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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

#201

Post by koalala »

dunslandsboo wrote: post #80
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…

Why do you want to change the behaviour of women regarding their choice of study field?

To add to this, another important question to ask is: what kind of equality, in general, do you want? Do you want equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? They are mutually exclusive.

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

#202

Post by [deleted] »

matt4077 wrote: post #85

Here'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…

[deleted]

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

#203

Post by gentaro »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #185
noonespecial wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you post your impossibly distant black hole images, I'm sure they'll consider your pull request cleaning it up...

For those who didn't realise above, I was being flippant. On a slightly serious note though, I wonder how much productivity is lost in the scientific community due to poorly written and documented code? I've heard stories of 40 year old Fortran code written by long deceased professors that was written to crunch physics numbers or whatever, and when it's come time to modify or add to it, nobody can make head nor tail…

I agree with you that the scientific community is way behind industry standards, but the reason for that is much less of their code is actually designed for reuse. The overwhelming majority of their work is just "let me try writing this code and see what results I get."

Industry professionals are forced to take the approach of "I need to write this code to be as maintainable and flexible as possible" because they have no idea what the business is going to want next and generally have no set timeframe for how long they may have to maintain any particular project.

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

#204

Post by blattimwind »

wallace_f wrote: post #200
spyckie2 wrote: post #79

from her paper: 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 i…

>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?

No. 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.

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

#205

Post by koalala »

cwal37 wrote: post #150
nprateem wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stories like this help bring more women into STEM fields How do you know?

This paper[1] gets at it for one. From the abstract: " Consistent with the importance of exposure effects in career selection, women and disadvantaged youth are as underrepresented among high-impact inventors as they are among inventors as a whole. These findings suggest that there are many “lost Einsteins”—individuals who would have had highly impactful inventions had they been exposed to innovation in childhood—esp…

This is easily explained by the difference in IQ distributions between men and women. The IQ distribution for men has fatter tails on both sides, so more very high and very low IQ individuals, where as the one for women doesn't.

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

#207

Post by chickenmonkey »

wallace_f wrote: post #200
spyckie2 wrote: post #79

from her paper: 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 i…

>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?

I'm not sure, but from a class I'm taking right now, I have a faint inkling that the lesser light you let in, the more resolution you have i.e the more you're able to distinguish between two close together objects.

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

#208

Post by kaitai »

antt wrote: post #172
matt4077 wrote: post #85

Here'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…

Top 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 Powe…

At least they're talking about PowerShell rather than gender!

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

#209

Post by analog31 »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #185
noonespecial wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you post your impossibly distant black hole images, I'm sure they'll consider your pull request cleaning it up...

For those who didn't realise above, I was being flippant. On a slightly serious note though, I wonder how much productivity is lost in the scientific community due to poorly written and documented code? I've heard stories of 40 year old Fortran code written by long deceased professors that was written to crunch physics numbers or whatever, and when it's come time to modify or add to it, nobody can make head nor tail…

I write that code. ;-)

It's a toss-up. On the one hand, there's a loss due to dirty code, but a gain by a smaller group of people being able to do multidisciplinary work. In my own case, I'm a physicist outside academia, and in addition to code, I also do electronics and a variety of other things.

When you're doing exploratory R&D, as I am, there are downsides to getting things done by domain specialists. First, you have to find people with quantitative skills, and they tend to be in the greatest demand due to scarcity. Second, you have to manage the politics of getting them assigned and engaged. Third, you have to manage the interface between specialties. It becomes a project management exercise. And then, the way that code and project files are structured, it may be possible to read isolated sections of code, but very hard for a non-expert to find their way around the myriad of files that tend to form a modern code base.

In my own case, I do what I can to write good code. I try to keep up to date on good practices, and so forth. Could we do better? Sure. The quest to improve my coding is how I accidentally bumped into HN in the first place.

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

#210

Post by shalmanese »

wallace_f wrote: post #200
spyckie2 wrote: post #79

from her paper: 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 i…

>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?

Angular resolution is the smallest angle that can be resolved by a telescope. Small angular resolution produces high resolution images.
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