That's pretty interesting, I look forward to see what comes out of this! People often tend to conflate "computer science" with "professional software development" and I admit my first reaction was "so what? I routinely use just a small handful of data structures, do we really need something like this?" but seeing it visually laid out in an easily-digestible format is somehow inspiring. From a scientific perspective I can imagine discovering more advanced structures much like "missing" elements from the periodic table.
I'm not trying to move the goal post. I'm only taking umbridge with the fact the previous poster said "No one has claimed that Oumuamua is likely an alien device". The person interviewed in the very article this discussion is about seems to think that maybe it could be. So we are talking semantics between "likely" and "possibly".
Ok how about the introductory paragraph that states
> The following October, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, co-wrote a paper (with a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, Shmuel Bialy) that examined ‘Oumuamua’s “peculiar acceleration” and suggested that the object “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an alien civilization.”
or another spot where he says
"Every now and then we find an object of artificial origin. And this could be a message in a bottle, and we should be open-minded."
Seems to me like he is saying it could be worth considering that maybe this is an alien object.
Hopefully the manager of the team is also subject to performance reviews. Generally the manager of the team is responsible for the performance of the team, meaning the manager fails if the team fails or has significant problems.
This is highly dependent on company environment however and obviously can come with it's own set of motivations and problems.