoAs I understand it that’s how articles look when a major organisation establishes SEO as a primary metric.
- sajib3 8y agoBecause it is. If it reads like a child book they did a great job. If you studied journalism you’d know making it as easy as possible for all audiences is a key skill each journalist needs to have. It’s not a science journal that it needs to be full of jargon. It’s meant for general audience and they did a great job. If you want a hard piece go read the journal papers that got published.
- growlist 8y agoIt's called dumbing down.
- inflatableDodo 8y agoThere are degrees of this. If you compare science reporting against the mainstream financial news it is like chalk and cheese. If the numbers represent money, technical jargon is everywhere, if the subject is scientific, even the numbers are considered scary, never mind a technical discussion around them.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoWhy is that a bad thing? One of the main drivers of people getting into STEM is and has always been popular science - taking a complicated subject like this project, or gravitational waves, or the LHC etc, and describing it in a language that everyone can understand. And if you can understand it, there's a higher chance it interests you, which will lead to digging some more, etc etc etc.
- amrrs 8y agoI'm not biased anyway but thinking Is it fair to attribute this entire thing to one person leaving out the team of collaborators? Doesn't it sound like what happens with Jobsism? Edit: While I'm being rapidly downvoted, I'd like to clarify that I didn't mean to demean this because it's a female nor any of the feat this research has achieved. My point was only about why is it reported as if individual feat while many of such things are a strong team work. For some other questions - will you say the same about Elon musk - of course i've argued this among my peers and that's exactly why I called it similar to `Jobsism` To Quote: Another recent incident, While AI Godfathers got Turing award, many questioned why this person hasn't got and that person hasn't got. My idea for this comment was a constructive discussion but it took a different spin that my comment is against this woman which definitely not my intention.
- antt 8y agoI'm annoyed because of the breathless coverage. One would see less hyperbole if a dog had done the work. The worst thing is how soul crushing academia is. I left my physics PhD when I actually started talking to my colleagues and seeing my career trajectory. I bailed as soon as I realized I will be working until my 40s on the per hour pay of a fast food employee. I do not see why you want to push women to a field that pays starvation wages, has worse work/life balance than programming and will pretty much require them to put off kids until their late 30s, if ever. But the dying media get their clicks, which is all that matters to them in the end. Regardless of the long term damage they do.
- Angostura 8y ago> One would see less hyperbole if a dog had done the work. I think you should take a moment to think about just how offensive that statement is.
- antt 8y agoYes, the BBC is terrible. I for one wouldn't care if a chihuahua was a co-author on one of my papers, but there will be a whole dog and pony show about it. That's the amazing thing about science it's not about people, it's about ideas. And ideas stand on their own, regardless of the identity politics of the time, be they eugenics or affirmative action.
- morrbo 8y agoI see a lot of mention on various forums about the storage they used (5pb) but am just wondering if anyone know what kind of backend they used to house this? From what I saw there were too many disks - in the wrong type of enclosure - to be running on a single server, which suggests multiple physical servers. I've seen a prior CERN research paper on gluster and ceph (iirc) and am just wondering if anyone in the know could enlighten me?
- njepa 8y agoSeems like what you are seeing on the image of the drives is part of this: https://www.haystack.mit.edu/tech/vlbi/mark6/index.html https://www.haystack.mit.edu/tech/vlbi/mark6/index.html Found it through this pdf: https://fskbhe1.puk.ac.za/people/mboett/Texas2017/Doeleman.pdf https://fskbhe1.puk.ac.za/people/mboett/Texas2017/Doeleman.p...
- princekolt 8y agoI read yesterday they were using a bunch of servers connected with a 40Gbps network link. I'll try to find the source.
- andrelaszlo 8y agoThe WaPo article also references a few of the interesting issues they had: "Then they spent the two years parsing literal truckloads of data, some of which had to be shipped on hard drives from the South Pole and defrosted outside a supercomputer facility at MIT." https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/10/see-black-hole-first-time-images-event-horizon-telescope/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/10/see-black-... I'd love to read more about this if anyone has an article with more details.
- melling 8y agoKatie gave a TED talk: https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs
- anc84 8y agoYou mean Bouman?
- stronglikedan 8y agoSame person.
- CydeWeys 8y ago... you never referred to someone by their first name in informal talk??
- sorenjan 8y agoIt's a TEDx talk. In this case it's an interesting one by an expert in her field, but TEDx have a lot lower demands for participating, so try to keep the distinction clear.
- negamax 8y agoUntil yesterday, everyone was in awe and gender was nowhere in the picture. But political people will use this for their propaganda (can already see references on social media), unfortunately. Fortunately, gender identity/politics is not the factor for talented people.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- baq 8y agoThis may inspire women to pursue a career in computer science. Is it bad even if it's political?
- negamax 8y agoOf course not. She can be a great role model irrespective of gender. Bringing gender into the picture and promoting it as such, transfers group affiliations on divisive lines. Her achievement and work can be inspiring to all children, that should be the ideal political stance and message ethos
- roguecoder 8y agoPeople who think that her being a woman is divisive are the ones making it political and divisive. Just accept that women exist and do science, and then it’ll stop being a problem for you when people talk about women exist and do science.
- negamax 8y agoYeah, I work with some brilliant people, some of whom are women. But I would include them in people group, not create a women group. Congrats on missing the point and getting tunnel visioned
- roguecoder 8y ago
- mhsabbagh 8y agoThis is extremely misleading and fake news. 200 scientists from 40 countries participated in the project [1], not just this one. Saying that she's the one "behind the first black hole image" is clearly pushing for some propaganda, ignoring all other people work. I have also seen countless tweets on Twitter that feature both her picture and Margaret Hamilton, saying that "The first one took us to Moon, and the second one showed us black holes", getting in total more than 1 million likes and retweets. Both are fake news and straightforward wrong. [1]: https://erc.europa.eu/news/eu-funded-scientists-unveil-first-ever-image-black-hole https://erc.europa.eu/news/eu-funded-scientists-unveil-first...
- Traster 8y agoYou're conflating two things. There is an EU project to observe and measure the environment around a black hole. It is a project involving 200 people going back many years - as is stated explicitly in the article you are commenting on. Katie Bouman was the scientist in charge of the project of taking the enormous amount of data and translating that into an actual image. Not only does the article state that the larger project has 200 people working on it, Dr Bouman comments that her team deserves equal credit. There is no problem with celebrating some of the leaders of projects. We all know Tim Berners Lee didn't single handedly install AOL into our houses but he's still known as the father of the internet because that's how media works - they publicize people who have been crucial in specific work. We don't need a conspiracy theory to explain this.
- mhsabbagh 8y agoNo I am not, in order to create the image they observed the black hole for years, which is coming from the work of the people I linked to in my source, 200 people from 40 countries and all the other astronomers, being the team who just produced the image from the data is relatively smaller effort comparing to the overall work of all the people involved for years. I am not blaming her, I didn't say she's the one pushing this thing, I am blaming this BBC article. She never said "I am the one". Yes she was in charge of the team responsible of producing the image from the data, it doesn't mean in anyway that she's "behind the first image of the black hole". Everybody involved is behind the image. This is not about celebrating those people, it's giving the main chunk of the credit to this person alone. I have no idea why is it such a hard thing to understand or why is this even an issue. Claiming that this person is the only "crucial" person involved is a straightforward lie. If that's how the media has been doing it for 30 years, then the media needs to change and fix their lies.
- dalemyers 8y agoI've read comments on Hacker News for many years, often finding them a useful source of additional information and insight into details from whatever the linked piece is. Sometimes these threads are full of only subtly veiled hatred and leave me with a feeling of disgust. This thread is one of those. There have been countless threads over the years where a man gets the credit for something a team has worked on and there is practically never any comments about this. For once a woman gets credit and this thread is full of people complaining that there was an entire team. Yes, there was a team, but that doesn't matter. For once a woman is getting credit for the great work they've done and this should be applauded. Stories like this help bring more women into STEM fields. Anyone who is complaining about the lack of fairness in this is making themselves look ignorant by ignoring the last thousand years of scientific progress.
- dunslandsboo 8y agoWhy do you want to change the behaviour of women regarding their choice of study field?
- juliendorra 8y agoYou misunderstood. We want any person, women and young girls included, to be able to pursue a career path, if they have even the faintest desire of it, without self-censorship, negative remarks, feeling out of place, their vocation and/or skills being continuously challenged randomly, or having to cope with various forms of harassment. If you build an environment that allow that, women presence in the field surge. And then you see retrospectively that many women wanted to try this field, but it was really the field that didn’t want women to try. Because, as you will probably agree, desire for a career is not natural destiny, it’s the result of many factors including avoiding being hurt.
- hurryskurry 8y agoIn more equal societies women tend to choose STEM less though
- 8y ago
- hgannita 8y agoIt doesn't really work like this. It's a team of scientists that make these contributions, not one person.
- threeseed 8y agoAnd nobody is saying that it was done by one person. It specifically lists the teams in the article.
- zadwang 8y agoTHE woman? I am not sure how other women team members should feel about the article. Or even men. She may made important contribution but so did many others. Attributing the credit to a single person in such a large scale project is not fair to any team member. I am sure it is not her fault but whoever pushed to have BBC publish a story like this is hurting the science endeavor overall more than helping it.
- simonh 8y agoWe see articles about 'the man behind' stuff all the time. Just go to Google News and search for 'the man behind', you'll see pages and pages of them just for the last few weeks. In fact, check out articles with 'the man behind' in the title on HN[0]. It's a common shorthand which I think most of us recognise as not necessarily disrespectful to a team they might have lead. [0]https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%27the%20man%20behind%27&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%27the%20man%20behind%27&sort=... But uh oh, now there's a woman behind something all of a sudden it's a huge problem and the thread is packed with complaints about it. I wonder why that is?
- threeseed 8y agoCongratulations. You didn't even bother to read one sentence beyond the headline. "A 29-year-old computer scientist has earned plaudits worldwide for helping develop the algorithm" Or even a few sentences in: "There, she led the project, assisted by a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory .." But hey who needs to read articles when you can jump to conclusions and surface your clear biases.
- matthewmacleod 8y agoThis article is full of mentions about the fact that there was a team behind the work. Please stop being so obviously ridiculous. There, she led the project, assisted by a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the MIT Haystack Observatory. But Dr Bouman, now an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology, insisted the team that helped her deserves equal credit. The effort to capture the image, using telescopes in locations ranging from Antarctica to Chile, involved a team of more than 200 scientists. "No one of us could've done it alone," she told CNN. "It came together because of lots of different people from many different backgrounds."
- telesilla 8y agoCongratulations Katie! It's beautiful to see something that I hoped would be real, especially after seeing Interstellar's gorgeous rendition. And may you inspire hundreds of thousands of girls to enter the fields of science and technology.
- rullelito 8y agoor boys..
- vectorEQ 8y agonow to reproduce and make it actual science ....
- yitchelle 8y agoPlease don't attempt to devalue the work that Dr. Bouman had done by implying that it is not science.
- frozenport 8y agoWe could for example claim that writing a data conversion tool is engineering
- aries1980 8y ago“The results of the algorithms were then analysed by four separate teams to build confidence in the veracity of their findings.”
- EvagohP5 8y agoI would investigate into her black hole
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- founderling 8y agoI posted a comment 10 minutes ago and it got immediately downvoted into oblivion. Could you guys please tell me why it is such a bad question to ask? Thank you! Here it is: Does it really count as an image of a black hole? Since no light is reflected by the black hole, all we see is light bend by the gravity of the black hole. Haven't we seen that before? I have the strong feeling there have been photos of star constellations that seem distorted because of black holes. A quick googling brings up this article from 2014 for example: https://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/12/tech/black-hole-nasa-nust.. https://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/12/tech/black-hole-nasa-nust.... "Black hole bends light, space, time -- and NASA's NuSTAR can see it all unfold"
- bubblewrap 8y agoMust admit, I feel kind of the same. It's also probably more of an artistic rendering than a photograph in the classical sense.
- zymhan 8y agoHumans can only see a tiny sliver of the enormous Electromagnetic spectrum. Just because it's not a photograph in visible light doesn't mean it's not our best rendering of EM data and what that would look like to us if it was in the visible spectrum. We do the same thing with digital cameras, X-rays, MRI, etc.
- yetihehe 8y ago> Could you guys please tell me why it is such a bad question to ask? Because it's nitpicking[0]. When scientists show you results of several years of work of many people, you effectively chose to ask question like "Is it really violet? Seems more purple to me". You don't contribute anything to discussion, but just want to sound smart-ass. [0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nitpicking https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nitpicking
- founderling 8y agoThanks! The link says nitpicking is "Looking for small or unimportant errors". That is certainly not what I want to do. The press is full of articles about this "First photo of a black hole". This seems to imply that it is somehow important. But so far, I fail to see what is important about it. So my question still stands. I would really like to know in what sense this is the first image of a black hole. And if there is something we can learn from looking at it. My first impression is "Yeah, it's round. I would have thought so." :)
- ta8883021 8y agoFirst, congrats to the entire team for the sum of their contributions. Now I'm simply trying to be objective here. If we look at the main github repo https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors She is contributor #4, with only 90 commits. Meanwhile, the #1 contributor, https://github.com/achael https://github.com/achael, has written over 850k lines of code. Katie was making basic Python syntax errors only one year ago in the repo. Is she really behind the first black hole image?
- jealous_guy 8y agoWell. I think why so many people are bitter, including me, is that when news like that break out - you want to say to yourself "that could've been me". I have interests in science, I might do research one day - that could be me!!! I want fame! :) But then you look at the repo, and you realise that even if you were taking part in such a research, and tried your absolute 1000% you probably would be that nameless guy with most contribs. And that credit for your work would be taken, because you're expected to perform, because you're a guy! Of course you work like crazy, of course you do all the hard bits, but that's only expected. But if a girl does something close - then she's a hero... I haven't been there, and I haven't seen those people, but I work in IT and I know how it goes, guys work unreasonable hours, and put in unreasonable efforts to make projects succeed. Girls usually take more "balanced" approach. I think having mixed teams is absolutely critical for a success of any IT/Scientific endeavour! I think the right balance between masculine and feminine energy is what give the team right motivation, right pace and keeps it sane to accomplish impossible! I enjoy working with female developers perhaps even more than with male devs! But! The article should've said something like "every successful team needs both genders" - or something of that kind. There should be a message of unification... And absolutely - they could've highlighted her contributions, but highlight it as a part of a team! You don't even have to name the guys, just say "among team of 6 male phd scientists was a female who did meaningful contributions to the code and kept team spirit high". But this is incredibly demoralising! After this you want to say - I'm NOT getting on any team - I will own my work, even if that means working 100000%. And yes, after this article more girls will get into science! But LESS BOYS WILL!!! Might as well call this "Katie's Hole" :P
- godelmachine 8y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Bouman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Bouman
- Waterluvian 8y agoSo is the 200 people team a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize in Physics?
- billfruit 8y agoWas making a photographic image the main aim of the project? Or is the image just a byproduct? I mean hard to imagine such a large project being taken up, for the benefit of public being able to see a picture of the black hole. Would this kind of multi telescope effort be capable of producing surface images of extra solar planets for example?
- CydeWeys 8y agoIt wasn't a photographic image (they're using radio waves, not visible light). This is a visual representation of the radio waves. And yes, this is one way of representing the data. I'm not sure exactly what your question is though, as actually getting this data is really important to confirm a variety of theories and also to potentially open up new avenues for investigation. And this cost orders of magnitude less than Hubble, whose purpose was also to generate photographs, seeing as how they simply connected together existing radio telescopes. The point was to demonstrate that this technique is feasible. Now they can use it to image all sorts of other stuff and learn lots more.
- billfruit 8y agoQuestion is, what did the project aim to achieve? Take a picture of the black hole? Or gather data that will help us study blackholes? Because the press is largely focusing on the picture and not telling much else detail. And is Boumans contributions to do with the making of this image?
- InitialLastName 8y agoI'm confused. Given that "images" are just data, how is taking a bunch of data about a black hole and combining it into a single "picture" of a black hole not also gathering data to help us study black holes? As I understand it, the notability of the project is that it found a novel way to process data from coordinated data collectors scattered around the earth into a single coherent data set (with more resolution than any single collector could gather).
- trashtalking99 8y agoHow soon before all the mansplainers and women haters on HN crap on her achievements?
- dvtrn 8y agoTitle ought to reflect the fact that this woman has a doctorate from MIT and should rightfully be addressed as Dr. Katie Bouman.
- ominous 8y agoHer name is Katie Bouman. She can also be addressed as Dr. Katie Bouman.
- elliotec 8y agoShe should be referred by her proper title. Can and should.
- dvtrn 8y agoSure. But in a published headline, one ought to be addressed by their formal title. Differences exist between casual conversation and publication. A distinction I shouldn’t have to point out as one that exists.
- CydeWeys 8y agoIn the headline? They call her "Dr" just a few sentences into the article. The rule of headlines is to use as few words as possible, and every one of them should be necessary. I've never heard that formal titles MUST be used in headlines, and indeed in practice this doesn't seem to be the case. Shaquille O'Neal has a PhD and I've never seen him referenced as Dr. Shaquille O'Neal, in a headline or otherwise (and no, I'm not joking, this is apparently real). I don't think this is an attempt to minimize her accomplishments, unlike many of the comments here in this very thread.
- thecatspaw 8y agoI agree with you, however the difference is that her Dr is relevant to the article, and Shaq's Phd usually isnt.
- 8y ago
- aphextim 8y agoMan who contributed 850 000 out of 900 000 lines of code vs woman who added other programmers' code. Guess who gets the credit? https://files.catbox.moe/tejoch.png https://files.catbox.moe/tejoch.png
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- TheHypnotist 8y agoYou're aware this team was large and was more than just code commits? If code commits are our barometer, there are a ton of people that deserve no credit.
- cdelsolar 8y agoNice 4chan-style image and completely uninformed and idiotic comment. the large majority of those 850K lines of code were machine generated, models, or docs. Go back to whatever alt-right hole you crawled out of.
- IshKebab 8y agoCitation definitely needed. The software is "ehtim", here are the contributors: https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors He says: > I wrote ehtim (eht-imaging) as a python framework for implementing regularized maximum likelihood imaging methods on EHT data. In the last two years, it has evolved into a flexible environment for manipulating, simulating, analyzing, and imaging interferometric data and is a workhorse of the EHT’s data analysis pipeline. Source: https://achael.github.io/_pages/software/ https://achael.github.io/_pages/software/ At first I thought the image was being disingenuous by cherry-picking commits to highlight, but take a look for yourself, she really did mostly just modify plotting, add options and fix bugs: https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/commits?author=klbouman https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/commits?author=klbouma... There's nothing wrong with that, but claiming that she is "behind the software" is just bullshit.
- 8y ago
- amai 8y agoShe also has a newer paper, which gives a glimpse on what the people of EHT are up next: Reconstructing Video from Interferometric Measurements of Time-Varying Sources https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.01357 https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.01357 So maybe we will also see a video of a black hole, soon.
- brootstrap 8y agoI just want to see what she named her jupyter notebook. 'black_hole_v4_new_FINAL.ipynb'
- gonational 8y agoIs this the correct repo? https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors I didn't realize this was public code. It looks like one "achael" is the author of this, though.
- govg 8y agoI don't think she was a large part of the implementation effort, especially with her background. Andrew Chael seems to have been the programmer on this project, or at least handled a lot of it. (Note a significant fraction of his code commits content are models)
- gasbikesracecar 8y agoChael did all the work and Katies janitor cleanup code gets all the credit. Woman vs LGBT face off, woman wins this time!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bigbaguette 8y agoIf that's the correct repo: klbouman 90 commits 2,410 ++ 1,265 -- achael 566 commits 850,275 ++ 131,044 --
- _zachs 8y agoXD
- anonytrary 8y agoThis is incredibly misleading. If you inspect the repository in more detail, 820,000 lines of the line count are actually raw matrix data, not code. achael's corrected contribution is probably closer to 20,000 lines.
- realradicalwash 8y agoHer story is trully inspiring! She seems like a really likable person, has been hard working, with great results, making a major contribution. The photo with her and the hard drives is amazing and I am sure she will inspire many to enter science. However, I think to call her "the woman behind the first black hole image" is a hyperbole. It makes it sound as if she was _the one person_ responsible that all this came about. -- But that is not the case. Arguably, there are others who have contributed as much if not more. This is what makes me somewhat feel that this focus on her is not quite fair. Coverage in mainland Europe has been different so far: Prof Falcke gets a lot of credit for the image/project. Falcke is heading one of the major teams that contributed to the project. In fact, many here attribute the conception of the project to him. But how many in the English speaking sphere have heard or will ever hear about Falcke? Why is that? My personal guess is that the reason for this is: 1) The Anglo-american media were looking for inspiring EHT scientists from the English-speaking world. 2) Bouman fit that description best. So, imv, something like "The inspiring story of Katie Bouman" and some credit to some of the other major figures like Falcke would have been fairer.
- yeahitslikethat 8y agoNo one would read that story. No one knows Katie Bouman. Everyone knows the blackhole. You're thinking like a programmer. Think not like a programmer and then explain why the original headline is better. Why was the article written?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago> This is what makes me somewhat feel that this focus on her is not quite fair. Thought experiment: if you saw an article titled "Jony Ive: The Man Behind The iPhone" would you be commenting on how unfair it is to single him out? After all, he just designed the thing, a huge team of people built the software and the hardware that actually made it possible.
- Gpetrium 8y agoReading some of the comments in here and in previous texts, I think everyone should try to heed to the following guidelines: - When an individual/team's work is emphasized by their biological characteristics, it is often meant for clicks or to drive emotions (positive & negative) - When that happens, ask yourself whether the author of the paper did it for nefarious reasons or not. - If the cause doesn't seem nefarious, ask yourself whether the society around you has outgrown the biases towards X biological characteristics - When interacting with others, do not base your actions and thoughts on their biological characteristics. - Celebrate, debate and criticize the work that the individual/team did, the work the author of the article did and the comments.
- nardi 8y agoSeems to me that you are the one emphasizing “biological characteristics”. The article does not. Are you projecting, maybe?
- Gpetrium 8y agoThe Ycombinator text doesn't say it, but the link does. I think a lot of the negative reaction in here comes from the way people have started to perceive the narrative created by the media and personal feelings of threat (which is often unfounded). I am all in for getting more people from all backgrounds into Computer & Sciences. I also agree that sometimes it is beneficial to have 'biological characteristics' added to articles to get certain groups to find someone to look up to. Humans are biologically set-up to do that, what the guideline implies is for everyone to do 'at least that' before creating biased comments. Care to explain how the 'guidelines' comment is projecting?
- nardi 8y ago> The Ycombinator text doesn’t say it, but the link does. The title of the article as of this moment is, “Katie Bouman: The woman behind the first black hole image.” Saying, “the woman behind X” doesn’t emphasize gender any more than saying “the man behind X” does. Again, this is you projecting, perhaps because you think “normal” is male, and thus “woman” is somehow making a statement? I see nothing in the body of the article that mentions her gender in any way other than using the pronoun “she.” It seems to me that you read an article about a female scientist and projected some kind of ulterior motive on the part of the author, which says a lot more about you than it does about the author.
- zorbagreek 8y agoShe actually wrote 2k lines of code. Alex Chael wrote 850.000 out of the 900k total, but is ignored. Katie's lines of code did two things: 1) integrated the code of others 2) allowed you to change the font-size
- patrickg_zill 8y agoThe Chinese military used a similar method to find US spy planes - they used background signals from e.g. cell phone towers and looked for the area where there was a "blank spot" - which was the spy plane's absorption of the spectrum.
- lambdadmitry 8y agoThis is a popular hypothesis, but how exactly do you think it may work? It's not like you can see a "blank spot" by looking from radio sources, you'd need to put your antennas in a position where the plain will intersect your line of sight to the transmitter. And not just one, but massive number of lines if you plan to track it and deliver a missile there. It sounds pretty improbable and I believe it's just an urban myth.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoWhy let the facts get in the way of your unexamined beliefs? References a paper from 2009 (classified research could well have been much earlier): https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-navys-next-hawkeye-plane-can-detect-stealth-fighters-51023944fcbe https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-navys-next-hawkeye-... Guess what emits UHF/VHF? Terrestrial TV stations and 900Mhz and 700Mhz cell phone towers , like Sprint and Nextel used to operate in the USA before their spectrum was traded/sold back to the government. China claims can track F22 fighter even in stealth configuration: https://news.yahoo.com/stealth-no-more-china-claims-024700905.html https://news.yahoo.com/stealth-no-more-china-claims-02470090... And this is what is publicly released for public consumption...
- dralley 8y agoIt's well known that low frequency radars can detect stealth airplanes. But it's difficult to target a missile using them, and they're too big to put anywhere but on the ground.
- diracpam 8y agoIt is common for lead men to take credit for team's work (e.g. gravitational wave detection), so it should be no different here. But was she really the lead? She clearly wasnt the implementation lead (from Github contributions) and the I havent seen EHT list her as the official project lead (which to me seems reasonable given that she was a postdoc at the time of this work). So if she was neither the implementation nor the operational lead, then why is she singled out for credit?
- streb-lo 8y agoSerious question HN: If Katie was a man do you think people would be going through git histories and their published papers trying to determine if she is being over-credited for her achievements?
- tropo 8y agoDo you think a man in a similar position would be elevated on a pedestal, to the exclusion of the algorithm designer (Mareki Honma) and the primary software author (Andrew Chael)?
- streb-lo 8y agoYes I think the world would be interested to meet the person behind viewing the first black hole regardless of their gender. >to the exclusion of the algorithm designer and the primary software author? How can you possibly infer that from a git history?
- inflatableDodo 8y agoWho gets elevated on a pedestal and who actually did the work appear to be so badly correlated across the entire breadth of human cultures that you would assume that they only share the most tenuous of causal linkages. So yes, that happens a lot.
- adventured 8y agoI think people get consistently annoyed when blanket credit is given to eg Elon Musk regarding SpaceX (as though he's an aerospace god that did it all by himself), and when far too much credit was given to Steve Jobs regarding the iPhone. SpaceX is a case where Gwynne Shotwell deserves a chunk of the credit that is typically thrown at Musk by the media (because his stardom sells). It's not that they don't deserve their fair share of credit, to be clear. It's that they do not deserve the level of overwhelming credit the media intentionally tries to bestow upon them, to create an idol that sells / generates clicks. You pretty well see it in every thread regarding those two people. The hype train tries to give them credit, whether the media or fans, and other people get annoyed by it and call it out because it's obviously ridiculous to so overly credit such vast accomplishments requiring thousands of contributors to a given individual.
- geden 8y agoBBC covered it more as a team effort for this BBC4 doc I watched last night. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00042l4/how-to-see-a-black-hole-the-universes-greatest-mystery https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00042l4/how-to-see-a-...
- PascLeRasc 8y agoSlightly off-topic - is anyone able to identify the software used in this photo of the first time seeing the black hole? [1] https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190410153403-katie-bouman-mit-graduate-student-black-hole-super-tease.jpg https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190410153403-katie-bo...
- 6oodfella 8y agoWow, a woman pressed some keys on a computer. Well done. Did I mention she has a vagina? Because that is the most important thing about this non-story. It's not even a photo, it's computer image.
- 6oodfella 8y agoWow, a woman pressed some keys on a computer to create a computer image (not a photo). Well done. Did I mention she has a vagina? Apparently that's the most important part of this non-story. Gee, it sure is odd that when you look up "What is a black hole? Stephen Hawking's final theory", you find a video, and the thumbnail has the same image of the black hole on it, a whole month before it was digitally-created by a woman, with a vagina and everything. Strange.
- bartimus 8y agoNow let's try to generate some pics of the lunar landing sites.
- bartimus 8y agoCan somebody explain why this got downvoted? I'm genuinly interested if this is possible with the technology (using optical telescopes). This was my (poor) attempt to start an open conversation about it.
- old_rot 8y agoMega Science projects are always huge collaborative efforts. This remarkable scientific achievement is now unfairly focused on an individual. Lets compare this with a couple of other mega science discoveries. The gravitational waves detection discovery was not attributed to any single individual. The collaboration got the credit for it. Back in 2012 when ATLAS experiment at CERN announced the discovery of Higgs boson, the collaboration spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti made the announcement through quite an impressive presentation of the results. Yet the discovery was attributed to the whole collaboration. In both these occasions no Eureka moment photographs were publicized and stole the credit. In particle physics, these practices evolved over decades, when specific individuals tried to claim credits for discoveries in an unfair way(Nobel dream by Gary Taubes gives a beautiful account of this). Many particle physics collaborations now have detailed constitution and guidelines on what images/graphs they can show to the public. Someone who first made the first Higgs mass plot which shows a 5 sigma evidence of Higgs observation could not have leaked that plot on social media. However this narrative is inspiring and perhaps motivate many young woman to take up careers in science and promote a more welcoming atmosphere for women in STEM.
- black-tea 8y agoWomen have so much encouragement to enter science already. There have already been tons of "inspring and motivating" women held up as examples. We all know that merely possessing the required genitalia and being sufficiently attractive is enough to be held up as the next female champion of whatever. Tech conferences have been cancelled after the anonymous selection process selected only men. Women are given special treatment, special places, special encouragement. They have special sources of funding. Hell, they even get paid more according to Google. All of this special treatment and they still don't want to do it. Add to this the fact that every man in tech has done a woman's work for her at some point. The last 20% of work takes 80% of the time, always. As men are getting less and less sex they are now realising this more and more. That is why we can cut through this bullshit immediately now.
- hlurhhh 8y agoI was gonna reply but lol at "As men are getting less and less sex they are now realising this more and more." what the fuck does this have to do with black holes lol u need help bro
- Not_a_pizza 8y agoHow much of the code did she actually write?
- roguecoder 8y agoHacker’s News is so sexist they can’t just find the joy in this algorithm genius’ success. She solved one of those hard technical problems we always talk about, and the world is richer for it.
- black-tea 8y agoHacker News, which consists of mostly men who do the vast majority of work in tech, is sick of men not being fairly treated and credited just because they are not women.
- nds6wert 8y agoDo you have any prove that she have solely solved this problem? She was not the sole person and even her contribution in the github repo is mostly the mistype corrections.
- philonoist 8y agoWhat many people here committing is logical fallacy of Tu Quoque[0]. Just because people wrongly attributed disproportionate credence of such creativity, fame, and inspiration to Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and all, it doesn't mean they must be mute to such continued disproportionate bias of limelight and recognition when add another one adds to the list. We are always allowed to correct ourselves whenever we find such bias regardless of it emanating from some implied message of jealousy or butt hurt attitude because a minority section has achieved. This is why I like HN( and back in the day, Quora). They are so beautifully intelligent minded that they won't even leave git histories and published papers. This, I have seen on many submissions here. Never have men at large objected to such bias when women have cited theories and concepts discovered by men to publish papers and win medals in the field of mathematics. That is something naysayers should ponder over. All the documentaries, autobiographies, and famous books that peered deep into the lives of those inspirational people always give proportionate credit to those contributors of success either by these people or the authentic researchers. Katie was no less enthusiastic when it was her turn. But these news agencies play with people's emotions, desires,aspirations, etc. These news agencies are capitalistic and optimize over consumerism. These news agencies are shameless whores to betray the principles of intellectual honesty and journalistic ethics in dissemination of facts by kowtowing to the appeasement of the disgruntled - who happen to be majority of their viewers. But? We, the layman, are hapless to (1) gain knowledge from immediate sources (2) draw immediate conclusions from these sources. We can't be blamed for not putting efforts to gain complete picture or check the veracity of middlemen called the media. We run forward the self fulling prophecy originating from media. The trust was put in reputed media and that is why the media should care for its reputation. That trust was put in the media because it was touted as fourth pillar of democracy who can't commit hypocrisy in its main endeavors to expose the truth. Whereas otherwise, the organization Katie Bouman is working, official representatives such as MIT blogs, and TED talks have all credited to the development of original algorithm, though when it was at nascent stage, to THE Katie Bouman, while at the same time to her team for handling in subsequent parts. I salute her. With relevant degree and using her education in imaging black holes, she set the discourse of the main branch that others picked up. If the idea and algorithm germinated in her mind, she should get credit for it, simple. All she needed is few people to delegate implementation of her ideas or modify it for sustenance. If somebody furthered her ideas enough that it can be versioned as 2.0 or 3.0, then they get equal credit and status as her in final mission[1]. She can patent her invention rightly for conjuring the initial stages of algorithm using all of her own cognitive capabilities. But we should go only so far. Even women aspirants will get disheartened and show recidivism by wrongly strengthening the bias that they are somehow less capable in attaining pinnacles of STEM, when they learn that the achievements of women in reality is not what media portrays. This is why I consider the twitter photo of her being placed aside Margaret Hamilton as the efforts are no way comparable ceteris paribus. Moreover, if lack of minority role models is enough of a reason to discourage that aspiring minority from their passions, then it would be no less effective in discouragement of non-minority's passions when there is lack of attention and acknowledgement to non-majority's achievements. I mean how did Katie meander through her success to begin with, if there were no role models to her in the field she is working, in the first place? People say that men had plenty of men in annals of history to look up to, but I'd contend that women aren't in anyway stopped to take inspiration and pique their curiosity in men's achievements just like men take inspiration from Marie Curie or Hedy Lamarr apart from the sea of men. [0]rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tu_quoque [1] I mean Prof Falcke.
- seaborn63 8y agoIt's so awesome! I thought it was kinda cool that it actually looks a little bit like the one from Interstellar. <sarcasm> I just wish they had used a camera from this century </sarcasm>
- lanboyo 8y agoIf everyone could put their real name in this thread it would be a helpful guide to whom never to hire.
- pgreenspun 8y agoThe journalists and Facebookers who are excited about a person who has done some work as a computer programmer... how much would you have to pay them to sit through the first hour of an intro programming class? (Maybe coding is like public transit. People think it is a great idea for everyone other than themselves.)
- shaki-dora 8y agoThat... seems like an extremely malevolent take on this? She has a doctorate from MIT and isn't being glorified for turning on a computer, but for her algorithmic work squeezing information out of the gravitationally mangled paths of spurious photons reaching us after 80 million years. That "learn to code" meme has also become a favorite of the alt-right to go after anyone they don't like.
- pgreenspun 8y agoWe can translate this to physics quite easily. How many of the folks posting on Facebook to celebrate this person's achievement would be willing to do even one homework assignment for a freshman physics class at the local community college?
- pgreenspun 8y agoHere are some groups using the "learn to code" meme: https://girlswhocode.com/about-us/ https://girlswhocode.com/about-us/ http://www.blackgirlscode.com/ http://www.blackgirlscode.com/ Would you say that they are "alt-right"?
- daosulta 8y agoRedirect your confusion towards that unprofessional media outlet. What Dr. Bouman has to do with this? Read or listen to her interviews, she always highlights that it was a team effort.
- thrwwy192783 8y agoIf you do, you will get banned. Criticizing the media is not allowed here.
- rurban 8y agoWrong title: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist before the first black hole image (bbc.com) Behind was a huge team, but the reporter conveniently needed a figurehead. So he took one and out her in front of the image.