The Fear and Loathing of Reading Nuit Blanche

I heard through the grapevines that some people tended to avoid reading Nuit Blanche because it felt like going a conference every single time they read a blog entry. Others even reported fearing their ideas would already be published by other groups or that somebody else's thinking might taint their own thought process. This fear and loathing is absolutely misplaced because it's just the beginning. There is plenty of work and revolutionary ideas ahead of us. Recall what Richard Hamming said: "It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack" (“You and Your Research” --- Richard Hamming (1986) ). Think of the blog as providing a convenient way of finding many other reasonable attacks. In that context, I also like Howard Aiken's quote “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If it’s original, you’ll have to ram it down their throats”. We have had a taste of that already.

Let us look at some numbers to get a sense of the reality of the "competition" and interest on the subject. About six months ago, I asked one of you to provide me with the stats of her site after being featured here. Here is what the Nuit Blanche Effect looked like then:

It may sound like a small number except those are high quality visits but what are the chance they are working in your exact same field, on your exact same problem ? Next, here are the stats of the blog and the compressive sensing big picture page after being featured on Wired:

While forty times larger, that type of traffic also brings additional maintenance issues and I am not talking about web servers maintenance type of issues here (see in Why Compressed Sensing is NOT a CSI "Enhance" technology ... yet ! and Surely You Must Be Joking Mr. Screenwriter).

Finally, here are the stats of this cartoon. Let us mention that the latest increase come from being featured on the CS big picture site (i.e. the constant traffic there about 100 to 200 views per day) which itself is featured on the wikipedia entry:

What are the lessons from scrutinizing these data:

• First and foremost, if you have a really revolutionary idea, chances are nobody but yourself is thinking about it or has the drive to implement it.
  
• Second, if you want a subject to be of interest to students and engineers all over the world, make sure your entry on Wikipedia sticks (by the way I think the current one is by far not optimal). I don't care about Wikipedia enforcing a no-follow tag on every articles of theirs however the traffic from Wikipedia sustains itself over time. If you are working on a subject that is new (or not) I suggest you write an entry on Wikipedia and then link to the CS page. For the senior folks reading this, this means getting your new grad students to make that entry. It will help them, it will help you.
  
• Third, I serendipitously have heard many of you talking to each other, getting papers out or traveling half-way around the world thanks to this blog. If there is something I am really proud of, this is it.
• Fourth, I am not sure how to transfer this type of dynamics on the Compressive Sensing LinkedIn group which now has 378 members from industry and academia. I just added the Nuit Blanche RSS feed to the group news.
  
• Finally, for those of you really fearing and loathing reading this blog because it might be the bearer of bad news in that you might be upstaged by somebody else. I have a solution for you: I am going to build an IPhone app featuring only Nuit Blanche as a feed and sell it for $500 on the app store. That way, you can buy it and feel content that the information is on your IPhone but never open it so that you can keep your hopes up that you have not been upstaged: A situation not unlike that of high priced gym memberships.

P.S.: You are bored and you want to see some action? what about changing the entry on linear system of equations in wikipedia to reflect the new findings of compressive sensing and wait for the "Everyone knows this is impossible" slam down quote.