She is definitely not an astronomer. A lot of highly specialized and talented people who aren't astronomers or physicists are are critical to the success of big science projects.
The 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.
Yes, 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.
She's everywhere for the same reason Elizabeth Holmes was everywhere a few years ago. The media wants to push a certain agenda. You are being downvoted because some "people" misread your comment and thought you were questioning the agenda when in actuality, you clearly weren't. Actually, your comment is really in support of her rather than detracting from her, but "people" can't read nuance.
She really should have been at the conference given her contributions, but she wasn't. Maybe it was a scheduling conflict? Who knows.
I'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.
ok, so just so everyone is clear, the point between parent and grandparent is Andrew Chael seems to have written a hell of a lot more code than Katie Bouman, for a lot longer
* achael 566 commits 850,275 ++ 131,044 --
* klbouman 90 commits 2,410 ++ 1,265 --
However, at least at the level of reading the commit messages, Katie's are pretty math heavy:
"fixed bug in the fake briggs weighting"
"starting to fix chirp problems with polrep"
"made it possible to do a min uv cut on closure phase when adding it a..."
While Andrew's lean frequently toward code maintenance:
"updated some docstrings in imager_utils"
"moved imgsum to plotting.summary_plots"
"modified README"
That said, Andrew and others seem to have pretty good insight too.
True, but that need not be of high importance when assigning credit. Especially in projects that involve a lot of implementation, the high level algorithms and techniques are developed by someone who might be far removed from actually writing code, and that aspect is outsourced to someone much more competent at programming. A lot of PhD students / professors do not have the talent or have not developed the thought process to write complex code, simply because their focus has been on other things.
Exactly. One project I worked on a while back involved me taking a big pile of very clever and complicated Matlab code and rewriting it in python in a way that made it easy to use from other projects and able to read a couple of additional input file formats. If you just look at the commits on that project it would look like I was responsible for 90+% of the entire thing, while in truth I was basically just doing transcribing and cleaning and had basically nothing to do with any of the difficult parts.
To add some more context... of the 850k lines, 500k lines are mostly models and machine generated code. Andrew is definitely smart (smarter than an average HN user) and his code is very important but I have never seen so much display of misogyny and sexism against a woman scientist. She never took any credit and clearly said that this was a team effort. Some of the top posts on reddit are trying to mischaracterize the work that Dr.Katie has done and the comments are so vile.
We don’t exist in a purely meritocratic and egalitarian society. Maybe you have never been told that you are not good enough for some work but growing up in deeply paternalistic society, I constantly heard “women are too stupid for hard sciences and they should just stick to kitchens”. If celebrating her achievements in this way changes minds of a few people and inspires a few girls to believe in themselves, I think it is worth the “biased” coverage that she is getting for her work.
People don't surrender their outside political views, their lineage, sexual orientation and other background either. See how stupid the article would sound if titled: "Jane Doe: The divorced homosexual black democratic woman with three children behind the first black hole image". Science matters.
It's fallacious to presume that — because gender, sex, race, etc. shouldn't impact peoples' opportunities — that we should treat is as though it doesn't impact them.
I don't see what you're seeing, I see news headlines and comments that are suggesting Dr Bouman worked alone.
They just need "a" instead of "the", or "lead" if she's responsible as leader of a team.
For me, I am slightly primed by the "Apollo code" story: the claim was (paraphrasing) "this programmer created all the code for the Apollo programme" with an image of a person standing with folders of printouts stacked up to their shoulder. Well that person was the lead of teams of coders and didn't personally do it all. The implication, explicit in some cases, was "women's contribution is always hidden, this person did it all and got no recognition because vile men refused to share the spotlight". (Hamilton's contribution as a lead programmer was vital to the Apollo programme, but it doesn't appear to have anything to do with her being a woman).
Now, this story appears to be doing exactly what was claimed there, people's contributions being ignored.
Normally a headline would be "Bouman leads team to image blackhole", but the use of a clearly gendered forename suggests the headline writer is trying to pick out the sex of the subject. "The" suggests singularity (pun attempted!) of contribution. So, it's natural to ask why, and if you've been subject to the social media "women do it all and men get all the credit" one is bound to question the contributions.
Then looking at GitHub and seeing 2k loc vs 850k loc -- paired with the programming vs computer science confusion -- it appears like another exaggeration to forward a feminist agenda rather than an attempt to report science.
I can not believe you have written the last sentence without any sense of irony. We are just discussing about how stupid the LOC metric is and how most of the LOC Andrew write were machine generated. People were also saying that her commits were more math heavy. Anyway if you actually believe that there is a secret feminist agenda, I don’t think I can say anything that will change your mind.
Don’t think GP supports that statement. That post just explains why the earlier lost was miffed about the commit log.
It’s disappointing to see this celebration of an amazing technical achievement devolve into a contentious meta-analysis inspired by the USA’s broken politics.
You've misunderstood me slightly. You're absolutely right about the loc metric -- seems reasonable to me that she'd design the/some algos and let others do boiler plate and implementation of [other] algo's. That's why I emphasised "appears", as in "someone naively approaches the subject, sees that and thinks 'her contribution was really small'".
I don't think there is a "secret feminist agenda" as such, but news outlets do over-egg the situation to try and create "women heroes of science". The way it's done appears to be sexist in an attempt at, so-called, positive discrimination; rather than being equalist.
You seem to consider my analysis to be abjectly errant, I would appreciate hearing why?
One of the few redeeming features of the HN conventions of civility and seriousness is that we don't have Reddit's problems and we don't need to talk about Reddit.
But what could possibly qualify you to say that "Andrew is definitely smart (smarter than an average HN user) and his code is very important"?
Number of lines is not an indicator of contribution. The reason I posted this repo was so that folks curious about the programming behind this science could have their fill. I am just happy to see an academic project using good version control practices released under a proper license.
This 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?
Honestly 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.
It'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.
There are 6 authors for that paper, the way you linked it suggested it's solely by her; are the other authors listed honorarily?
Similarly the title suggests she worked alone on the project. Which seems exceedingly unlikely given the need for telescope time and computing time and the wide range of disciplines I imagine the project covers ... did she work alone. That must be almost unique in experimentalism nowadays?
It depends a bit on the scientific field, but in mine (computer vision, which this was also published in) the first author is the "main" author, usually doing most if not all the "ground work", then you have collaborators and co-authors, and finally the supervisors (in the case of the PhD student that she was at the time). It is becoming more common to see papers with "Author1, Author2, Author3..." lists, where the "*" authors count with equal contribution. This is important for attribution and the infamous metrics that funding often depends on, but it's not the case here.
So I'm certain those authors did their part, so maybe yes, I should have linked this as "Bouman et al." but I wouldn't expect this to be six equal contributions either.
That all being said, she's certainly standing on the shoulders of a pyramid of giants there.
Edit: to the people downvoting the parent, maybe explain? I didn't take this as a bad faith comment. It can be genuinely confusing to someone who doesn't know the ins and outs of academic attribution...
I've found that CS contributions in academia are often poorly credited (sometimes even entirely neglected) to endeavors not purely executed within CS itself.
It's interesting considering how many modern scientific endeavors are dependent on new innovative algorithms, software, and computing techniques in both experimental and theoretical work then its frequently just hand-waved away as "technology."
I'm not saying such contributions (typically, though they can,) lay groundwork for an experiment or theory in another domain, but I am saying active CS involvement/expertise is typically critical to many scientific endeavors' success these days. If a project is interdiscipinary, there's probably a computer scientist on the team helping out.
Although I agree with the point you have raised, it can sometimes be a little tricky to draw the line. Should we have Microsoft cited for projects completed using their software or system? Should we always cite Newton when using calculus?
I think society implicitly assumes that there has been a tone of people backing up a single individual towards their main achievements and that the individual is humble enough to know and to try - ever so slightly - to show appreciation.
From my perspective, if in order to accomplish your work, you need consult or active collaboration with a computer scientist and otherwise could not develop/test your theory or conduct your experiment, then they almost certainly should be cited as an author/collaborator.
If you utilize something OTS outside the project that just works for you and don't need a computer scientist, then whatever entity created that OTS IP isn't really an author/collaborator, but it's likely their work should be cited/referenced if it's part of the critical methodology (as part of disclosure and repeatability).
If your project used Microsoft Word to write up a report, it's not important to the underlying science you conducted. You could have substituted it with TeX, other Word processors, or pen/paper and it wouldn't change the outcome of the underlying theory/experiment you developed. If you used an Ansys package to perform analysis for some purpose, you should probably mention that out of rigor but Ansys isn't an author or collaborator.
If on the other hand you need someone to architect a solution to handle processing your massive dataset, needed someone to write custom code because nothing could do what you needed, needed a new algorithm because you had no clue how to approach the problem, or even needed someone to modify source code significantly to something that existed but couldn't do what you needed, then they are certainly an author/collaborator. If you took existing code/algorithm and made it more efficient in order to accomplish a task that would have taken too long otherwise, you're a contributor/collaborator and should be listed as an author.
This has been a huge issue in academic research but it's been getting a bit better and researchers are starting even more to acknowledge/credit computing professionals as crucial contributors and authors, as they rightfully should be.
I’ve gotten authorship when I have collaborated on the paper itself (rather than just research: that’s how you get into acknowledgements, same as lab techs, collaborators who didn’t work on this specific paper, etc.)
Papers are routinely credited to their first author. Everyone understand the co-authors also took part. She also clearly credits the rest of the team in the posted BBC article.
There is actually nothing really in the BBC story about being a women other than in the context of her getting attention on twitter, but barely that. I think whoever changed the title might have been confused as well. It doesn't refer to woman as gender but woman as subject as in e.g. "the man walked his dog".
Very few science papers have a single author these days. She's listed as first author, so presumably her contribution was at least as important as anyone else's.
If we want to be pedantic, this paper is the work of millions of humans throughout history, who have helped developed the math knowledge for such a project to even be feasible.
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 of it and they have to write it from scratch.
There's a reason why in the non-academic world we have coding standards and code review. Code isn't written in a bubble, other people will look at it and work on it.
That's not to belittle or criticise the work done in the slightest. Cleanliness of code is orthogonal to functionality. You can have beautifully written, clean and documented code that doesn't do what it's meant to, and likewise you can have a complete mess of code that performs some genius function perfectly.
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.
A lot of industry code is also glue logic which doesn't express any original idea which makes it inherently easier to document. Code expressing a novel algorithm is never going to be as easy to document and maintain as code plugging standard libraries together. Notably, code in "industry" which does express novel algorithms is often also not so easy to read, there just isn't that much of it on most projects.
>I agree with you that the scientific community is way behind industry standards
You could say the same about academic CS code which is arguably far more egregious since this is their field. I don't think most reasonable people expect Physicists or Biologists to write production level code for their work, nor do they need to.
There are efforts to integrate more industry standard software engineering practices into research (RSE or "research software engineering" as a phrase is growing in popularity):
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.
Don't worry about these comments. The worst thing in science is usually that the code is not published (and these comments on code quality don't help).
As long as it's published, if somebody wants to reuse it, reimplementing from the paper is the hardest part.
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 in a production context in a company that has to make money to justify its existence -- and since they learned C++ first but we're programming in R or Python there are some ridiculous and unnecessary maneuvers and lots of for loops. I try to work through the code with them but I also don't have time for all of it, since I'm also teaching several classes etc. Sometimes it's easier to go with the crap I've got (that I've tested for correctness) than rewrite things.
If people have good resources I could pass to students about standards for Python code, for instance, let me know.
This is an issue in my field (Engineering) as well.
Most people in my field (materials engineering) are not programmers either they are lucky if they've done one intro course 10 years ago (which was probably done in a language like Java or Visual Basic).
Even then what gets taught in an intro course at university is not the type of code that is written "on the job". I did two semesters of programming courses when I was at uni (as electives) my courses were taught in Java and focused on stuff like object oriented programming and memorizing stuff about "the waterfall model"
There is a pretty big gap between this and my first experience which was being sat down in front of some 30 year old Fortran code which had no objects, no classes etc.
The goto at least in my org when people are trying to understand scientific code - write their own algorithms etc is the 30 year old "Numerical Recipes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_Recipes) textbook. The explanations in this textbook are best and simplest I have come across by far.
I know I personally referenced this book heavily when I was writing code in C to do Spline interpolation/smoothing. I am unaware of any other reference for a lot of algorithms/techniques than this book.
Only other thing I am aware of is the GNU GSL library which in my experience is harder to understand for beginners - even it's example code is "for loop based"
If I had to convert this code to R (which I do know) or python (which I've never written) I'd probably write it this loop based style as well it's what I know and what makes sense to do me and the people in my org I'd expect to be interacting with my code. (the "Engineers can write Fortran in any language meme" is a real issue).
Maybe someone should write a new textbook on "modern" way to solve these sorts of problems if such a thing exists I am unaware of it but would certainly be welcome.
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).
There's a lot of Fortran code in underlying math libraries that are highly highly optimized, including the Fortran compilers themselves (mainly due to age and demand to eek performance out).
I worked with an old Fortran codebase at one point and there were comments in the documentation (a scan of a typewritten via typewriter document) throughout about switching "cards" and "decks"... took me a moment to realize it was refering to punch cards (and I thought I was old) which also led to the program structure fragmented in several individual smaller sub programs (so card reader could handle it) that now is a trivial matter to handle. Maybe they were just ready for the SOA and microservices trend.
In academia, pressure is often on publishing and pulling funding in through grants and contracts. I've done a lot of rapid prototyping in academic research environments and while writing clean software is always on my mind, often, sitting down and refactoring to be more cleverly efficient or taking time to focus on structure, long term maintainability, etc. isn't a priority and refocuses needed cognitive load from the high level research goal the software needed to achieve to instead focusing on production quality software.
I'm not concerned if it takes O(2n) vs O(n) or O(n log n) vs. O(n) time if I know the target scale is small. I'm not concerned that I can cleverly avoid using an extra data structure (and reduce space complexity) if I can do this operation in place on an existing data structure using some reasonably complex algorithm. Chances are I might remove this functionality entirely tomorrow or some student may have to figure it out later on, and I don't want to implement or explain to the student the Boyer-Moore majority algorithm when a brute force O(n^2) time is just fine here and a lot easier to adjust/maintain for a passer by scientist/student.
I'm aware there's a lot of problems and maybe my abstraction hierarchies aren't the best, I could probably make something better with more time.
You have some high-level complex process you're trying to represent and translate in to a program (maybe a simulation, maybe a complex model or set models, etc.). You're not always concerned about if there's a better way to write it or make extensive use of all the features of whatever language you needed to work in (which you may or may not have experience with since you needed to work from existing codebases to start with since time is tight), you simply want to use whatever requires the least time and cognitive load to think about and produce results so you can keep your eyes on the target of what you're developing.
Later on, when prototypes work (or if you hit performance bottlenecks stopping progress), then and only then do you start refactoring and looking at performance optimization--targeting the biggest bottlenecks first.
If everything works, then you can focus on overall refactoring and optimization and turning your Frankenstein into a supermodel (if you have resources/money to do that with--good luck), but you typically need a functional proof of concept to even have a chance of securing funding for that step.
If there's no money in that effort moving forward and you decide "well, maybe someone can use this" so let's release it, that typically has to get approval through a technology transfer office who are always in arms about protecting potential IP so it ends up on some disks rotting away never to be seen or used again.
If you're permitted to release the IP, you begin wondering how the development quality will reflect on you and your group, especially for those who see it and have no context of the constraints you worked with to produce that miracle functional Frankenstein. It's ugly as sin, but it fulfilled the goal to deliver the core research results and did so as quickly as possible and cheaply as possible.
No doubt. But can you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? Especially not ones that violate this site guideline: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."
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.
Why 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.
I'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.
I'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.
Yes, 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.
I thought scientists and academicians do it for the heck of it (and have large amount of wealth to inherit anyway) not because they want to get paid more.
It's interesting how you are concerned about your own "career trajectory", yet for women you cite work/life balance and ability to have children.
Edit: I just checked this comment from yesterday, where someone faulted Marissa Meyer for outsourcing her domestic work[0]. Funny story: it's also by you!
But I guess it's all a coincidence. Plausible deniability, right?
The keywords are "push" - as in, applying cultural pressure - and "require" - as in, "[work in academia] will pretty much require them to put off kids until their late 30s, if ever".
Presenting choices and opening avenues is a laudable thing. Pushing, via cultural means, is the opposite. Especially when certain inconvenient details are consistently glossed over.
>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.
Do you notice I put starvation wages first? Probably not, it would require reading what you're replying to. You're welcome to play again of course.
Might I direct you to [0] where in I compare male CEOs to chimps and come to the startling conclusion that not only are chimps better but the lack of cocaine habit makes them more cost effective too?
Nobody is claiming it is a one person effort. Nobody.
And whilst she is getting more attention it has not come at the expense of anyone else.
And you wonder why women hate to work in IT with comments like yours where you've dismissed her accomplishments simply because she is a "women in tech".
It's a bit of both - she was the lead behind the algorithm used to process the data, so she rightly deserves credit for that aspect (being the first to do something always gets the credit in the research community). At the same time, it's disingenuous to say it would have been impossible without her, there were multiple competing methods that could have pulled this off, and there were large parts of this achievement that had nothing to do with computational photography research (the astronomy / radio physicists teams).
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 lots of different people from many different backgrounds."
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.
Everyone, from government to education to tech companies really, really, really want more women in STEM. A smart, photogenic woman making a contribution is the real story because it fits that narrative. I don't mean to take away from her contributions and I'm not making value judgments, that's just how I see it.
I'm not sure this will get the suitably nuanced discussion it should on Hacker News, but there's a whole school of discussion about 'Great man theory' view of history.
Focus on an academic superstar at the expense of their team - or a big 'team lead' at a place like Google or Facebook is far from remarkable. Any particular reason that this story stands out for you?
It's a scientific feat that's ranked in the top 50 HN stories of all time, yet you somehow feel a profile of the central figure is somehow inappropriate?
How would you rate "Meet Robert Oppenheimer, father of the bomb"?
I'd also love anyone to point me to any similar discussion on Elon Musk and one of his companies.
I 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?
The 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."
It'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.
They don't make a habit of posting the shitty TEDx talks to the main channel, I'm guessing. (And there's plenty of those.) This is definitely high quality relative to most TEDx talks, so I understand why it was upgraded.
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.
Disclaimer: this is based on watching the talk and some basic machine learning knowledge. Im no expert.
They have a sparse set of data that is part of an image. They have trained a model to look at the sparse set and make an educated guess about what the full image looks like. They do this by feeding it full images.
The full images you feed into the model thus have an effect on the final image generated. In order to see how large that effect is, they trained different versions of the model with different sets of complete images. Some were images of what we thought a black hole looked like. There is potential that this heavily influences the model and ensures that the output looks like what we expect it to, even if that isnt actually true.
They also trained the model with non-blackhole images. Since the output of the model was approximately the same, this indicates that the resulting output picture doesnt look like what we think a black hole looks like just because it was trained with black hole images. It likely really looks like that.
The model doesn't need to be told what a black hole looks like. The sparse measurements combined with knowledge of how sparse data can be combined to form a generic image is enough. The model learned that the sparse data is not likely pure noise, instead there are shapes and lines and gradients that relate the sparse data points to each other.
Her analogy of sketch artists is good. If you have a functionally complete description and give it to 3 sketch artists from different cultures who are used to different looking people, they will still draw the same person. However if your description isnt actually detailed enough, their sketches will significantly differ as they use their existing knowledge and bias to fill in the gaps with what they think is likely.
Not OP, but I too am confused. I understood the sketch artist analogy but that didn't seem related to this point:
>They also trained the model with non-blackhole images. Since the output of the model was approximately the same, this indicates that the resulting output picture doesnt look like what we think a black hole looks like just because it was trained with black hole images. It likely really looks like that.
If you are feeding non-blackhole images in and getting blackhole results out, wouldn't that be indicative of an over-trained model? Her other analogy was we can't rule out that there is an elephant at the center of the galaxy, but it sounds like if you feed a picture of an elephant in you'll get a picture of a blackhole out?
From what I understand, the training input images are just to establish the relationship between sparse data points and full image, regardless of subject matter. Since they were getting the black hole picture out of the trained model regardless of how it was trained, it's likely that the model was producing accurate results of what the "camera" was pointed at. If they had pointed it at an elephant, the model would have produced a picture of something elephant-like because it was somewhat accurately reconstructing a full image from sparse data points.
Probably not with random noise. With random noise there is literally no connection between pixels. With any actual picture there are connections. Like for instance a pixel is more likely to be the value of its neighbor or nearly so than any random value. This follows from the fact that the pictures are of actual objects with physical properties that determine the value of the pixel that maps to them. Most of the image can be characterized by continuous gradients with occasional edges.
I think if you trained with random noise you would get random noise output.
They're not just training the model to make pictures from nothing. They're training the model to make pictures from an input.
So I assume they're simulating what an input would look like of, say, a planet or astroid or elephant or whatever, given that it was viewed through the relevant type of sensor system. Then when they feed in the black hole sensor data, they get pictures that look like the black holes we imagined. Even if we never told the model what a black hole looks like.
This is ensuring that the model is not over trained.
They also showed that when they fed in simulated sparse measurements based on real full images of generic things, they got back fuzzy versions of the real image. [1] So if you put in a sparsely captured elephant (if for instance there was one at the center of the galaxy) you'd get an image of the elephant out, not this black hole.
To complete the artist analogy, imagine that the suspect that is being drawn by each artist is some stereotypical American. The description given to the artists doesnt say that, it just describes how the person looks. One of the three sketch artists is American and the others are Chinese and Ethiopian.
If the American draws a stereotypical American, how can you be sure that the drawing is accurate and thats not just what he assumed the person would look like because everyone he has ever seen looks like that?
You look at what the other two draw. If they both draw the same stereotypical American, even though they have no knowledge of what a stereotypical American looks like, you can be pretty sure that they determined that based on the description provided to them. The actual data.
They did still likely utilize some of their knowledge about what humans in general look like though. This is analogous to how the model uses its training on what a generic image looks like. For instance, maybe several sparse pixels of the same value are likely to have pixels of that same value between them. The model puts things like this together and spits out a picture of what we think a black hole looks like even though its never seen a black hole before.
Hmm I skimmed the paper on the algorithm this morning and didn't get the impression they trained the model on other images. I thought they jointly estimated patches that make up the image and penalized deviations from these patches (i.e. estimated a sparse basis). I haven't watched the Ted talk yet though
> that effect is, they trained different versions of the model with different sets of complete images
What does training mean?
I thought that the training means to adjust Neural Network until it learns to convert our input into expected output of "complete image".
But if thaining means to teach the model to produce expected "complete image", then how is it possible that "the output of the model was approximately the same" [for different training "complete image"s]?
Training is to feed in thousands of sets of {sparse sample of actual image, actual image}. The model is adjusted until the total difference between the output image and the actual image is minimized across all training images.
The output images are approximately the same because the model is "looking" at training images at a lower level that we do. The talk says they chop the images up into small pieces. So the model never "sees" the full shapes that are in the full images. It only sees small local features. I guess it turns out that these smaller pieces are pretty generic in that they are common between images of black holes and everything else. The curve of an elephant trunk looks similar to the curve of an event horizon if you cut it out in a small enough piece.
Perhaps if they didnt do this step, then the model would be more sensitive to the images its trained on.
Kathie said [1] "What you can do is to use methods where you [have] do not need any calibration whatsoever and you can still can get pretty good results.
So here on the bottom at the top is the truth image, and this is simulated data, as we are increasing the amount of amplitude error and you can see here ... it's hard to see ... but it breaks down once you add too much gain here. But if we use just closure quantities - we are invariant to that.
So that really, actually, been a really huge step for the project, because we had such bad gains.
"
[1] https://youtu.be/UGL_OL3OrCE?t=1177
I had the same issue. It seemed like with many plausible solutions, there is some bias in the image. I agree there are some reasonable constraints, like it should be energetic stuff in a sphere around a dark sphere, but how many solutions would have fit that criteria?
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.
Until 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.
Of 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
People 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.
Yeah, 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
People used to work in different men and women group earlier. With clear professional differences. Housewife is a word Househusband not as much. We work in mixed groups now. We don't need these boundaries (for both men and women). It's misleading, divisive and only help political people who want to further their own agendas
As it happens I only have vision in one eye. In her position would I want the headlines to begin 'Visually-impaired scientist..'? Personally I would find this patronising.
This 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.
You'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.
No 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.
Yes, the same way that people credit elon musk for tesla, or credit elon musk for spaceX. He didnt build those rockets himself either.
> This is not about celebrating those people, it's giving the main chunk of the credit to this person alone.
Because leading a large team of researches working on highly complicated work is respectfull work as well. Another team leader might have botched it and we wouldnt have the picture.
Those are his companies, he founded them with his money. He's the CEO of all those companies, unlike the situation here. She wasn't the leader of the entire project. And she didn't even put her hands on the other aspects other than processing the image from the data.
> Another team leader might have botched it and we wouldnt have the picture.
How do you know that? The "might" means nothing here. There were many other teams working too and each of them have their talented leader doing complicated things. Choosing this one specifically from all others to take the credit is meaningless.
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 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.
The sheer toxicity of many of the comments is something I haven't seen for a long time. They really hate that a women is getting credit and that others aren't getting the same level of attention.
I wonder how those same people think about Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs etc. They had huge teams behind them as well.
For every extraordinarily recognized academic/professional person, there’s always going to be many times more people who are never publicly recognized for their achievements.
Maybe they fly under the radar, maybe they picked the wrong subject to focus on or industry for career, maybe their timing is bad, maybe there’s nothing wrong with them.
I’m proud of this (stranger to me) girl for accomplishing something so large at this age. Being about the same age, I’m not jealous - but it is one more reminder that somewhere along the line my record-player skipped a few years. My 20s disappeared too quickly, or maybe I was focused on the wrong things (work) instead of passion.
Some additional anecdotal information on the above comment:
My wife absolutely loathes being called "girl". It is used to reinforce the toxic idea that women are less mature and capable than men. Same feeling from other women that I've discussed this with.
it's important not to allow age-based vocab to drift when you are talking about a woman vs. a man, but I think it's more contextual than you present it. there are plenty of males over the age of eighteen whom I would not refer to as "men". if you changed only the gender of these people, I would probably not refer to them as "women" either.
I like how you highlight some admittedly minor commits in big scary red boxes while ignoring technically significant ones like "added function to figure out amt of systematic noise you need to add to get a chi squared of 1",
This is why people say there's sexism in tech bud. A male MIT PhD who was the public face of their project would not be subjected to nearly this much doubt and accusations of being deadweight by insecure 4chan weirdos combing through git logs.
Yeah I'm reading all these comments and I hope these people are NOT the sames ones asking why more girls/women don't get into tech, because I've been a programmer for > 8 years and shit like this is off putting to me, a grown ass woman.
In my experience this is common for this type of news about "prodigies" on HN. I remember the same types of reactions a few years ago about an article about a child who made the headlines (it even prompted a response by pg IIRC). Was it Malala? I can't remember.
I think it's just that many people feel threatened or inadequate when they (naturally) compare themselves to these people. It's tempting to put them down so that we feel better about ourselves. I think most of us here on HN like to think that we're clever but when people like Katie Bouman get under the spotlight suddenly most of us realize that we're not such hot shots after all.
It's probably worse when it's a woman/child/minority/... because it gives us the convenient excuse of "this is probably a PR stunt" to dismiss them. It's lazy and it's intellectually dishonest but it's also very human unfortunately.
Indeed, one of the most poisonous things going on in Hollywood/TV right now is writers and actors getting told they didn't get the job because "diversity is hot right now" or some similar rubbish. It reinforces the idea that "the best" people should get the job (not the best people for the job) whilst simultaneously implying that "diverse" people are not "the best".
This leads to people getting rejected thinking it's part of some culture war, when the truth is that most people get rejected, some of those people would have been brilliant in the role they got rejected for and it's exactly the same brutal industry that it was in the 1980s.
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.
the closest one that comes to mind is the teenager who was credited with that article summarizing algorithm that I think Yahoo or someone ended up buying. My memory is pretty hazy on it, but in that case it seemed more like a group of researchers actually made it and I'm not 100% certain how he was connected. I remember that one getting a bit of "hey, what a second" kind of comments about it.
I think in this particular case, I have no problem with it. One, she obviously had a big part in it. Maybe it is blow back because they feel a picture of the inside of a black hole isn't a big deal and people are making it into something big? In my opinion, it is. I remember middle school teachers almost scoffing at the idea of a picture of a black hole and yet, 25 years later, here we are. Regardless, she in her twenties has generated something that researchers spend a lifetime trying to find so kudos to her. I'm sure there is a certain gendered element to it in both cases (for and against) and it'd probably be naive to think there wasn't.
Even if this were a smaller aspect of what these researchers were aiming for, I'd love to see a documentary series on what various team members worked on (and in her case, discovered). An image generated by radio waves and she (maybe with others?) was able to construct an image out of that? That's impressive. Probably not, but I'd be curious if this kind of thing could be localized in a way that it could be the "sound to visual model" element of a system so that blind people could make out the world a bit more directly (obviously, there'd need to be a means for them to consume said model. All of this is way above me and my pay grade).
You were probably thinking about the startup Summly, which was founded by a 16 yo [0]. Summly eventually got bought by Marissa Mayer while at the helms at Yahoo! for $30 million [1].
>In my experience this is common for this type of news about "prodigies" on HN. I remember the same types of reactions a few years ago about an article about a child who made the headlines (it even prompted a response by pg IIRC). Was it Malala? I can't remember.
For an example of this that involves a male, the media has been hyping the Ocean Cleanup project because it provides them with a great prodigy story, but people on HN have been rightly pushing back against its merits.
You would say that's the same thing? Seeing as Elon Musk initiated all the things himself (and raised/provided the money)? I don't think he is getting credit for constructing rockets, for example, but for making the project happen.
There was, however, an extra article about his rocket engineer on HN. Mabye that is more like it.
Fun fact: Elon Musk is not the founder of Tesla. He became an investor and board member a year after the company was founded by two other people. His role grew and now he is synonymous with the company.
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 that are being treated like little kids that need to be shown the correct path.
Is there some blind spot people have when a woman is involved? Achievements by men are run through a gamut of informed and not-so-informed criticism all the time on HN. Bouman is getting standard treatment.
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!?!!
One of the reasons I felt isolated in STEM 20 years ago was the very lack of role models. That's changing and I know for a fact, as I interact with young women, that seeing another woman in action as a professional in STEM helps them feel there is a place for them. It definitely fosters a sense of encouragement to pursue higher dreams.
A 'role model' is someone who shares your background and is successful in an area of interest where you would like to participate/contribute (science, art, sports, politics, ...) .
It's someone who demonstrates that 'someone like you' can be successful, too.
Therefore, the closer this role model is to your inherent and unchangeable properties (age, sex/gender, origin, social class), the more it can inspire you.
Surely, a man can be a role model for a woman in science (and vice versa) - e.g., if you are from the same small ethnic minority as the role model.
However, male/female lifestyle, upbringing, interests, challenges, etc. are quite different in general, even in otherwise very homogeneous (western) societies.
Therefore, the role model having the same sex/gender is very important.
(Just my view - I don't have evidence or experience in this regard).
I'd say that is just toxic feminism telling women they can't have men as role models. Why not?
Would they say women can not achieve what men can (at least in science, if not in physical endeavors)? Because if they say women can do that, then why shouldn't they take men as role models?
"Someone like you" - is for example a white man from a middle class background more like a white woman from a middle class background, or is that white women more like a black woman from a poor background? I think to say "biological sex" in that context is more defining for "likeness" in academia is a silly, toxic narrative.
In my youth, I personally also enjoyed books and comics with female heroines, and never thought that they shouldn't be my role models. I guess these days that wouldn't be possible anymore.
Yes, "role models" are a good indication of how weak or strong our social capital is. Our society is increasingly fraying apart, so much so that people are now unwilling to view others as fundamentally sharing the same humanity and social outlook as themselves, unless they happen to share some shallow but somehow salient features like gender, ethnic background, religion, sexual orientation and so on and so forth, that make them a part of some increasingly narrow "tribe". This kind of thing used to be seen as a significant social faux pas, but increasingly we see it being accepted.
This is exactly the kind of comment that make these threads toxic.
Gender, like it or not, shapes the life experience of an individual. Why would you not want to have a role model that had a similar life experience to your own?
Except, inevitably, when a woman expresses that desire, it gets called "toxic feminism", and the justification is, wait for it: the personal anecdotes and experiences of a male.
I am shocked that in 2019 there is still so little self-awareness around this.
So the personal life experience of a male doesn't count for anything? THAT is what I would call the actual toxic attitude. What makes women unable to have male role models, but men able to have female role models? Is there a difference between men and women, then? Is that what you are saying?
By that logic, why shouldn't I as a man say "fuck women in STEM", because apparently we will never be able to communicate about anything meaningful anyway. People who make it clear they don't care about my opinion, why should I want them in my life?
I stated my reasons why I think focusing on gendered role models is misleading and harmful. Fine, you may disagree. But calling it toxic and "mansplaining" - that's not furthering discourse, and frankly, if that is your attitude, STEM may be better off without you anyway. After all, science is about keeping an open mind, among other things.
>So the personal life experience of a male doesn't count for anything? THAT is what I would call the actual toxic attitude.
Ah yes, the classic: "I'm not toxic, you are!".
Where in my original comment did I say the male perspective, anecdotal as it may be in a given context, counts for nothing?
I didn't.
What I did say was that a singular, anecdotal male perspective was not appropriate as a justification for depicting a woman desiring a similarly-gendered role model was somehow indicative of "toxic feminism".
>What makes women unable to have male role models, but men able to have female role models?
No one said they couldn't, but you're depicting what was said as far more benign than it really was. You didn't ask an open-ended question about it, you specifically categorized said desire as "toxic feminism".
>if that is your attitude, STEM may be better off without you anyway. After all, science is about keeping an open mind, among other things.
Maybe one of the STEM fields will be able to develop a device that can accurately measure the immense amount of irony bundled up in that sentence.
Same merry-go-round as usual in these threads:
Subtly patronizing comment(mansplaining if you will), someone points out "hey that's kind of toxic", original commenter retreats to victimhood and "I'm not toxic, you are! No one has an open mind about this kind of thing etc...", and around we go.
If you want to pretend like STEM doesn't have a centuries-long history of fairly uneven footing for other genders and minorities, and accuse everyone of suddenly being close-minded and toxic, fine, but you're going to have a hard time cashing in the victim card when someone points out the ridiculousness of it.
You twist all the words - I suspect you are not really reading, just rerunning your stereotypes in your head.
I did NOT say desiring a female role model is toxic feminism. Feminists claiming women need female role models is toxic feminism. There is a difference.
And that is what feminists claim, because they need this claim to support their victim narrative of why fewer women are in STEM.
No point commenting your other stuff, because you completely misrepresented what I said.
And by the way, you directly called ME toxic, whereas I made a general comment about feminism.
> The whole she did it and had ovaries, omg, seems so condescending and unnecessary.
it's not omg she had ovaries, it's omg she did it, knowing she's going to get shit on by people (e.g. these comments) instead of applauded for what her and her team did for science. That's how it's inspiring to me.
I do! And many of them. But imagine you have a strong, particular physical trait and you are in a room with others who do not share that trait. Usually you forget about it, but sometimes it matters because you have to use a different bathroom, or you don't get easily invited out for drinks because of tension or maybe you don't speak the language well, or maybe there are perceived cultural barriers. If you saw someone on television or in the news about someone with your trait and excelling in your field, imagine how delighted you would feel! That somehow, after all you do belong in that field. It's a natural human response to want to feel part of a community, and that's hard to do when you are a singular type of a clearly-visible trait.
Except in most of STEM there are already an equal number of women. As soon as the baby boomers retire itll be obvious. Women get more PhDs than men, and have been for a while.
Do you work in an office with low-level programmers and hardware designers? I do, and I'm one of a handful of women in the building. Actually at the moment, I'm the only one and I'm lobbying for our new hire of managing director to be a woman but it's likely not going to happen because I can't find someone qualified. When I teach in the field at my university, I'm the only woman. And I live in a very popular, large city. Even less, as owners - when I go to a conference of hundreds of businesses, I'm maybe one or 3 or 4 in my field who owns her company. We're not equal yet. Maybe California and the East Coast have some slight more balance, but it's not distributed to the rest of the world yet.
In spite of this, I'm lucky to have an amazing network of other women in my field, and thanks to the internet and cultural exchanges, we don't feel so alone these days.
Unfortunately, we're not there yet in California, either.
I worked at one of the most progressive / women-friendly companies in San Francisco, and as of last year, only 34.3% of our technical roles were filled by women (company size ~1,000). I'm eager to see this year's numbers, and hope they've improved, but there's undoubtedly a lot of room to grow.
EE is from what I have seen one of the most, if not the most, male dominated field in STEM though. I am not sure why, but it could be that it is not old enough to be traditional, but not new enough to be accessible. Wouldn't surprise me if there are more women in EE research than in EE.
Your "lobbying for our new hire of managing director to be a woman" is fuel for rage and even return fire. I hope you can see how it might be used to justify discrimination in the other direction. You aren't being fair.
Your statement is ignorant of office and network politics: I work surrounded by men who communicate professionally with men, primarily. At conferences they drink and socialise with each other. It's harder as a woman to get into these networks. When there is an opening, this information spreads via the network. Which has few women in it.
You may feel uncomfortable knowing the hiring process is weighted. But I feel uncomfortable being in an office that doesn't have other women. If I can change that WHILE at the same time meeting my hiring standards AND not consciously turning away a clearly better candidate then absolutely, I'm going to use positive discrimination.
It seems very likely that as a woman, you would have an easier time to get into those assumed networks (and so would other women). Don't believe all the propaganda.
I'm a man and I am ignorant of this alleged man-only social network that supposedly helps me get notice of job openings. Doesn't that suggest that it doesn't exist? If it does exist yet I'm ignorant of it, doesn't that suggest that the same might exist for women? I propose that there is a woman-only social network that is helping you to get notice of job openings, and you are exactly as ignorant of it as I am ignorant of the one helping me.
The women-only network is tiny. It's true, we rally together and encourage more women to work with us, for fear that the field of STEM will continue to be unbalanced. Where the continued creation of technology is primarily designed by and for the global minority (non-working class men), we lose out on innovation and this affects everyone.
I must say, I never really felt like that. I never saw another man do something great and then thought "hey, I can also do that, since I am also a man".
In the same vein, I never quite understood fandom of soccer, for example. If "my" team (or my country) wins in soccer, I never felt like it was my achievement somehow. The athletes trained really hard to become good at soccer. I didn't train hard. So I don't feel like I deserve a share of their glory.
And I never felt like every other man, just because I am also a man. Some other men are smarter than me, or more athletic, or more attractive. I never thought I am simply the same, just because I am a man.
Of course, I take not of your view, if you felt like that, it can't be argued with. Just in my personal opinion, it doesn't really make sense. Unless it concerns something that is gender specific, like giving birth. I am not looking at women giving birth and think "I could do that" - I definitely can't, because I am a man...
(FYI I'm not directing this anger at you dude, it's generalized) what the fuck don't people understand about a woman wanting a woman role model? I got the same questions asked to me in the Marissa Mayer thread a day or two ago.
Like yeah I got some male role models too, but fuck I want some representation! Someone who I can relate to! Someone who I know went through what I did!
A few things. I wouldn't say these if I didn't think you had the capacity to listen and learn.
1. Your tone is excessively combative for Hacker News. If you're put off by my saying that, ask yourself what a non-combative way to take that in and reflect on it would be. As a concrete example, you said "What makes women unable to have male role models, but men able to have female role models?", in a thread after the OP had already replied to you that she had/has men as role models. It implies either that you aren't listening, or that you're being antagonistic for the sake of being antagonistic. Neither is welcome here.
2. Using phrases like "toxic feminism" make you sound intellectually feeble. Try to be more specific and concrete about what you're addressing without using charged words like that. Unironically using the phrase "toxic feminism" instantly undermines any argument you might make. Again, if your point really is to learn from / share with others, find ways to communicate that don't put up walls.
" 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—especially among women, minorities, and children from low-income families."
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.
> 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
This is whataboutism at its best. The fact is that teams are all too often denied appropriate credit in the popular press for group projects, something which surely impacts many women working in science and STEM more generally. There's no reason why we should be expected to be happy about it this time around, merely because the one person who is getting all the attention happens to be female. I mean, you just need to look at that title: the computer scientist behind the picture? Isn't that ridiculous on its face?
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.
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.
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"
Do you realize that women aren't a monolithic group? Various effects can be at play at the same time - women preferring on average other kinds of work isn't an argument in favour of discriminating against those that do not.
Scandinavia has hundreds of years of mostly unbroken history in STEM. It is literally the home of the Nobel prize. It isn't really comparable to nations that have rapidly shifted their workforce and industries more recently.
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.
> without self-censorship, negative remarks, feeling out of place, their vocation and/or skills being continuously challenged randomly
This is the life of all men in competence hierachies. All of these things happend to me within the last half year and have been since I was a boy. Doesn't matter in the least, you couldn't pry me away from my interests with a crowbar.
This is your real problem: generally, girls want to be invited, boys just do.
The reason I speak up at all and will take all the abuse and downvoting thats sure to follow is it irks me so much.
We got into PCs and didn't matter one damn if they came from space aliens or out of the dumpster. We sat at them, we sat at them and we got scolded for it and told to go outside and called nerds. Our status was absolute dogshit and few women would associate willingly with computing in any form.
I am old enough to remember that at parties we mumbled "something with computers" and smiled apologetically hoping the topic would move on. Yes, many of us spent years, decades even, feeling slightly ashamed of our profession.
Now that the best and brightest of us nerds literally reshaped the world into a place where your personal handheld computer became a status symbol here come the women.
And you know, it would be okay, we are very tame men overall, except now you claim your collective absence from this topic is because we hurt you. No, we did not, you all just didn't like computers.
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.
I agree with your general sentiment but two comments:
1) Look back at any physic journal for similar stories of experimental success (example gravitational waves), you won't find news stories of focus pieces on a single team member because it is a COLLABORATIVE effort. The only cases were single people get recognition is for theorists like Prof Higgs, Hawkings etc, but not for the individual experimentalists at the LHC or other astronomical projects.
2) The idea of focussing on a single team member is a technique for creating a clear narrative that readers can follow. The story would get less interest if you were told about the live and works of all of the team members.
Hacker News isn't some monolithic community. Each time, you're seeing different people express their opinions. There's no hypocrisy there.
I think it's friggin awesome to see women in science. But even if Bouman was male I would still be cautious of attributing so much of an international collaboration to one person in the form of "Meet the _____ behind the first black hole image". That phrasing disregards too much hard work. I see no reason to offer Bouman special treatment in this regard at the expense of others solely because of her gender. That isn't equality.
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 around for half a century. Heino Falcke proposed the experiment. Shep Doeleman led the entire EHT initiative. Scientists around the world brought techniques to the table.
I imagine even Bouman takes issue with being labeled "the scientist behind the first image of the black hole". She is surely aware and appreciative of the massive international effort involved.
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.
I'm copying my comment I made on reddit, but let me first preface by saying that I think that the accomplishments of Katie Bouman are entirely praiseworthy on their own merits. I don't mean to diminish the value of what she has done, I only mean to comment on what I believe you're arguing against.
I think you're ignoring the other part of that pattern, which is that there is absolutely a propensity for posts of a given nature, i.e. "this is _the_ person who invented/achieved XYZ," featuring a woman or a disenfranchised minority figure, only for it to be specifically disingenuous and hyperbolic, and attempting to promote a truth on the basis of a different objective altogether. A good example were the multiple posts on the front page of reddit regarding Mary Beatrice Davidson inventing the sanitary pad (she didn't). Vice, among others, wrote about the same topic. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mb5yap/mary-beatrice-...
Similarly, the _only_ inventor of _any_ toy that I'm aware of is Lonnie Johnson, the black man who invented the super soaker and has been shared on Reddit countless times.
Even Margaret Hamilton, as mentioned. I've seen her with her stack of code on Reddit at least 3x, and she's the only NASA engineer I'm even aware of.
If you Google "American Inventors," not only is Thomas Edison the only white man in the first results, but the inventor of peanut butter and the super soaker displace Alexander Graham Bell and Nikola Tesla. I just googled it.
Mind you, this isn't to say that you'll find Margaret Hamilton mentioned more often than Albert Einstein. What is being discussed here is not objective quantities of exposure, but the distortion of ideological lens, and to what degree it is present.
Where I think that you'd fundamentally disagree with my assessment is if I were to posit the question, "would this have had 5 different posts on the front page of reddit, specifically attributing the success of the project to a specific person, if that person had been a white or Asian male?" I think the kneejerk reaction might be "of course we would, having the achievements of white and Asian men is the default position of our society." But think about it. Would the American inventors in the google results have been there for their exact same accomplishments, if not for the color of their skin? Be honest. Would Mary Davidson have had multiple threads praising her if not for her gender and the color of her skin? Again, be honest.
In this case of Katie Bouman, the unfortunate thing is that, again, this is a monumental achievement, and the majority of the praise is totally justifiable completely independent of any ideological lens. But the lens is also in effect, make no mistake, and that's what you are seeing a reaction to. This is the problem with identity politics.
TL;DR you're almost certainly correct that the majority of the comments you see of that nature are on posts like this regarding women, but I think it's because posts of this nature are predominately about women and minorities, and often hyperbolic and patronizing.
Exactly. The sheer fact that the headline use "Katie Bouman" instead of Dr. Bouman or name her at all shows that the important point conveyed by the title and the article is the sex of the researcher. Don't believe it? BBC didn't use the name of Pr. Honjo and Pr. Allison for the Nobel prize of Medecine. [1] I guess getting a Nobel prize is not important enough to be mentioned in headline... for men.
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 one who usually gets the credit in science. She was the first author but not the PI hence her getting credit may be a bit unusual. There have been countless post-docs and grad students who have made discoveries and were never mentioned in press.
However, she may be a superstar, no pun intended, and so her getting almost all of the credit is completely warranted, but graduate student and post-doc are training roles, and a lot of the time the post-doc won't really make a name for themsleves until they establish their own lab, because it is unclear who is producing the ideas.
Citation needed? I’m a postdoc, and that doesn’t ring remotely true.
At least in CS, authors get most of the scientific credit all the time, and not just in citations to “FirstAuthorSurname et al.”, or in giving talks about the work (especially in CS). They’re the ones doing most of the hard work and thinking.
Advisors often range from consultants/consulents to managers. Not because they’re not smart, but because they seldom have months of uninterrupted time to focus on a problem intensely enough.
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.
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 you better brace yourself, it wasn't done by a man, it was done by a woman! A real living woman!". I understand the argument of needing to make a shout about it to help encourage more women into the field and to try to push against previous years of women not being in the limelight for work like this. But at the same point, every time it is specifically called out, it feels like something that is (obviously) only done for a woman, so therefore it is treating the achievement differently than if a man had achieved it.
Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Anyway, I do not want to sidetrack from this amazing achievement.
Yeah, the most important fact for the humanity that they did it, they created the first image of a black hole, is it a man, a woman, a child, a muslim, a white man, what does it even matter?
I kinda hate the recent trend to focus more on gender or race if somebody achieves anything. Look what Morgan Freeman said about racism [0]. Is it really important that she is a woman? Do people think a lot of women can't achieve these things? And if 1 woman achieved this, all women are better than men? Do everybody just expect men to be smarter and if they do something outstanding it's ok, but when a woman does it, it's extraordinary... Why focus so much on this?
In discussions like this we should really focus on the person (and also the team behind her/him, I doubt she could do it alone without the team), not the gender or race or whatever.
I really hope this positive discrimination hype dies out, it doesn't help anybody. Let the best person for the job get the job.
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.
In much of STEM women are basically at parity. With computer science, and engineering being obvious exceptions. Further there is a study which has shown that in countries with greater gender equality women choose STEM occupations less. Overall women get more graduate degrees than men and have been for the last ten years.
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 many people suddenly desperately concerned that the Little People get a mention, and I'm at least part-way convinced that gender (and maybe youth? she's 29...) has a good deal to do with it (apparently the other thing that triggers the "harrumph, what about the team" crowd are stories about child prodigies, according to another thread).
“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?
Dr. Bouman is a talented, enthusiastic and no doubt indispensable force on the larger team responsible for this achievement. Her role is as a co-lead for one small team which is responsible for one algorithm (out of four) used for imaging, as well as for an imagine verification algorithm (with Dr. Bouman's focus more on the latter). The larger imaging group (about 45 people by my rough count, led by Drs. Michael Johnson and Kazunori Akiyama) is itself one part of the analysis group, which has three other working groups, and then the analysis group is one of a half dozen larger groups in the EHT project which produced this result.
So it's not a case of the project lead being presented as the face of the project, which is par for the course in academia (and the outside world). It is a postdoc one level above the grad students who form the least-senior rung of the project, and many levels from the top suddenly being misleadingly presented as the key figure in a major result.
Imagine you worked on a small team of a couple of postdocs and a few grad students near the bottom of a hierarchy of teams involving hundreds of people, and then came in one day and your colleague and co-lead at the same level as you was suddenly presented as the face and key contributor for not only your small slice of things, not even the larger component to which the slice belongs, but the entire project?
You'd probably be pretty happy for them, but also confused as to why the many people with the actual role as overall group leaders or the project leaders aren't mentioned. One might also note how distant the general public is from the machinations of the academic world that no one is asking how a 20-something CS postdoc ended up leading a multinational astronomy project involving top faculty from top institutions? In terms of notability and improbability, that would probably be a bigger story than any image produced by the group!
Explaining her actual position and contribution is not in any way to detract from her contributions: only to clarify the record in the face of an onslaught of misleading media articles, which seemed to largely sourced (transitively) from a few misleading tweets, themselves triggered by a viral image.
On top of that, none of this is doing Dr. Bouman any favors. Although they are mostly silent, no one in the EHT project is confused about her role, and none of the other people in her faculty or almost anyone else who matters will be under any misconception despite the headlines. If anything, academia is even more picky than other fields when it comes to attribution, so any type of misplaced credit can be viewed very negatively and can attach itself to a person indefinitely. Now she hasn't invited this or propagated this story, so one should consider her a blameless victim here: but not everyone in a position to care will necessarily remember that subtlety.
Are you personally involved with the project? I'm curious about the motivation to write (via a throwaway account) a massive thesis debunking the supposedly excessive contribution given to someone who you also refer to as a "no doubt indispensable force".
As someone who's been interested in astronomy my entire life, and considered getting a degree in it but only ended up with a minor since I sensibly prioritized CS and wanted to graduate in four years, this is an awesome, amazing, really clever accomplishment. And yet many of the comments here are just so negative, either outright sexist, picking nits and trying to argue that it isn't a big breakthrough or anything, or going through code contributions line-by-line trying to establish that really someone else had more to do with it.
All I know is, she must be insanely intelligent and hard-working. What an awesome PhD project, and at MIT no less!, an institution that I have enormous respect for and that I somewhat identify with because my dad attended and I've been there for many events. I'm jealous. This would've been the exact kind of thing I'd have gone into in astronomy for (because of my background in programming) had I seriously pursued it, but I know I'm just not diligent enough to have seen it through. And being honest, I didn't apply myself well enough in undergrad to have gotten good enough grades to get into a good grad school.
It sucks that so many people jump into "push people down" mode instead of "life people up" mode in these kinds of situations rather, because this is an amazing scientific accomplishment that deserves celebrating. One of the PIs in one of the press conferences said that this was the most important accomplishment in astronomy since 2014 [when Rosetta landed a probe on a comet], and I tend to agree. It's not just about this one image, but about establishing the feasibility of a virtual planet-sized radio telescope that is capable of imaging lots more than just black holes. A lot more discoveries are likely to come out of this technique, and guess who came up with the algorithm to make sense of all those petabytes of data?
I think this might be one of those cases where we just have to agree to disagree, but I, well, disagree with the premise that the reaction to men is any different on this point.
There are regularly posts here linking to articles about misattribution of credit in science and technology, the problem with the "great man theory," laments about the role of social media in creating hype, and there are plenty of male figures discussed here who engender bitter discussions about how credit should be assigned. I honestly don't see any difference between this discussion and any other discussion. I seem to remember similar discussions emerging about discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre hardware vulnerabilities, and many other physics discoveries involving large teams of researchers, just to take a few examples.
The way credit is assigned in science is a significant moral crisis in my opinion (as it is in work in general; cf. rampant income inequality), and it really doesn't matter what the genders of the individuals involved are. Strangely enough, I think attention is being paid to this argument here because of her gender. It's one of these unfortunate circumstances where I think two competing ethical goals are kind of conflicting, one being the better representation of women and minorities in science, the other being lack of fair representation for all in credit.
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.
HN seems to have an unfortunate problem where any time women are promoted in tech it creates incredibly toxic threads with lots of thrashing and gnashing about how unfair it is.
One needs to just look at another large thread that generated controversy to get an idea of the growing trend [1].
Which means one has to ask themselves: Is HN cultivating an environment that's only going to get worse? And personally, I think the answer would be yes.
THE 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.
We 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.
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?
This 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."
Congratulations 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.
> 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/ 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).
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.
Thanks. I read the Wiki on the matter; should have gone straight there instead of asking. After understanding what it is, angular resolution does make perfect sense a term, but at first glance was certainly a bit counterintuitive.
I think the reason it's confusing is that the way that bit in the article is worded does little to imply that you want a LOW angular resolution, and it doesn't directly mention resolution in and of itself (which is understood to have an inverse relationship with angular resolution, as it is directly affected by diameter).
It took me several rereads and reading the comments here to understand that we want low numbers for angular resolution.
I suppose it's fairly obvious for one well-versed in optics, but to the layman (like me) it's initially opaque.
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.
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 does or does not deserve praise.
This 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.
Not 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.
>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.
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”.
I 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:
Humans 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.
> 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.
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." :)
Is anyone knowledgeable about the project calling it a "photo" (i.e., the term you used) or are they calling it (more accurately) an "image"?
My take in response to your original question is that it seems like nitpicking or armchair quarterbacking or something else related to that.
I'm always wary of succumbing to the "appeal to authority" fallacy, but this does seem like a case where all the experts and leading figures in a field are saying this is a big deal, and publishing a lot of info about it, so the right approach just seems to be to take the time to read/listen to what they're saying and learn, rather than posting simplistic skeptical questions in web forums.
If you didn't intend to come across that way, then perhaps rethink your question or the way you worded it.
This is an image rendered from photons that had passed around the black hole, and travelled to Earth and been captured by a radio telescope that humans built.
It's the first time that's been done.
All the images in the DDG search are artistic constructions.
Edit: The thing that's so remarkable is that it does look like what scientists predicted it would look like, and thus some of those artistic representations are similar to what we're now seeing in this image.
Since everybody seems to be looking for subterfuge in these comments, I'll try to answer the actual question you've asked.
The images in the google search link you supplied are all, without exception that i can see, artistic renderings of a black hole.
There are images of gravitational lensing [1] that show a basic distortion of light from gravity, but none of them reach the intensity of a black hole's 'event horizon'.
The body that we are seeing is at the center of the bright spot in this image [2], and is the source of the blue jet of material coming out. (I originally thought that jet was projected laterally, but in one of the two recent Veritasium videos on this topic he says it's actually heading almost straight at us and is 5000 light years long.) However, it's such an infinitessimally small part of the above image (about 1/10,000,000th the size) that we do not possess the optical resolving power to actually see it. For example, Hubble can resolve down to approximately .05 arcsecond. This image is approximately .00004 arcsecond. To get that resolving power they had to combine signals from radio telescopes all over the world using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry. The contribution of Katie and her team is to extract a useful image from the petabyates of data that came from that exercise.
It seems like a valid question. We're also told that a black hole isn't visible, and we're told that this image is reconstructed from sensor data. Whether or not it's really fair to consider it a "photograph" of a black hole boils down to exactly how much artistic license is taken in reconstructing the sensor data. Not knowing how much of this is artistic license, I'm willing to take the scientists at their word, but to ask the question doesn't seem like a nitpick.
EDIT: In Dr Bouman's TED talk, she notes that there are an infinite number of ways the sensor data could be constructed into an image, and that they were looking for a construction that looks like what they expect things in our universe look like. So, there's some ambiguity in the definition of "photograph"
No, it's a legit question. Before I read this article I heard mention of a new picture of a black hole, and I was wondering how it was different from previous pictures.
My understanding now is that this is the first time we've observed one accurately enough to get a picture of the Einstein ring around a black hole. And even there, it's heavily reconstructed using machine learning, which I wouldn't call a "photo", more of a "AI artist rendition".
Any digital photo is a reconstruction. Consider all the pictures from the Hubble telescope: these techniques are a far more sophisticated version of the same kinds of techniques used to clean those up.
Well. 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
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[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 368 ms ] threadJeez why the downvotes? It's a legitimate question I had.
She’s not an astronomer?
I am a postdoctoral fellow with the Event Horizon Telescope and will be an Assistant Professor in the CMS department at Caltech beginning in 2019.
[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/computer-scientists-play-key-ro...
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.
She really should have been at the conference given her contributions, but she wasn't. Maybe it was a scheduling conflict? Who knows.
Edit: Geez, why the downvotes? ;)
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.
* achael 566 commits 850,275 ++ 131,044 --
* klbouman 90 commits 2,410 ++ 1,265 --
However, at least at the level of reading the commit messages, Katie's are pretty math heavy:
"fixed bug in the fake briggs weighting"
"starting to fix chirp problems with polrep"
"made it possible to do a min uv cut on closure phase when adding it a..."
While Andrew's lean frequently toward code maintenance:
"updated some docstrings in imager_utils"
"moved imgsum to plotting.summary_plots"
"modified README"
That said, Andrew and others seem to have pretty good insight too.
one commit with 524,306 additions. adding a model.
Writing code is easy, figuring out complex algorithms is something very different, and does not require coding knowledge
Do people like Linus deserve less credit now that he isn't the leader on the commit scoreboard ?
There are no woman scientists, science has no gender.
The article is sexiest not people who are curious what Dr. Bouman actually did to be honored to mention in BBC article.
Bad for you.
Thanks God I grew up in a society where every person no matter of gender and age can do hard science.
This is a good article on the concept: https://everydayfeminism.com/2013/09/dont-see-race/
[Edit:] Or this, as a complementary one: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-dont-see-race
They just need "a" instead of "the", or "lead" if she's responsible as leader of a team.
For me, I am slightly primed by the "Apollo code" story: the claim was (paraphrasing) "this programmer created all the code for the Apollo programme" with an image of a person standing with folders of printouts stacked up to their shoulder. Well that person was the lead of teams of coders and didn't personally do it all. The implication, explicit in some cases, was "women's contribution is always hidden, this person did it all and got no recognition because vile men refused to share the spotlight". (Hamilton's contribution as a lead programmer was vital to the Apollo programme, but it doesn't appear to have anything to do with her being a woman).
Now, this story appears to be doing exactly what was claimed there, people's contributions being ignored.
Normally a headline would be "Bouman leads team to image blackhole", but the use of a clearly gendered forename suggests the headline writer is trying to pick out the sex of the subject. "The" suggests singularity (pun attempted!) of contribution. So, it's natural to ask why, and if you've been subject to the social media "women do it all and men get all the credit" one is bound to question the contributions.
Then looking at GitHub and seeing 2k loc vs 850k loc -- paired with the programming vs computer science confusion -- it appears like another exaggeration to forward a feminist agenda rather than an attempt to report science.
It’s disappointing to see this celebration of an amazing technical achievement devolve into a contentious meta-analysis inspired by the USA’s broken politics.
I don't think there is a "secret feminist agenda" as such, but news outlets do over-egg the situation to try and create "women heroes of science". The way it's done appears to be sexist in an attempt at, so-called, positive discrimination; rather than being equalist.
You seem to consider my analysis to be abjectly errant, I would appreciate hearing why?
But what could possibly qualify you to say that "Andrew is definitely smart (smarter than an average HN user) and his code is very important"?
If I read it right, she mentioned and praised her team as well.
Katie's paper on VLBI reconstruction: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413
This is how I learned about the topic and I think it's well suited for computery folks, since it was published in CVPR.
Similarly the title suggests she worked alone on the project. Which seems exceedingly unlikely given the need for telescope time and computing time and the wide range of disciplines I imagine the project covers ... did she work alone. That must be almost unique in experimentalism nowadays?
So I'm certain those authors did their part, so maybe yes, I should have linked this as "Bouman et al." but I wouldn't expect this to be six equal contributions either.
That all being said, she's certainly standing on the shoulders of a pyramid of giants there.
Edit: to the people downvoting the parent, maybe explain? I didn't take this as a bad faith comment. It can be genuinely confusing to someone who doesn't know the ins and outs of academic attribution...
It's interesting considering how many modern scientific endeavors are dependent on new innovative algorithms, software, and computing techniques in both experimental and theoretical work then its frequently just hand-waved away as "technology."
I'm not saying such contributions (typically, though they can,) lay groundwork for an experiment or theory in another domain, but I am saying active CS involvement/expertise is typically critical to many scientific endeavors' success these days. If a project is interdiscipinary, there's probably a computer scientist on the team helping out.
I think society implicitly assumes that there has been a tone of people backing up a single individual towards their main achievements and that the individual is humble enough to know and to try - ever so slightly - to show appreciation.
From my perspective, if in order to accomplish your work, you need consult or active collaboration with a computer scientist and otherwise could not develop/test your theory or conduct your experiment, then they almost certainly should be cited as an author/collaborator.
If you utilize something OTS outside the project that just works for you and don't need a computer scientist, then whatever entity created that OTS IP isn't really an author/collaborator, but it's likely their work should be cited/referenced if it's part of the critical methodology (as part of disclosure and repeatability).
If your project used Microsoft Word to write up a report, it's not important to the underlying science you conducted. You could have substituted it with TeX, other Word processors, or pen/paper and it wouldn't change the outcome of the underlying theory/experiment you developed. If you used an Ansys package to perform analysis for some purpose, you should probably mention that out of rigor but Ansys isn't an author or collaborator.
If on the other hand you need someone to architect a solution to handle processing your massive dataset, needed someone to write custom code because nothing could do what you needed, needed a new algorithm because you had no clue how to approach the problem, or even needed someone to modify source code significantly to something that existed but couldn't do what you needed, then they are certainly an author/collaborator. If you took existing code/algorithm and made it more efficient in order to accomplish a task that would have taken too long otherwise, you're a contributor/collaborator and should be listed as an author.
This has been a huge issue in academic research but it's been getting a bit better and researchers are starting even more to acknowledge/credit computing professionals as crucial contributors and authors, as they rightfully should be.
That's one of the reasons I said "I agree with the point you have raised".
I also think you have once again, raised some good points. Hopefully, others will use similar structures when writing and publishing their research.
Somehow though my facebook feed is already littered with images saying she was single-handedly responsible and no one's talking about her.
https://bit.ly/2Gkfk7f
To clarify: I don't doubt women can do science, just empirically, they don't get to do it as often (at this level) as men.
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 of it and they have to write it from scratch.
There's a reason why in the non-academic world we have coding standards and code review. Code isn't written in a bubble, other people will look at it and work on it.
That's not to belittle or criticise the work done in the slightest. Cleanliness of code is orthogonal to functionality. You can have beautifully written, clean and documented code that doesn't do what it's meant to, and likewise you can have a complete mess of code that performs some genius function perfectly.
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.
You could say the same about academic CS code which is arguably far more egregious since this is their field. I don't think most reasonable people expect Physicists or Biologists to write production level code for their work, nor do they need to.
US: http://urssi.us UK: https://www.software.ac.uk
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.
As long as it's published, if somebody wants to reuse it, reimplementing from the paper is the hardest part.
If people have good resources I could pass to students about standards for Python code, for instance, let me know.
Most people in my field (materials engineering) are not programmers either they are lucky if they've done one intro course 10 years ago (which was probably done in a language like Java or Visual Basic).
Even then what gets taught in an intro course at university is not the type of code that is written "on the job". I did two semesters of programming courses when I was at uni (as electives) my courses were taught in Java and focused on stuff like object oriented programming and memorizing stuff about "the waterfall model"
There is a pretty big gap between this and my first experience which was being sat down in front of some 30 year old Fortran code which had no objects, no classes etc.
The goto at least in my org when people are trying to understand scientific code - write their own algorithms etc is the 30 year old "Numerical Recipes" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_Recipes) textbook. The explanations in this textbook are best and simplest I have come across by far.
I know I personally referenced this book heavily when I was writing code in C to do Spline interpolation/smoothing. I am unaware of any other reference for a lot of algorithms/techniques than this book.
Only other thing I am aware of is the GNU GSL library which in my experience is harder to understand for beginners - even it's example code is "for loop based"
For example: https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/doc/html/bspline.html
If I had to convert this code to R (which I do know) or python (which I've never written) I'd probably write it this loop based style as well it's what I know and what makes sense to do me and the people in my org I'd expect to be interacting with my code. (the "Engineers can write Fortran in any language meme" is a real issue).
Maybe someone should write a new textbook on "modern" way to solve these sorts of problems if such a thing exists I am unaware of it but would certainly be welcome.
I worked with an old Fortran codebase at one point and there were comments in the documentation (a scan of a typewritten via typewriter document) throughout about switching "cards" and "decks"... took me a moment to realize it was refering to punch cards (and I thought I was old) which also led to the program structure fragmented in several individual smaller sub programs (so card reader could handle it) that now is a trivial matter to handle. Maybe they were just ready for the SOA and microservices trend.
In academia, pressure is often on publishing and pulling funding in through grants and contracts. I've done a lot of rapid prototyping in academic research environments and while writing clean software is always on my mind, often, sitting down and refactoring to be more cleverly efficient or taking time to focus on structure, long term maintainability, etc. isn't a priority and refocuses needed cognitive load from the high level research goal the software needed to achieve to instead focusing on production quality software.
I'm not concerned if it takes O(2n) vs O(n) or O(n log n) vs. O(n) time if I know the target scale is small. I'm not concerned that I can cleverly avoid using an extra data structure (and reduce space complexity) if I can do this operation in place on an existing data structure using some reasonably complex algorithm. Chances are I might remove this functionality entirely tomorrow or some student may have to figure it out later on, and I don't want to implement or explain to the student the Boyer-Moore majority algorithm when a brute force O(n^2) time is just fine here and a lot easier to adjust/maintain for a passer by scientist/student.
I'm aware there's a lot of problems and maybe my abstraction hierarchies aren't the best, I could probably make something better with more time.
You have some high-level complex process you're trying to represent and translate in to a program (maybe a simulation, maybe a complex model or set models, etc.). You're not always concerned about if there's a better way to write it or make extensive use of all the features of whatever language you needed to work in (which you may or may not have experience with since you needed to work from existing codebases to start with since time is tight), you simply want to use whatever requires the least time and cognitive load to think about and produce results so you can keep your eyes on the target of what you're developing.
Later on, when prototypes work (or if you hit performance bottlenecks stopping progress), then and only then do you start refactoring and looking at performance optimization--targeting the biggest bottlenecks first.
If everything works, then you can focus on overall refactoring and optimization and turning your Frankenstein into a supermodel (if you have resources/money to do that with--good luck), but you typically need a functional proof of concept to even have a chance of securing funding for that step.
If there's no money in that effort moving forward and you decide "well, maybe someone can use this" so let's release it, that typically has to get approval through a technology transfer office who are always in arms about protecting potential IP so it ends up on some disks rotting away never to be seen or used again.
If you're permitted to release the IP, you begin wondering how the development quality will reflect on you and your group, especially for those who see it and have no context of the constraints you worked with to produce that miracle functional Frankenstein. It's ugly as sin, but it fulfilled the goal to deliver the core research results and did so as quickly as possible and cheaply as possible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
However, this is such a great achievement. Would be awesome to learn more about the algorithm.
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.
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.
I think you should take a moment to think about just how offensive that statement is.
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.
Edit: I just checked this comment from yesterday, where someone faulted Marissa Meyer for outsourcing her domestic work[0]. Funny story: it's also by you!
But I guess it's all a coincidence. Plausible deniability, right?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19620176
Presenting choices and opening avenues is a laudable thing. Pushing, via cultural means, is the opposite. Especially when certain inconvenient details are consistently glossed over.
Do you notice I put starvation wages first? Probably not, it would require reading what you're replying to. You're welcome to play again of course.
Might I direct you to [0] where in I compare male CEOs to chimps and come to the startling conclusion that not only are chimps better but the lack of cocaine habit makes them more cost effective too?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19620218
People I right, I made an assumption based on the title and not the content.
And whilst she is getting more attention it has not come at the expense of anyone else.
And you wonder why women hate to work in IT with comments like yours where you've dismissed her accomplishments simply because she is a "women in tech".
The media have highlighted the lead, she credits the team, and the article outlines the numbers who worked on it.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1021332602552304...
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."
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.
How would you rate "Meet Robert Oppenheimer, father of the bomb"?
I'd also love anyone to point me to any similar discussion on Elon Musk and one of his companies.
Found it through this pdf: https://fskbhe1.puk.ac.za/people/mboett/Texas2017/Doeleman.p...
"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-...
I'd love to read more about this if anyone has an article with more details.
https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs
They don't make a habit of posting the shitty TEDx talks to the main channel, I'm guessing. (And there's plenty of those.) This is definitely high quality relative to most TEDx talks, so I understand why it was upgraded.
Do you understand Katie's explanation?
They have a sparse set of data that is part of an image. They have trained a model to look at the sparse set and make an educated guess about what the full image looks like. They do this by feeding it full images.
The full images you feed into the model thus have an effect on the final image generated. In order to see how large that effect is, they trained different versions of the model with different sets of complete images. Some were images of what we thought a black hole looked like. There is potential that this heavily influences the model and ensures that the output looks like what we expect it to, even if that isnt actually true.
They also trained the model with non-blackhole images. Since the output of the model was approximately the same, this indicates that the resulting output picture doesnt look like what we think a black hole looks like just because it was trained with black hole images. It likely really looks like that.
The model doesn't need to be told what a black hole looks like. The sparse measurements combined with knowledge of how sparse data can be combined to form a generic image is enough. The model learned that the sparse data is not likely pure noise, instead there are shapes and lines and gradients that relate the sparse data points to each other.
Her analogy of sketch artists is good. If you have a functionally complete description and give it to 3 sketch artists from different cultures who are used to different looking people, they will still draw the same person. However if your description isnt actually detailed enough, their sketches will significantly differ as they use their existing knowledge and bias to fill in the gaps with what they think is likely.
>They also trained the model with non-blackhole images. Since the output of the model was approximately the same, this indicates that the resulting output picture doesnt look like what we think a black hole looks like just because it was trained with black hole images. It likely really looks like that.
If you are feeding non-blackhole images in and getting blackhole results out, wouldn't that be indicative of an over-trained model? Her other analogy was we can't rule out that there is an elephant at the center of the galaxy, but it sounds like if you feed a picture of an elephant in you'll get a picture of a blackhole out?
Did they try to feed random noise into their trained image builder?
I suspect that the output of that trained image builder is always the same "black hole", even with random noise as an input.
I think if you trained with random noise you would get random noise output.
So I assume they're simulating what an input would look like of, say, a planet or astroid or elephant or whatever, given that it was viewed through the relevant type of sensor system. Then when they feed in the black hole sensor data, they get pictures that look like the black holes we imagined. Even if we never told the model what a black hole looks like.
They also showed that when they fed in simulated sparse measurements based on real full images of generic things, they got back fuzzy versions of the real image. [1] So if you put in a sparsely captured elephant (if for instance there was one at the center of the galaxy) you'd get an image of the elephant out, not this black hole.
To complete the artist analogy, imagine that the suspect that is being drawn by each artist is some stereotypical American. The description given to the artists doesnt say that, it just describes how the person looks. One of the three sketch artists is American and the others are Chinese and Ethiopian.
If the American draws a stereotypical American, how can you be sure that the drawing is accurate and thats not just what he assumed the person would look like because everyone he has ever seen looks like that?
You look at what the other two draw. If they both draw the same stereotypical American, even though they have no knowledge of what a stereotypical American looks like, you can be pretty sure that they determined that based on the description provided to them. The actual data.
They did still likely utilize some of their knowledge about what humans in general look like though. This is analogous to how the model uses its training on what a generic image looks like. For instance, maybe several sparse pixels of the same value are likely to have pixels of that same value between them. The model puts things like this together and spits out a picture of what we think a black hole looks like even though its never seen a black hole before.
[1] https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs?t=685
What does training mean?
I thought that the training means to adjust Neural Network until it learns to convert our input into expected output of "complete image".
But if thaining means to teach the model to produce expected "complete image", then how is it possible that "the output of the model was approximately the same" [for different training "complete image"s]?
The output images are approximately the same because the model is "looking" at training images at a lower level that we do. The talk says they chop the images up into small pieces. So the model never "sees" the full shapes that are in the full images. It only sees small local features. I guess it turns out that these smaller pieces are pretty generic in that they are common between images of black holes and everything else. The curve of an elephant trunk looks similar to the curve of an event horizon if you cut it out in a small enough piece.
Perhaps if they didnt do this step, then the model would be more sensitive to the images its trained on.
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...
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.
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.
> This is not about celebrating those people, it's giving the main chunk of the credit to this person alone.
Because leading a large team of researches working on highly complicated work is respectfull work as well. Another team leader might have botched it and we wouldnt have the picture.
> Another team leader might have botched it and we wouldnt have the picture.
How do you know that? The "might" means nothing here. There were many other teams working too and each of them have their talented leader doing complicated things. Choosing this one specifically from all others to take the credit is meaningless.
Very few people are excited about "5TB of data of a black hole gathered".
> How do you know that? The "might" means nothing here.
It doesnt mean _nothing_. It means she did a good job, or at least good enough, for her team to actually produce the image.
How I know that some other team leader might have botched it? I would have.
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.
The sheer toxicity of many of the comments is something I haven't seen for a long time. They really hate that a women is getting credit and that others aren't getting the same level of attention.
I wonder how those same people think about Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs etc. They had huge teams behind them as well.
For every extraordinarily recognized academic/professional person, there’s always going to be many times more people who are never publicly recognized for their achievements.
Maybe they fly under the radar, maybe they picked the wrong subject to focus on or industry for career, maybe their timing is bad, maybe there’s nothing wrong with them.
I’m proud of this (stranger to me) girl for accomplishing something so large at this age. Being about the same age, I’m not jealous - but it is one more reminder that somewhere along the line my record-player skipped a few years. My 20s disappeared too quickly, or maybe I was focused on the wrong things (work) instead of passion.
As in engineering, it's helpful to use proper terminology with people:
if using a gender is necessary for the narrative …
- under 13: girl
- 13 – 18: girl / teenager / young woman (depends on context; 16? – 25?)
- 18 or over: woman
My wife absolutely loathes being called "girl". It is used to reinforce the toxic idea that women are less mature and capable than men. Same feeling from other women that I've discussed this with.
18 or over = woman.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is why people say there's sexism in tech bud. A male MIT PhD who was the public face of their project would not be subjected to nearly this much doubt and accusations of being deadweight by insecure 4chan weirdos combing through git logs.
I think it's just that many people feel threatened or inadequate when they (naturally) compare themselves to these people. It's tempting to put them down so that we feel better about ourselves. I think most of us here on HN like to think that we're clever but when people like Katie Bouman get under the spotlight suddenly most of us realize that we're not such hot shots after all.
It's probably worse when it's a woman/child/minority/... because it gives us the convenient excuse of "this is probably a PR stunt" to dismiss them. It's lazy and it's intellectually dishonest but it's also very human unfortunately.
This leads to people getting rejected thinking it's part of some culture war, when the truth is that most people get rejected, some of those people would have been brilliant in the role they got rejected for and it's exactly the same brutal industry that it was in the 1980s.
Many people are intelligent enough, but are not going to work hard enough.
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.
I think in this particular case, I have no problem with it. One, she obviously had a big part in it. Maybe it is blow back because they feel a picture of the inside of a black hole isn't a big deal and people are making it into something big? In my opinion, it is. I remember middle school teachers almost scoffing at the idea of a picture of a black hole and yet, 25 years later, here we are. Regardless, she in her twenties has generated something that researchers spend a lifetime trying to find so kudos to her. I'm sure there is a certain gendered element to it in both cases (for and against) and it'd probably be naive to think there wasn't.
Even if this were a smaller aspect of what these researchers were aiming for, I'd love to see a documentary series on what various team members worked on (and in her case, discovered). An image generated by radio waves and she (maybe with others?) was able to construct an image out of that? That's impressive. Probably not, but I'd be curious if this kind of thing could be localized in a way that it could be the "sound to visual model" element of a system so that blind people could make out the world a bit more directly (obviously, there'd need to be a means for them to consume said model. All of this is way above me and my pay grade).
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3399377
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5442290
For an example of this that involves a male, the media has been hyping the Ocean Cleanup project because it provides them with a great prodigy story, but people on HN have been rightly pushing back against its merits.
There was, however, an extra article about his rocket engineer on HN. Mabye that is more like it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.
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 that are being treated like little kids that need to be shown the correct path.
We just want to show that you if you accomplish something in tech you aren't going to be diminished or dismissed simply because you're a woman.
How do you know?
Surely, a man can be a role model for a woman in science (and vice versa) - e.g., if you are from the same small ethnic minority as the role model. However, male/female lifestyle, upbringing, interests, challenges, etc. are quite different in general, even in otherwise very homogeneous (western) societies. Therefore, the role model having the same sex/gender is very important.
(Just my view - I don't have evidence or experience in this regard).
Would they say women can not achieve what men can (at least in science, if not in physical endeavors)? Because if they say women can do that, then why shouldn't they take men as role models?
"Someone like you" - is for example a white man from a middle class background more like a white woman from a middle class background, or is that white women more like a black woman from a poor background? I think to say "biological sex" in that context is more defining for "likeness" in academia is a silly, toxic narrative.
In my youth, I personally also enjoyed books and comics with female heroines, and never thought that they shouldn't be my role models. I guess these days that wouldn't be possible anymore.
Gender, like it or not, shapes the life experience of an individual. Why would you not want to have a role model that had a similar life experience to your own?
Except, inevitably, when a woman expresses that desire, it gets called "toxic feminism", and the justification is, wait for it: the personal anecdotes and experiences of a male.
I am shocked that in 2019 there is still so little self-awareness around this.
By that logic, why shouldn't I as a man say "fuck women in STEM", because apparently we will never be able to communicate about anything meaningful anyway. People who make it clear they don't care about my opinion, why should I want them in my life?
I stated my reasons why I think focusing on gendered role models is misleading and harmful. Fine, you may disagree. But calling it toxic and "mansplaining" - that's not furthering discourse, and frankly, if that is your attitude, STEM may be better off without you anyway. After all, science is about keeping an open mind, among other things.
Ah yes, the classic: "I'm not toxic, you are!".
Where in my original comment did I say the male perspective, anecdotal as it may be in a given context, counts for nothing?
I didn't.
What I did say was that a singular, anecdotal male perspective was not appropriate as a justification for depicting a woman desiring a similarly-gendered role model was somehow indicative of "toxic feminism".
>What makes women unable to have male role models, but men able to have female role models?
No one said they couldn't, but you're depicting what was said as far more benign than it really was. You didn't ask an open-ended question about it, you specifically categorized said desire as "toxic feminism".
>if that is your attitude, STEM may be better off without you anyway. After all, science is about keeping an open mind, among other things.
Maybe one of the STEM fields will be able to develop a device that can accurately measure the immense amount of irony bundled up in that sentence.
Same merry-go-round as usual in these threads:
Subtly patronizing comment(mansplaining if you will), someone points out "hey that's kind of toxic", original commenter retreats to victimhood and "I'm not toxic, you are! No one has an open mind about this kind of thing etc...", and around we go.
If you want to pretend like STEM doesn't have a centuries-long history of fairly uneven footing for other genders and minorities, and accuse everyone of suddenly being close-minded and toxic, fine, but you're going to have a hard time cashing in the victim card when someone points out the ridiculousness of it.
I did NOT say desiring a female role model is toxic feminism. Feminists claiming women need female role models is toxic feminism. There is a difference.
And that is what feminists claim, because they need this claim to support their victim narrative of why fewer women are in STEM.
No point commenting your other stuff, because you completely misrepresented what I said.
And by the way, you directly called ME toxic, whereas I made a general comment about feminism.
Citation?
I call bunkum on that. TBH it seems both sexist and racist to say one can only be inspired by people of one's own characteristics (in science).
In this case the sex and race are irrelevant to Bouman's contribution AFAICT.
If you were talking about someone like Payne-Gaposchkin, then she overcame a deal of sexism, fair enough.
The whole she did it and had ovaries, omg, seems so condescending and unnecessary.
> The whole she did it and had ovaries, omg, seems so condescending and unnecessary.
it's not omg she had ovaries, it's omg she did it, knowing she's going to get shit on by people (e.g. these comments) instead of applauded for what her and her team did for science. That's how it's inspiring to me.
That may be your personal definition, but that is not the actual denotation of "role model". Some definitions I found are:
"a person whose behavior, example, or success is or can be emulated by others, especially by younger people. "
and
"a person whose behavior in a particular role is imitated by others"
There is no mention or qualifier of it needing to be someone who shares one's background
In spite of this, I'm lucky to have an amazing network of other women in my field, and thanks to the internet and cultural exchanges, we don't feel so alone these days.
I worked at one of the most progressive / women-friendly companies in San Francisco, and as of last year, only 34.3% of our technical roles were filled by women (company size ~1,000). I'm eager to see this year's numbers, and hope they've improved, but there's undoubtedly a lot of room to grow.
You may feel uncomfortable knowing the hiring process is weighted. But I feel uncomfortable being in an office that doesn't have other women. If I can change that WHILE at the same time meeting my hiring standards AND not consciously turning away a clearly better candidate then absolutely, I'm going to use positive discrimination.
Women make up 48 percent of the total work force, yet only 24 percent of STEM workers https://haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/women-stem-its-not-just-n...
https://www.commerce.gov/sites/default/files/migrated/report...
15% of engineering professionals are women https://ngcproject.org/statistics
Women make up less than 10% overall in computer science and engineering https://www.higheredtoday.org/2015/03/03/where-are-the-women...
In the same vein, I never quite understood fandom of soccer, for example. If "my" team (or my country) wins in soccer, I never felt like it was my achievement somehow. The athletes trained really hard to become good at soccer. I didn't train hard. So I don't feel like I deserve a share of their glory.
And I never felt like every other man, just because I am also a man. Some other men are smarter than me, or more athletic, or more attractive. I never thought I am simply the same, just because I am a man.
Of course, I take not of your view, if you felt like that, it can't be argued with. Just in my personal opinion, it doesn't really make sense. Unless it concerns something that is gender specific, like giving birth. I am not looking at women giving birth and think "I could do that" - I definitely can't, because I am a man...
Like yeah I got some male role models too, but fuck I want some representation! Someone who I can relate to! Someone who I know went through what I did!
Which is what, exactly? What is so fundamental different abotu your experience? The immeasurable pain of being a minority in a group of people?
1. Your tone is excessively combative for Hacker News. If you're put off by my saying that, ask yourself what a non-combative way to take that in and reflect on it would be. As a concrete example, you said "What makes women unable to have male role models, but men able to have female role models?", in a thread after the OP had already replied to you that she had/has men as role models. It implies either that you aren't listening, or that you're being antagonistic for the sake of being antagonistic. Neither is welcome here.
2. Using phrases like "toxic feminism" make you sound intellectually feeble. Try to be more specific and concrete about what you're addressing without using charged words like that. Unironically using the phrase "toxic feminism" instantly undermines any argument you might make. Again, if your point really is to learn from / share with others, find ways to communicate that don't put up walls.
3. If you're legitimately interested in finding out about why representation matters — and I sincerely hope you are — this is a good piece on it: https://medium.com/@uxdiogenes/just-a-brown-hand-313db35230c...
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—especially among women, minorities, and children from low-income families."
[1] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/134/2/647/5218...
This is whataboutism at its best. The fact is that teams are all too often denied appropriate credit in the popular press for group projects, something which surely impacts many women working in science and STEM more generally. There's no reason why we should be expected to be happy about it this time around, merely because the one person who is getting all the attention happens to be female. I mean, you just need to look at that title: the computer scientist behind the picture? Isn't that ridiculous on its face?
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...
This is the life of all men in competence hierachies. All of these things happend to me within the last half year and have been since I was a boy. Doesn't matter in the least, you couldn't pry me away from my interests with a crowbar.
This is your real problem: generally, girls want to be invited, boys just do.
The reason I speak up at all and will take all the abuse and downvoting thats sure to follow is it irks me so much.
We got into PCs and didn't matter one damn if they came from space aliens or out of the dumpster. We sat at them, we sat at them and we got scolded for it and told to go outside and called nerds. Our status was absolute dogshit and few women would associate willingly with computing in any form.
I am old enough to remember that at parties we mumbled "something with computers" and smiled apologetically hoping the topic would move on. Yes, many of us spent years, decades even, feeling slightly ashamed of our profession.
Now that the best and brightest of us nerds literally reshaped the world into a place where your personal handheld computer became a status symbol here come the women.
And you know, it would be okay, we are very tame men overall, except now you claim your collective absence from this topic is because we hurt you. No, we did not, you all just didn't like computers.
1) Look back at any physic journal for similar stories of experimental success (example gravitational waves), you won't find news stories of focus pieces on a single team member because it is a COLLABORATIVE effort. The only cases were single people get recognition is for theorists like Prof Higgs, Hawkings etc, but not for the individual experimentalists at the LHC or other astronomical projects.
2) The idea of focussing on a single team member is a technique for creating a clear narrative that readers can follow. The story would get less interest if you were told about the live and works of all of the team members.
It's not all hate :)
I think it's friggin awesome to see women in science. But even if Bouman was male I would still be cautious of attributing so much of an international collaboration to one person in the form of "Meet the _____ behind the first black hole image". That phrasing disregards too much hard work. I see no reason to offer Bouman special treatment in this regard at the expense of others solely because of her gender. That isn't equality.
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
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 around for half a century. Heino Falcke proposed the experiment. Shep Doeleman led the entire EHT initiative. Scientists around the world brought techniques to the table.
I imagine even Bouman takes issue with being labeled "the scientist behind the first image of the black hole". She is surely aware and appreciative of the massive international effort involved.
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.
I think you're ignoring the other part of that pattern, which is that there is absolutely a propensity for posts of a given nature, i.e. "this is _the_ person who invented/achieved XYZ," featuring a woman or a disenfranchised minority figure, only for it to be specifically disingenuous and hyperbolic, and attempting to promote a truth on the basis of a different objective altogether. A good example were the multiple posts on the front page of reddit regarding Mary Beatrice Davidson inventing the sanitary pad (she didn't). Vice, among others, wrote about the same topic. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mb5yap/mary-beatrice-...
Similarly, the _only_ inventor of _any_ toy that I'm aware of is Lonnie Johnson, the black man who invented the super soaker and has been shared on Reddit countless times.
Even Margaret Hamilton, as mentioned. I've seen her with her stack of code on Reddit at least 3x, and she's the only NASA engineer I'm even aware of.
If you Google "American Inventors," not only is Thomas Edison the only white man in the first results, but the inventor of peanut butter and the super soaker displace Alexander Graham Bell and Nikola Tesla. I just googled it.
https://i.imgur.com/Qu0PPiU.jpg
Mind you, this isn't to say that you'll find Margaret Hamilton mentioned more often than Albert Einstein. What is being discussed here is not objective quantities of exposure, but the distortion of ideological lens, and to what degree it is present.
Where I think that you'd fundamentally disagree with my assessment is if I were to posit the question, "would this have had 5 different posts on the front page of reddit, specifically attributing the success of the project to a specific person, if that person had been a white or Asian male?" I think the kneejerk reaction might be "of course we would, having the achievements of white and Asian men is the default position of our society." But think about it. Would the American inventors in the google results have been there for their exact same accomplishments, if not for the color of their skin? Be honest. Would Mary Davidson have had multiple threads praising her if not for her gender and the color of her skin? Again, be honest.
In this case of Katie Bouman, the unfortunate thing is that, again, this is a monumental achievement, and the majority of the praise is totally justifiable completely independent of any ideological lens. But the lens is also in effect, make no mistake, and that's what you are seeing a reaction to. This is the problem with identity politics.
TL;DR you're almost certainly correct that the majority of the comments you see of that nature are on posts like this regarding women, but I think it's because posts of this nature are predominately about women and minorities, and often hyperbolic and patronizing.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-45704322
However, she may be a superstar, no pun intended, and so her getting almost all of the credit is completely warranted, but graduate student and post-doc are training roles, and a lot of the time the post-doc won't really make a name for themsleves until they establish their own lab, because it is unclear who is producing the ideas.
Advisors often range from consultants/consulents to managers. Not because they’re not smart, but because they seldom have months of uninterrupted time to focus on a problem intensely enough.
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.
Please don't. HN threads are supposed to be for people conversing, not copy-pasting.
Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Anyway, I do not want to sidetrack from this amazing achievement.
I kinda hate the recent trend to focus more on gender or race if somebody achieves anything. Look what Morgan Freeman said about racism [0]. Is it really important that she is a woman? Do people think a lot of women can't achieve these things? And if 1 woman achieved this, all women are better than men? Do everybody just expect men to be smarter and if they do something outstanding it's ok, but when a woman does it, it's extraordinary... Why focus so much on this?
In discussions like this we should really focus on the person (and also the team behind her/him, I doubt she could do it alone without the team), not the gender or race or whatever.
I really hope this positive discrimination hype dies out, it doesn't help anybody. Let the best person for the job get the job.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ
I don't think I've ever seen so many people suddenly desperately concerned that the Little People get a mention, and I'm at least part-way convinced that gender (and maybe youth? she's 29...) has a good deal to do with it (apparently the other thing that triggers the "harrumph, what about the team" crowd are stories about child prodigies, according to another thread).
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?
Dr. Bouman is a talented, enthusiastic and no doubt indispensable force on the larger team responsible for this achievement. Her role is as a co-lead for one small team which is responsible for one algorithm (out of four) used for imaging, as well as for an imagine verification algorithm (with Dr. Bouman's focus more on the latter). The larger imaging group (about 45 people by my rough count, led by Drs. Michael Johnson and Kazunori Akiyama) is itself one part of the analysis group, which has three other working groups, and then the analysis group is one of a half dozen larger groups in the EHT project which produced this result.
So it's not a case of the project lead being presented as the face of the project, which is par for the course in academia (and the outside world). It is a postdoc one level above the grad students who form the least-senior rung of the project, and many levels from the top suddenly being misleadingly presented as the key figure in a major result.
Imagine you worked on a small team of a couple of postdocs and a few grad students near the bottom of a hierarchy of teams involving hundreds of people, and then came in one day and your colleague and co-lead at the same level as you was suddenly presented as the face and key contributor for not only your small slice of things, not even the larger component to which the slice belongs, but the entire project?
You'd probably be pretty happy for them, but also confused as to why the many people with the actual role as overall group leaders or the project leaders aren't mentioned. One might also note how distant the general public is from the machinations of the academic world that no one is asking how a 20-something CS postdoc ended up leading a multinational astronomy project involving top faculty from top institutions? In terms of notability and improbability, that would probably be a bigger story than any image produced by the group!
Explaining her actual position and contribution is not in any way to detract from her contributions: only to clarify the record in the face of an onslaught of misleading media articles, which seemed to largely sourced (transitively) from a few misleading tweets, themselves triggered by a viral image.
On top of that, none of this is doing Dr. Bouman any favors. Although they are mostly silent, no one in the EHT project is confused about her role, and none of the other people in her faculty or almost anyone else who matters will be under any misconception despite the headlines. If anything, academia is even more picky than other fields when it comes to attribution, so any type of misplaced credit can be viewed very negatively and can attach itself to a person indefinitely. Now she hasn't invited this or propagated this story, so one should consider her a blameless victim here: but not everyone in a position to care will necessarily remember that subtlety.
As someone who's been interested in astronomy my entire life, and considered getting a degree in it but only ended up with a minor since I sensibly prioritized CS and wanted to graduate in four years, this is an awesome, amazing, really clever accomplishment. And yet many of the comments here are just so negative, either outright sexist, picking nits and trying to argue that it isn't a big breakthrough or anything, or going through code contributions line-by-line trying to establish that really someone else had more to do with it.
All I know is, she must be insanely intelligent and hard-working. What an awesome PhD project, and at MIT no less!, an institution that I have enormous respect for and that I somewhat identify with because my dad attended and I've been there for many events. I'm jealous. This would've been the exact kind of thing I'd have gone into in astronomy for (because of my background in programming) had I seriously pursued it, but I know I'm just not diligent enough to have seen it through. And being honest, I didn't apply myself well enough in undergrad to have gotten good enough grades to get into a good grad school.
It sucks that so many people jump into "push people down" mode instead of "life people up" mode in these kinds of situations rather, because this is an amazing scientific accomplishment that deserves celebrating. One of the PIs in one of the press conferences said that this was the most important accomplishment in astronomy since 2014 [when Rosetta landed a probe on a comet], and I tend to agree. It's not just about this one image, but about establishing the feasibility of a virtual planet-sized radio telescope that is capable of imaging lots more than just black holes. A lot more discoveries are likely to come out of this technique, and guess who came up with the algorithm to make sense of all those petabytes of data?
There are regularly posts here linking to articles about misattribution of credit in science and technology, the problem with the "great man theory," laments about the role of social media in creating hype, and there are plenty of male figures discussed here who engender bitter discussions about how credit should be assigned. I honestly don't see any difference between this discussion and any other discussion. I seem to remember similar discussions emerging about discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre hardware vulnerabilities, and many other physics discoveries involving large teams of researchers, just to take a few examples.
The way credit is assigned in science is a significant moral crisis in my opinion (as it is in work in general; cf. rampant income inequality), and it really doesn't matter what the genders of the individuals involved are. Strangely enough, I think attention is being paid to this argument here because of her gender. It's one of these unfortunate circumstances where I think two competing ethical goals are kind of conflicting, one being the better representation of women and minorities in science, the other being lack of fair representation for all in credit.
One needs to just look at another large thread that generated controversy to get an idea of the growing trend [1].
Which means one has to ask themselves: Is HN cultivating an environment that's only going to get worse? And personally, I think the answer would be yes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464269
It specifically lists the teams in the article.
[0]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?
"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.
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."
> 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/ 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).
Not trained in this field, but this reads like a certain mistype. Shouldn't resolution increase with telescope diameter?
It took me several rereads and reading the comments here to understand that we want low numbers for angular resolution.
I suppose it's fairly obvious for one well-versed in optics, but to the layman (like me) it's initially opaque.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic-aperture_radar
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
I wouldn't expect the answer to "who is the person behind the first black hole image?" to be so clear.
>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.
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....
"Black hole bends light, space, time -- and NASA's NuSTAR can see it all unfold"
We do the same thing with digital cameras, X-rays, MRI, etc.
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
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." :)
My take in response to your original question is that it seems like nitpicking or armchair quarterbacking or something else related to that.
I'm always wary of succumbing to the "appeal to authority" fallacy, but this does seem like a case where all the experts and leading figures in a field are saying this is a big deal, and publishing a lot of info about it, so the right approach just seems to be to take the time to read/listen to what they're saying and learn, rather than posting simplistic skeptical questions in web forums.
If you didn't intend to come across that way, then perhaps rethink your question or the way you worded it.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=black+hole&t=h_&ia=images&iax=imag...
It's the first time that's been done.
All the images in the DDG search are artistic constructions.
Edit: The thing that's so remarkable is that it does look like what scientists predicted it would look like, and thus some of those artistic representations are similar to what we're now seeing in this image.
The images in the google search link you supplied are all, without exception that i can see, artistic renderings of a black hole.
There are images of gravitational lensing [1] that show a basic distortion of light from gravity, but none of them reach the intensity of a black hole's 'event horizon'.
The body that we are seeing is at the center of the bright spot in this image [2], and is the source of the blue jet of material coming out. (I originally thought that jet was projected laterally, but in one of the two recent Veritasium videos on this topic he says it's actually heading almost straight at us and is 5000 light years long.) However, it's such an infinitessimally small part of the above image (about 1/10,000,000th the size) that we do not possess the optical resolving power to actually see it. For example, Hubble can resolve down to approximately .05 arcsecond. This image is approximately .00004 arcsecond. To get that resolving power they had to combine signals from radio telescopes all over the world using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry. The contribution of Katie and her team is to extract a useful image from the petabyates of data that came from that exercise.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens#/media/File...
[2] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/M87_jet....
EDIT: In Dr Bouman's TED talk, she notes that there are an infinite number of ways the sensor data could be constructed into an image, and that they were looking for a construction that looks like what they expect things in our universe look like. So, there's some ambiguity in the definition of "photograph"
My understanding now is that this is the first time we've observed one accurately enough to get a picture of the Einstein ring around a black hole. And even there, it's heavily reconstructed using machine learning, which I wouldn't call a "photo", more of a "AI artist rendition".
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
She is contributor #4, with only 90 commits. Meanwhile, the #1 contributor, 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?
"Katie's Hole" :P