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Her 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 he

Her 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 ago
No 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.
- realradicalwash 8y ago
  this is hard to say, tbh. first: by alluding to Ive, you insert a gender component. i don't want to make this about gender - which is what happened itt. as mentioned, i think the difference in focus is because of geo-cultural reasons. another piece of evidence for this hypothesis comes from the following: over here, the EU also gets a lot of praise for providing the main chunk of the funding for the project. a quick check tells me that this detail is often omitted in US articles about the project. also, a note on myself: i work in a field where the majority of people are female. so is my boss. her work is great and i love working here. at the same time, i am aware that the bar to get here was higher for my female colleagues than it is for men. also, i see the glass ceiling having an effect on the careers of my sisters and my female friends. and i am painfully aware of the struggles that my mum and other women of her generation had/have to go through. so i consider myself a feminist, in the sense that i believe that we should have full equality and that we do not have it yet. second: think iphone, i think jobs. so what "Jony Ive: The Man Behind The iPhone" would imply to me is that Ive is _the one person_ that had the biggest impact on the development of the iphone. i don't know enough about Ive to evaluate this. but here's the thing: if it turned out that another person contributed as much if not more than Ive, then i'd say: hey, it's nice that the article introduces Ive and gives him some credit, but let's not exaggerate and let's not forget about the other people who have also greatly contributed to the project. edit: to clarify: i find it hard to say, because it's somewhat hypothetical. i truly hope for myself that i would react the same way / that gender has no impact on my thought process.
  - rhacker 8y ago
    > first: by alluding to Ive, you insert a gender component Personally, I want to say the gender component actually happened right about here: >> Her story is trully inspiring! She seems like a really likable person We have interesting ways and subtext when we talk about people that show our biases. Actually beyond that the entire article isn't anything about asking Katie questions or how she came about her algorithm. It's more about her fast rising popularity. It's an article that says a woman did something without saying that. I'm not judging if that's offensive or merely a reflection on how we relay news given our society.
MattGrommes 8y ago
I agree. She's said many times she wasn't the only one involved and it's really a team win. The issue is that the media likes to have one winner and she was it. It's another version of the media dumbing down science coverage.
- wklauss 8y ago
  It's not dumbing down science. Is making science relatable to an audience that otherwise would not care much about an image of a black hole. Having a "hero" in a story serves a purpose (many purposes, in this case) and it happens in every single field you can imagine. Is that sport player really a star os is he/she a star because he has an amazing team that creates the opportunities for him/her to stand out? Is this law championed by a politician really his/her idea or does he/she have a team of advisors that helped shape it? Nobody lives in a vacuum. There isn't a single person, dead or alive, that has accomplish anything of importance without the help of others (knowingly or unknowingly, wether directly or indirectly) but at some point you have to take that for granted, to a certain degree, and focus on the figure that drives the enterprise, or makes a new discovery thanks to previous ones, or leads a team, or publish a paper. It's not media who loves to have a winner, in any case. It's all of us, and the media obliges because it knows that a story with a hero is better told and better heard. It just happens that for some reason, in this case, having a hero seems to be unacceptable for some and I can't quite put my finger on why...
steego 8y ago
I hate it when news outlets and movie production companies focus on individuals and ignore the team effort and dynamic, and it's not because I care about distributing credit. I want them to tell more stories about teams and communities working together to build things, not more lone genius stories. I get it. I truly do. But consider the context: This picture of a blackhole is going around along with an iconic picture of a woman with a ton of hard-drives that resembles the iconic picture of Margaret Hamilton with a stack of papers. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who knows little to nothing about this project. What questions do you think people have? Headlines have to create irresistible questions that lure people in and this one is using the tried and true "Who's this genius?" formula. Once they've grabbed this casual reader (see headline), they're not going to dive too deep into the project. This isn't serious science journalism, this is a human interest story in the science section. Why did they pick her? Because she lead the team and was a key figure in conceiving and implementing the algorithm. Because she was already the face, spokesperson and active promoter for this project. Look at her TED talk from 2017. I get it. Tons of people deserve credit. More importantly, the story of how this team collaborated should be told. But that's not what this profile piece is about. But let's get serious. You're critiquing the accuracy of a very casual profile piece for average readers. Most of them really don't care what statements are slightly hyperbolic, they just want to understand the gist of the project and her role.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- njepa 8y ago
  The ironic thing is that this seems to be a case when someone doing the science gets to represent the project and get credit rather than just institutions and senior researchers.
- monksy 8y ago
  > Margaret Hamilton with a stack of papers. That was used to say "well women are doing something very important" (If we're truly focused on equality should be yes.. that is normal.. but why is that important to advertise that message) The feeling that I'm getting from all of this is that the result is showcased to the side and they're trying to make her into a celebrity. I would love to hear her praise "her team" (her team is a subset of people in the whole project) Although, I don't think she has enough experience to realize that it's a good thing to do. (That's something you get from working in teams outside academia) If you go to the moon, you don't just praise the one guy who did it. You bring the whole group of astronauts who went and did something. If they're smart they're going to admit that there were a ton of people who helped. EDIT-Update on the comment about the team praise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19638629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19638629
victor106 8y ago
From the article: "But Dr Bouman, ...insisted the team that helped her deserves equal credit."
- realradicalwash 8y ago
  my criticism is not aimed at her at all - but at the media. and yes, she emphasised this elsewhere, too, which imv shows what a great and humble person she is.
  - jachee 8y ago
    Every media article I've read cites her team-credit emphasis. What more should the media do? "Faceless, nameless team does X, No film at 11 in case that might make someone look like they're getting too much credit."? Every team has a leader (de facto or otherwise). Having one voice, one face for a globe-spanning team effort is the way the media can convey the amazing, awesome message to the masses in a relatable way.
    - n1231231231234 8y ago
      > Every media article I've read cites her team-credit emphasis. But that is the problem, actually. Simple question: Is Prof Bouman the team leader that held all this together? In answering this, consider this is from the ERC website, which is the major funding body of the project: > Since 2014, this six year research project is being carried out by three lead scientists and their teams; namely Professors Heino Falcke from Radboud University Nijmegen (also Chair of EHT Science Council), Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy, and Luciano Rezzolla from Goethe University Frankfurt. [0] So to answer "What more should the media do?", my guess would be: at some point, mention Falcke, Kramer, and Rezzolla? And the ERC? [0] https://erc.europa.eu/news/eu-funded-scientists-unveil-first-ever-image-black-hole https://erc.europa.eu/news/eu-funded-scientists-unveil-first...
      - jachee 8y ago
        > Simple question: Is Prof Bouman the team leader that held all this together? Why does this bother you so much? What do you lose by her getting credit? Or anyone? What actual harm is it doing?
njepa 8y ago
> 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. It doesn't say that though. It says she was behind the image. And as I understand she lead one of the teams responsible for creating the image from the data. So I don't think that is particularly inaccurate as far as headlines go.
- sodafountan 8y ago
  Well luckily we can verify just how much code she actually committed to the project. The Event Horizon Telescope Analysis Toolkit is a publicly available repository on Github: https://github.com/sao-eht/eat https://github.com/sao-eht/eat according to Katie's profile klbouman, she was responsible for a subset of that toolkit known as hopstools - which is described in the readme as "tools to convert data from the HOPS format": https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools Of the 259 commits to that project, klbouman is responsible for exactly 2. An initial commit - and a merge into the final toolkit: https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits/master https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits/master Leaving sex out of it, is this a classic case of a project manager getting all of the credit for a development team's hard work? Because by the looks of it it certainly looks like she didn't commit very much code unless I'm missing something. I'd say at the very least giving Andrew Chael, Mareki Honma and the rest of the development team just as much credit as she got for such an historic accomplishment would be fair to say the least.
  - alukima 8y ago
    Lines of code is not, and will never be a metric for gauging project contribution. Most of that 850,000 lines of code is likely boilerplate setup code.
    - sodafountan 8y ago
      850,000 loc vs what looks to be an initial commit and a merge: https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits?author=klbouman https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits?author=klbouma... if I'm wrong here please point it out
rcruzeiro 8y ago
Just like the Portuguese scientist involved is getting more coverage than her here in Portugal. It's just natural I guess. People want to find someone relatable.
- diedyesterday 8y ago
  One difference is that you're all Portuguese in Portugal. But they are not all women in the US or whatever and they will react if they sense "unfairness". There are no (substantial) non-Portuguese in Portugal to react!
moonbug 8y ago
Yes won't someone spare a thought for the men
kemitchell 8y ago
I don't understand how "the woman behind the first black hole image" is hyperbole. She's a woman and she's behind the first black hole image. I don't think anybody truly believes that taking images of black holes is a one-person job. And the title doesn't imply that. Neither does the next, boldface paragraph in the article: > A 29-year-old computer scientist has earned plaudits worldwide for helping develop the algorithm that created the first-ever image of a black hole. Immediately followed by: > Katie Bouman led development of a computer program that made the breakthrough image possible.
- aassddffasdf 8y ago
  The problem is with the article "the". She's one of many people behind the first black hole image.
- BigFish12 8y ago
  It doesn't say "A woman behind", it says "THE woman behind". Big difference.
throc3 8y ago
You're wrong, she did most of the work on the algorithm to make this work: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413
zeroandjune 8y ago
Oh fuck off you wanker
diedyesterday 8y ago
Feminists and many good for nothing women/men in the media need heroes to inspire confidence and interest in science in their kind and that's essentially the subconscious reason behind this sensational over-magnification of one individual.

yeahitslikethat 8y ago

No 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.

realradicalwash 8y ago
this is hard to say, tbh. first: by alluding to Ive, you insert a gender component. i don't want to make this about gender - which is what happened itt. as mentioned, i think the difference in focus is because of geo-cultural reasons. another piece of evidence for this hypothesis comes from the following: over here, the EU also gets a lot of praise for providing the main chunk of the funding for the project. a quick check tells me that this detail is often omitted in US articles about the project. also, a note on myself: i work in a field where the majority of people are female. so is my boss. her work is great and i love working here. at the same time, i am aware that the bar to get here was higher for my female colleagues than it is for men. also, i see the glass ceiling having an effect on the careers of my sisters and my female friends. and i am painfully aware of the struggles that my mum and other women of her generation had/have to go through. so i consider myself a feminist, in the sense that i believe that we should have full equality and that we do not have it yet. second: think iphone, i think jobs. so what "Jony Ive: The Man Behind The iPhone" would imply to me is that Ive is _the one person_ that had the biggest impact on the development of the iphone. i don't know enough about Ive to evaluate this. but here's the thing: if it turned out that another person contributed as much if not more than Ive, then i'd say: hey, it's nice that the article introduces Ive and gives him some credit, but let's not exaggerate and let's not forget about the other people who have also greatly contributed to the project. edit: to clarify: i find it hard to say, because it's somewhat hypothetical. i truly hope for myself that i would react the same way / that gender has no impact on my thought process.
- rhacker 8y ago
  > first: by alluding to Ive, you insert a gender component Personally, I want to say the gender component actually happened right about here: >> Her story is trully inspiring! She seems like a really likable person We have interesting ways and subtext when we talk about people that show our biases. Actually beyond that the entire article isn't anything about asking Katie questions or how she came about her algorithm. It's more about her fast rising popularity. It's an article that says a woman did something without saying that. I'm not judging if that's offensive or merely a reflection on how we relay news given our society.

MattGrommes 8y ago

I agree. She's said many times she wasn't the only one involved and it's really a team win. The issue is that the media likes to have one winner and she was it. It's another version of the media dumbing down science coverage.

wklauss 8y ago
It's not dumbing down science. Is making science relatable to an audience that otherwise would not care much about an image of a black hole. Having a "hero" in a story serves a purpose (many purposes, in this case) and it happens in every single field you can imagine. Is that sport player really a star os is he/she a star because he has an amazing team that creates the opportunities for him/her to stand out? Is this law championed by a politician really his/her idea or does he/she have a team of advisors that helped shape it? Nobody lives in a vacuum. There isn't a single person, dead or alive, that has accomplish anything of importance without the help of others (knowingly or unknowingly, wether directly or indirectly) but at some point you have to take that for granted, to a certain degree, and focus on the figure that drives the enterprise, or makes a new discovery thanks to previous ones, or leads a team, or publish a paper. It's not media who loves to have a winner, in any case. It's all of us, and the media obliges because it knows that a story with a hero is better told and better heard. It just happens that for some reason, in this case, having a hero seems to be unacceptable for some and I can't quite put my finger on why...

steego 8y ago

I hate it when news outlets and movie production companies focus on individuals and ignore the team effort and dynamic, and it's not because I care about distributing credit. I want them to tell more stories about teams and communities working together to build things, not more lone genius stories. I get it. I truly do. But consider the context: This picture of a blackhole is going around along with an iconic picture of a woman with a ton of hard-drives that resembles the iconic picture of Margaret Hamilton with a stack of papers. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who knows little to nothing about this project. What questions do you think people have? Headlines have to create irresistible questions that lure people in and this one is using the tried and true "Who's this genius?" formula. Once they've grabbed this casual reader (see headline), they're not going to dive too deep into the project. This isn't serious science journalism, this is a human interest story in the science section. Why did they pick her? Because she lead the team and was a key figure in conceiving and implementing the algorithm. Because she was already the face, spokesperson and active promoter for this project. Look at her TED talk from 2017. I get it. Tons of people deserve credit. More importantly, the story of how this team collaborated should be told. But that's not what this profile piece is about. But let's get serious. You're critiquing the accuracy of a very casual profile piece for average readers. Most of them really don't care what statements are slightly hyperbolic, they just want to understand the gist of the project and her role.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
njepa 8y ago
The ironic thing is that this seems to be a case when someone doing the science gets to represent the project and get credit rather than just institutions and senior researchers.
monksy 8y ago
> Margaret Hamilton with a stack of papers. That was used to say "well women are doing something very important" (If we're truly focused on equality should be yes.. that is normal.. but why is that important to advertise that message) The feeling that I'm getting from all of this is that the result is showcased to the side and they're trying to make her into a celebrity. I would love to hear her praise "her team" (her team is a subset of people in the whole project) Although, I don't think she has enough experience to realize that it's a good thing to do. (That's something you get from working in teams outside academia) If you go to the moon, you don't just praise the one guy who did it. You bring the whole group of astronauts who went and did something. If they're smart they're going to admit that there were a ton of people who helped. EDIT-Update on the comment about the team praise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19638629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19638629

victor106 8y ago

From the article: "But Dr Bouman, ...insisted the team that helped her deserves equal credit."

realradicalwash 8y ago
my criticism is not aimed at her at all - but at the media. and yes, she emphasised this elsewhere, too, which imv shows what a great and humble person she is.
- jachee 8y ago
  Every media article I've read cites her team-credit emphasis. What more should the media do? "Faceless, nameless team does X, No film at 11 in case that might make someone look like they're getting too much credit."? Every team has a leader (de facto or otherwise). Having one voice, one face for a globe-spanning team effort is the way the media can convey the amazing, awesome message to the masses in a relatable way.
  - n1231231231234 8y ago
    > Every media article I've read cites her team-credit emphasis. But that is the problem, actually. Simple question: Is Prof Bouman the team leader that held all this together? In answering this, consider this is from the ERC website, which is the major funding body of the project: > Since 2014, this six year research project is being carried out by three lead scientists and their teams; namely Professors Heino Falcke from Radboud University Nijmegen (also Chair of EHT Science Council), Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy, and Luciano Rezzolla from Goethe University Frankfurt. [0] So to answer "What more should the media do?", my guess would be: at some point, mention Falcke, Kramer, and Rezzolla? And the ERC? [0] https://erc.europa.eu/news/eu-funded-scientists-unveil-first-ever-image-black-hole https://erc.europa.eu/news/eu-funded-scientists-unveil-first...
    - jachee 8y ago
      > Simple question: Is Prof Bouman the team leader that held all this together? Why does this bother you so much? What do you lose by her getting credit? Or anyone? What actual harm is it doing?

njepa 8y ago

> 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. It doesn't say that though. It says she was behind the image. And as I understand she lead one of the teams responsible for creating the image from the data. So I don't think that is particularly inaccurate as far as headlines go.

sodafountan 8y ago
Well luckily we can verify just how much code she actually committed to the project. The Event Horizon Telescope Analysis Toolkit is a publicly available repository on Github: https://github.com/sao-eht/eat https://github.com/sao-eht/eat according to Katie's profile klbouman, she was responsible for a subset of that toolkit known as hopstools - which is described in the readme as "tools to convert data from the HOPS format": https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools Of the 259 commits to that project, klbouman is responsible for exactly 2. An initial commit - and a merge into the final toolkit: https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits/master https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits/master Leaving sex out of it, is this a classic case of a project manager getting all of the credit for a development team's hard work? Because by the looks of it it certainly looks like she didn't commit very much code unless I'm missing something. I'd say at the very least giving Andrew Chael, Mareki Honma and the rest of the development team just as much credit as she got for such an historic accomplishment would be fair to say the least.
- alukima 8y ago
  Lines of code is not, and will never be a metric for gauging project contribution. Most of that 850,000 lines of code is likely boilerplate setup code.
  - sodafountan 8y ago
    850,000 loc vs what looks to be an initial commit and a merge: https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits?author=klbouman https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits?author=klbouma... if I'm wrong here please point it out

rcruzeiro 8y ago

Just like the Portuguese scientist involved is getting more coverage than her here in Portugal. It's just natural I guess. People want to find someone relatable.

diedyesterday 8y ago
One difference is that you're all Portuguese in Portugal. But they are not all women in the US or whatever and they will react if they sense "unfairness". There are no (substantial) non-Portuguese in Portugal to react!

moonbug 8y ago

Yes won't someone spare a thought for the men

kemitchell 8y ago

I don't understand how "the woman behind the first black hole image" is hyperbole. She's a woman and she's behind the first black hole image. I don't think anybody truly believes that taking images of black holes is a one-person job. And the title doesn't imply that. Neither does the next, boldface paragraph in the article: > A 29-year-old computer scientist has earned plaudits worldwide for helping develop the algorithm that created the first-ever image of a black hole. Immediately followed by: > Katie Bouman led development of a computer program that made the breakthrough image possible.

aassddffasdf 8y ago
The problem is with the article "the". She's one of many people behind the first black hole image.
BigFish12 8y ago
It doesn't say "A woman behind", it says "THE woman behind". Big difference.

throc3 8y ago

You're wrong, she did most of the work on the algorithm to make this work: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413

zeroandjune 8y ago

Oh fuck off you wanker

diedyesterday 8y ago

Feminists and many good for nothing women/men in the media need heroes to inspire confidence and interest in science in their kind and that's essentially the subconscious reason behind this sensational over-magnification of one individual.