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

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

#421

Post by patrickg_zill »

lambdadmitry wrote: post #376
patrickg_zill wrote: post #284

The 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.

This 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…

Why 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-...

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-02470090...

And this is what is publicly released for public consumption...

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

#422

Post by roguecoder »

hurryskurry wrote: post #177
njepa wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would hope that isn't it. While her trajectory might be uncommon it isn't abnormal. This is the kind of thing you are supposed to do with a PhD from MIT.

But the amount of hours worked are probably insane. I wouldn't be surprised if she was in her lab 12 hours a day for her whole post-doc or something like that. Many people are intelligent enough, but are not going to work hard enough.

Reading about this reminds me of Dawn Wall. The guy who climbed it was absolutely one of the best climbers in the world, but the reason he was the one to succeed was because he was the one of those best climbers who spent seven years obsessed with a single wall.

She became interested in this problem in high school and stuck with it all the way through. She is a genius, and also the genius who did the work that let this happen.

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

#423

Post by roguecoder »

scraft wrote: post #137
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…

I am glad she got credit and I am glad in that respect she got treated equally. I am a little sad that her gender is a 'thing', as in I think I have seen more comments on various news site comments, social media, etc. that are quick to specifically point out she is a woman. I get they are trying to be positive, but it also has this weird reverse side where it is like "An amazing feat in STEM has been achieved, but yo…

If a headline said “the man who discovered the cure” you wouldn’t think they were making a big deal out of his gender. You only see it as being attention-seeking because you are experiencing cognitive dissonance, and you are blaming it on their language instead of your mental patterns.

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

#424

Post by roguecoder »

kakarot wrote: post #142
soVeryTired wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really think she's getting special treatment because of her gender though. I think she's in the spotlight because: 1/ She led the team and was first author on the image reconstruction paper 2/ She gave a Ted talk on the topic a while back 3/ There's a brilliant photo of her initial reaction to the image that captures the excitement of scientific discovery circulating on the internet

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”.

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

#425

Post by roguecoder »

glangdale wrote: post #183
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…

Yes, quite a number of big academic, scientific or industry figures have had stories about their achievements without any major reference to their (obviously necessary) team. No-one felt moved to point out there were contributions from the graduate students and staff that worked with Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio in the HN story about the latter three's Turing Award. I don't think I've ever seen so ma…

“Women and children” is a phrase for a reason: men tend to treat both patronizingly, rather than identifying with them.

Imagine you had just had your invention create a picture of a black hole, you wrote the paper where you were the first author describing this and then the press came knocking: would you be as gracious as she has been? Or would you feel like the fucking rockstar you would, in fact, be?

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

#426

Post by roguecoder »

warp_factor wrote: post #63
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…

I think those comments try to react to the fact that this news got overblown because the researcher is a very talented woman. She definitely did something amazing and unfortunately it turned political because it fits the narrative that some people love to push currently. I'm not a fan of the liberal agenda of positive//negative discrimination. I really believe that it is making everyone worse off, especially women th…

I disagree with the premise that it is possible to overblow the news about a picture of a black hole. What kind of crappy nerd thinks science is getting too much press!?!!

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

#427

Post by roguecoder »

dunslandsboo wrote: post #280
juliendorra wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You 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. An…

Maybe you can help me understand. So how do you explain why there are fewer women in STEM fields in Scandinavia and more in Turkey, Tunesia and United Arab Emirates? Well at least according to the paper "The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Gijsbert Stoet, David C. Geary" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761774171...

That is some just-so-story that doesn’t present a disprovable hypothesis. There was a better-supported causal hypothesis floating around that exposure to the internet, in particular, turned women off of CS because the culture #onhere was so full of sexism. Try looking up “ambient belonging”: I remember some thing about all you had to do to get more women interested was change the decor to not suggest they were going to have to put up with sexist bullshit if they chose the field.

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

#428

Post by kaitai »

roguecoder wrote: post #419
kaitai wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of academic code is also written by students. For instance, I'm working on a project that ends up with code written by 6 masters' students. I'm trying desperately to get them to use Git or some other kind of version control rather than emailing me files, but it's only been partially successful. My last CS class per se was 18 years ago. They don't know (&( ^ about programming -- at least I've been paid to do it…

This makes me wonder if universities could employ a bootcamp-like curriculum, with lots of feedback, collaboration and unit tests, and make it available for students in these disciplines. Like how many schools have everyone take writing classes.

I think this would be very useful. So useful. I personally haven't been able to get anything code-related through the curriculum committee though (I'm not in CS).

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

#429

Post by roguecoder »

hurryskurry wrote: post #173
ralusek wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

She obviously deserves some credit, and you can see she got some for her hard work and skills, i.e., she already has a tenure track position set up at Caltech. But rarely do post-docs actually get credit. The credit they get is usually by PIs in seminars where they mention their students or try to get their students jobs. The person who provides the funding for the project, not the one actually doing the work is the…

How kind of you to suggest that she deserves “some credit” for the paper where she was the first author. That totally makes me think this is rooted in something other than you assuming there is no possible way someone who looks like her and sounds like her actually deserves credit for this incredibly fucking cool science.

She started working on this problem in high school, and worked on it across multiple institutions. If the PI should have gotten the credit, she wouldn’t be first author.

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

#430

Post by roguecoder »

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…

Also 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”.
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