Woman Who Media Claims Created Black Hole Image Contributed 0.26% of Code
Tom Pappert
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As the mainstream media attempts to give researcher Katie Bouman credit for the first “photos” of a black hole, it appears her role may have been mostly supervisory, and that other researchers did the majority of the leg work.
According to data provided publicly by GitHub, Bouman made 2,410 contributions to the over 900,000 lines of code required to create the first-of-its-kind black hole image, or 0.26 per cent. Bouman’s contributions also occurred toward the end of the work on the code.
In contrast, contributor Andrew Chael wrote over 850,000 lines of code.
While CNN attempted to give Bouman full credit, explaining “That’s where Bouman’s algorithm — along with several others — came in,” they slyly admitted that fellow researchers told CNN “‘(Bouman) was a major part of one of the imaging subteams,'” even after CNN incorrectly wrote on the previous line that she was on one of the “imaging teams,” not subteams.
BBC News was even more zealous in its eagerness to have a woman at the helm, and titled its article “Katie Bouman: The woman behind the first black hole image”.
Phys.org went even further, calling the young scientist a “superstar” in its headline.
While the Western media attempted to use her gender to make a point, Asian publications, including Asahi, offered a more nuanced and truthful article, writing that “207 scientists in 17 nations and regions took part in the project,” and refusing to assign the achievement to any one of the scientists.
For her part, Bouman made it clear on Facebook that she did not want sole credit for the achievement.
“No one algorithm or person made this image,” wrote Bouman, “it required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work” to capture the black hole image.
Replying to one of the comment asking if the image was made by her personally, Bouman added “Actually no, there were a number of us that all squeezed into the room and pressed go on our computers at the same exact time! We didn’t want any one person or algorithm to be the first one to make the image.”
She also gave “shout outs” to Chael and many of the other scientists she worked with.
It appears the American mainstream media lost sight of the truth in an attempt to give a female scientist undue credit for a massive achievement that should have the entire scientific community involved with the photo patting itself on the back collectively.
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