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Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

bbc.com

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Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#461

Post by belorn »

wklauss wrote: post #414
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely. I've made comments before to the effect of: I cringe hard enough to actually feel physical discomfort every time a headline refers to a team effort of SpaceX as "Elon Musk's Rocket."

Ok, how about "Turing: the genius that cracked the ENIGMA code"?

I would start by informing them that ENIGMA was actually broken by Poland, and they invited the British two weeks before the German invasions to show them how it worked and give them a prototype enigma breaking machine. They didn't want the technique and knowledge in how to break enigma to be lost after Germany invaded. The French also got a copy, and it was actually the French intelligence service that had gathered the initial data and it was unknown to them that this enabled the polish to break ENIGMA.

What turning did was to take the initial prototype they received and build a even more powerful and refined version. In particular he improved the technique so it broke the naval version of enigma which was more complicated than the army version that the polish had broken earlier. This was in part possible because the British had captured a working naval enigma from a German submarine.

(A lot of this comes a book called The Code Book by Simon Singh. The last chapter on modern ciphers is a bit dated but the chapters on enigma was quite good.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#462

Post by distant_hat »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #242
melling wrote: post #17

Katie gave a TED talk: https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs

It is an interesting presentation, but I do NOT understand Katie's explanation about how they were going to minimize the bias [to "see" already predicted black hole visualization] while creatively interpreting inputs from sparsely placed telescopes around the earth. Do you understand Katie's explanation?

If you want to understand that, do not listen to TED talks. They have a terrible format and are designed to make people feel smart rather than impart knowledge.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#463

Post by hgannita »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #283
realradicalwash wrote: post #265

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 ab…

> 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.

Jony Ive actually was truly essential to the work behind the iPhone, so it wouldn't be unfair to single him out.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#464

Post by belorn »

roguecoder wrote: post #416
ikeyany wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. That said, if Katie was a man, her story would not be as groundbreaking in a social context, and thus she would not be as celebrated.

We celebrated Mohawk NASA dude just as much as she’s being celebrated. Maybe we just like unabashedly enthusiastic engineers.

This article has 832 up vote points.

Can you link the HN article with the "Mohawk NASA dude". Searching on "Mohawk NASA" gave me a 1 point article that didn't get a single upvote.

Searching on "Bobak Ferdowsi" gives zero articles on HN, and I could not find any article where even comments were celebrating the achievements of Bobak Ferdowsi, and obviously no 832 point upvoted ones.

No, I must conclude that there is no articled named "Bobak Ferdowsi, the scientist behind the Curiosity rover", and definitively not one that got just as much celebration as this one.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#465

Post by black-tea »

dalemyers wrote: post #44

I'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 th…

Really? You could easily find comments on here talking about how Steve Jobs wasn't really the genius at Apple, but rather it was Steve Wozniak. We do care who really did it. Always.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#466

Post by kakarot »

roguecoder wrote: post #424
kakarot wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for mentioning the Ted talk, I'm about to check it out now. The first headline on Google for me when searching "black hole image" is this very BBC article. It was clearly written to grab the reader's attention, and it grabs it away from the actual phenomenon as well as all of the other brilliant minds who came together to make this happen. She led the CS team. But very-long-baseline interferometry has been aro…

Her existence is not a distraction from the science, and her being a her definitely isn’t. If it distracted you, that sounds like a you problem. You could try spend time reading about various women’s accomplishments until their gender is simply a fact rather than a “distraction”.

You are arguing against a strawman. I never made any such claim that "her existence is a distraction from the science".

I never made any comment as to her gender being a distraction, either?

Your post is very mean-spirited, ignorant of the views I just expressed, and honestly I don't like your implication that I am not familiar with the accomplishments of women in the past, especially in my field. Or that I have a problem with their gender. Ada Lovelace and Joan of Arc are two of my greatest inspirations! Cut the obvious virtue signalling.

My entire point is that gender has no bearing on this discussion. It's a discussion about misattributing a massive group effort to one individual. The point is that gender should not play a role in either direction, because that would be sexist. Everything you've extrapolated upon you just pulled out of the aether and not my mouth.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#467

Post by reicek »

realradicalwash wrote: post #39
robaato wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From article: 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 l…

i don't think the criticism of "jobsism" is directed at her, but rather at media outlets who are spinning the story this way.

So you attack a brilliant scientist with a post doctorate? You say she doesn't deserve credit for being the cornerstone that allowed this amazing discovery to happen?

Already read your coward excuse that you are only attacking the media, don't bother justifying your misogyny and insecurities.

Your profile has less than a year, can't be traced to the real you and all/most of what you say is just cheap criticism. From what I see, you are nothing than a mere internet troll that got some attention; an information parasite.

Know that you represent the worst of the information age.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#468

Post by themarkn »

monksy wrote: post #436
themarkn wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to avoid your own responsibility and bias in making that assumption. It's not accurate to blame it on the media coverage alone. Strikes me as more like confirmation bias around what your expectations are for academics, women, or both.

Excuse me? I admitted that I was incorrect in my impression. I could have deleted the original comment but posted an admission that I was too quick to jump to conclusions. You should be aware of what the media is trying to say, and how it's presented. This comment section is showing how different countries are presenting the same situation. Confirmation bias in academics: It's very common to escalate the work from un…

Not arguing that you didn't admit the assumption was incorrect ... Just that in saying it was based on the editorial bias in the articles you're ignoring your own participation in making the assumption.

You admit you were too quick to jump to conclusions: but I'd argue you were quick because those conclusions "seemed right" based on your own biases. I dunno. Maybe your statement "Although, I don't think she has enough experience to realize that it's a good thing to do." didn't have anything to do with her being a woman and it's just a coincidence that women struggle with being seen as less experienced than their male peers. It just came across to me as a really patronising and insulting thing to say, and hard thing to blame on the reporting of others.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#469

Post by inflatableDodo »

sajib3 wrote: post #23
mpfundstein wrote: post #9

Is 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.

Because 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.

There 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.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#470

Post by black-tea »

hlurhhh wrote: post #449
black-tea wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women 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 t…

I 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

If you don't think sex is important then you have a lot to learn, "bro".
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