Trolls hijacked a scientist's image to attack Katie Bouman. They picked the wrong astrophysicist.
Source: Washington Post
Trolls hijacked a scientist’s image to attack Katie Bouman. They picked the wrong astrophysicist.
By Tim Elfrink April 12
As the world stared in wonder this week at the first image of a black hole, a new star was born here on Earth: Katherine Bouman, a 29-year-old postdoctoral researcher who developed an algorithm that was key to capturing the stunning visual.
On the ugliest corners of the Internet, however, this sudden fame for a young woman in a male-dominated field couldn’t stand. A corrective was quickly found in Andrew Chael, another member of the Event Horizon Telescope team, who, not coincidentally, is white and male.
On Reddit and Twitter, memes quickly went viral contrasting Bouman with Chael, who — per the viral images — was actually responsible for “850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black-hole image algorithm!”
The implication was clear: Bouman, pushed by an agenda-driven media, was getting all the attention. But Chael had done all the real work.
That’s completely wrong, Chael said in a viral Thursday night Twitter thread of his own. Not only are the claims in the meme flat-out incorrect, but Chael — as an openly gay man — is also part of an underrepresented demographic in his field.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/04/12/trolls-hijacked-scientists-image-attack-katie-bouman-they-picked-wrong-astrophysicist/
Alternate link: https://www.nola.com/crime/2019/04/online-trolls-hijack-scientists-image-to-attack-katie-bouman-they-pick-the-wrong-astrophysicist.html
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