Slashdot Mirror
Katherine Johnson: NASA's Pioneering Female Physicist (thenewstack.io)
destinyland writes: Tuesday's State of the Union address included a shout-out to Katherine Johnson, the pioneering African American mathematician and physicist who calculated the trajectory of Alan Shepherd's 1961 space trip. "Her reputation was so strong that John Glenn asked her to recheck the calculations made by the new electronic computers before the mission on which he became the first American to orbit the Earth," notes one technology reporter. NASA policy at the time was to not acknowledge the female contributors to scientific papers, though "She literally wrote the textbook on rocket science," according to one NASA official, noting that her impact literally reaches all the way to the moon. At a ceremony in November, Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the 97-year-old pioneer continues to encourage young people to also pursue careers in technology, science, engineering and math.
The article says "The practice in 1960 would have been not to list the female Computers as formal co-authors". The blurb above replaces "Computers" with "contributors", painting a false and offensive picture.
Today in many fields it is common to only include as authors of a paper those who have had creative scientific input. A common example is research assistants who collate data, or technical staff who build lab equipment, but the example of someone who did a numerical computation for the author is not uncommon. Most "computers" simply did the computations, which was certainly an important contribution to the research, but not necessarily the kind of contribution that makes one an author of a paper.
Good thing she lived to 97!
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This is the third NASA/spaceflight industry article in 26 hours. Is NASA celebrating something this week? Has Dice.com gone from SJW outrage and click-bait to articles as advertising?
What's an 'African' American? Oh - an African who doesn't want to live in AFRICA...
The AVERAGE IQ of Africans is twenty or more points below that of whites. Care to discuss? One genius African doesn't negate that fact - meaning that the more Africans there are in a white country, the worse it becomes for whites. Which is why Africans don't want to live around their own kind, in AFRICA.
So in additional to the Friday "Social Justice" articles, we now get Monday "White Male Guilt" articles, too?
Come on, why even mention her race? She's a mathematician and physicist. Just leave it at that. There's no need to bring race or gender into it.
I don't see how race affects her ability to do math or physics.
I don't see how gender affects her ability to do math or physics.
So why mention it? Is it just some pathetic attempt to get the many white males here feeling "guilty" merely for being born as white males?
As a society, we will never get past racism and sexism as long as social justice types constantly keep bringing up race and gender.
Instead of focusing on our differences, why not focus on our similarities? We all love math and science. We don't need to waste our time considering what our races are, or what our genders are.
But I suppose if the social justice types did let us move beyond constantly focusing on race and gender, they'd have nothing to bitch and moan about. So it isn't in their best interest to actually eliminate racism and sexism; these are the very things that the social justice types exploit to give themselves power.
If only we as a society can now stop thinking of these people as abberations just on the basis of gender and other genetic factors. Geniuses in general are rare, so if you’re looking for them, the last thing you want to do is summarily exclude any segment of any population, simply because YOU believe some of their characteristics correlate less with genius.
I was reading a journal paper from the 1970’s or something that presented average IQs for different genetic groups. They found the average Asian IQ to be higher tna the average Caucasian IQ, which was higher than the average African IQ. However, in every case, the standard deviation was very high. This guarantees that geniuses would be found in large populations. (Of course, none of this accounts for aspects of intelligence not considered by IQ, like social ability.)
Of course, racism isn’t really about IQ. IQ is sometimes used as an *excuse* for racism, but if that were not a factor, racists would find another excuse. Bigotry in general is about deciding that someone is incompetent or inferior on the basis of superficial traits. It becomes *criminal* when you actively interfere with someone’s life on the basis of a prejudgement like this.
I’m hoping that highlighting women and other marginalized groups and their contributions to science and society as a whole will gradually enlighten the human race.
Africans are widely accepted to have superior social ability. That is a form of intelligence not accounted for by IQ. Your implication that Africans are dumber on the basis of IQ conveniently ignores that fact. But then, bigots and creationists are really good at paying attention only to whatever skewed interpretation of the facts supports their case, ignoring all of the other “inconvenient” facts.
Every person has things they’re good and bad at, and race is not going to be a predictor of one person’s mathematical ability.
Also, “African American” may seem like a silly term. But it’s a term that Americans of African decent decided to call themselves, and it’s their freedom to call themselves by that term. It’s no sillier than calling food grown a certain way “Organic.” Does that imply that we can buy inorganic food? Well, we can — salt and other minerals, but we don’t call them that, and the term “organic” is being used here in an entirely different sense with a new meaning that gets a new dictionary entry. “Organic” after all is just a string of phonemes with arbitrary meaning.
NASA policy at the time was to not acknowledge the female contributors to scientific papers, though "She literally wrote the textbook on rocket science,"
We should acknowledge it as such and not put it down to some SWJ agenda
Katherine Johnson: NASA's Pioneering Physicist
You'd never see "NASA's Pioneering Male Physicist", you're making it sound like a feminist article. You really don't need to point out that she's female, her achievements do not belong to the female gender alone keep gender out of science and tech! it's damaging to both.
"She literally wrote the textbook on rocket science," Someone doesn't know what literally means.
She's a good engineer. No doubt. There are many more male engineers more accomplished.
We are recognizing her for her simultaneous possession of a vagina.
That apparently is the achievement here. Otherwise there would have been many other recognitions.
BTW it should be possible to find it in the archives. NASA records and documents everything. Richard Feynman suggested something trivial. He noticed they were marking the bolts at 12 o'clock and 6 o'clock positions to help align solid booster rocket section assembly. He suggesting marking the 3 o'clock and 9 o'clock bolts in addition to help them better. NASA studied the suggestion for two years and rejected it because the documentation update would be prohibitive. That is the level of documentation they maintain. I am sure it would be possible to find the long forgotten women contributors and right the wrong.
We award Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously after several decades. We restored Robert E Lee's citizenship decades after he died. Gen Lee's application for citizenship with formal sworn renunciation of his allegiance to Confederacy was taken home as a personal souvenir by the Secretary of State and was found in attic after several decades.
If restoring that traitor's citizenship status after a century is deemed to be important, giving credit to women scientists for their contribution to NASA is important too. We can and we should find the historical wrong and right it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
With all respect, this guy wrote it.
it literally makes me care less when you literally say 'literally', no matter how literally you might mean it
Let's also give credit for the American space program where it's due... Mostly captured Nazi scientists.
Vera Rubin, who did a lot of the early research on dark matter, was not allowed to use the telescope at Caltech specifically because of her gender (eventually the policy did change). Also prevented from enrolling in Princeton's graduate astronomy program because women were not allowed until 1975.
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
Why should I care if she has a vagina? This submission is sexist and you should be ashamed!
men's general health overall is so good
Confirmed for troll by stating a bald faced lie about well-established facts. Men have 1.4x the death ratio of women, and it's higher in all major health-related categories except Alzheimers. Source: http://www.health.harvard.edu/...
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Let me name my penis after her