Recently, Wired magazine wrote about the Good Enough Revolution (GE-Rev). In short it comes down to that where in the past people wanted bigger, faster and better products with more features, nowadays Good Enough products seem to conquer the market. Iconic examples are the good enough computer (the netbook), the good enough video camera (The Flip, Kodak Zi8) and good enough sound (mp3, Skype). I personally love the GE-Rev and it’s products for it lowers the threshold to create content for the social web (eg flickr, youtube, wordpress, facebook).

However, sometimes I get the feeling that some people apply the Good Enough principle in a wrong way. For example, lot’s of scientist’s programming skills seem to be ‘Good Enough’: it works so it’s done. Well, let me disagree. As Edsger Dijkstra said (he is talking about programming code):

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure.

Or some manufacturers think that by making crap expensive, it stops being crap (Microsoft Sharepoint). Another itch is the seemingly complete random moment utensil manufacturers in the Occident stop in their development cycle. Take, for example, the simple case of saran wrap. How difficult is it to make an easy to use, functional casing for that?

Apparently very difficult.

Kaizen on the other hand is the philosophy of continuous improvement. It’s origin lies in the Japanese work culture and is best known for it’s biggest success story Toyota with it’s Total Quality Management system (allthough the latest callback didn’t really seem to advocate the use of Kaizen). What would Kaizen do to saran wrap?

Well, how remarkable, it is possible to make an easy to use, functional casing for saran wrap. Those Japanese nailed it again. You gotta love the Japanese utensil market. Every product is designed and improved to the best it can be. It really makes you wonder why Western stuff is that bad.

Now, I am a great fan of DIY (GE-Rev) and I’m also a great fan of Kaizen. How is that possible? Have I lost my mind?

No I did not loose my mind (at least, that’s what I force myself to believe). The point being is: where lies the value adding quality of the product or service? In the case of saran wrap the difference between Kaizen and Good Enough lies in the hugely improved usability.  In the case of e.g. netbooks Good Enough is a result of Kaizen. An analogy of the latter case is that of guitar playing skills. Johnny Rotten plays guitar Good Enough to play punk music. His goal is not to entertain listeners with his amazing guitar skills but to entertain listeners with the raw and direct energy of punk rock music. On the other hand, I wouldn’t buy the ‘Johnny plays Rachmaninov’ record if I’m looking for a skilled performance of classical music. Similarly the goal of the netbook is not to provide users the most powerful, highest resolution computing experience but to be small, cheap and process simple tasks (e-mail, browsing, text editing).

In short, try the best you can be by continuous improvement but always within the context of your goals and environment.

There must be many people like me who are annoyed by voice-mail and vacation responders. I mean, for example, the vacation responder, if the system knows that you are on holiday I don not want the mail to be sent anyway. And I only want to call you when you are able and willing to pick up the phone. ‘Auto presence’ is a concept that could help increasing team and network communication efficiency. The concept is quite easy: the system knows your presence and only forwards communication efforts to you when it is relevant. The benefits are obvious: no more voice-mail, out of office responders.

Awareness Systems

Actually, modern collaboration platforms, like Google Wave, already include a lot of the auto presence concept. But what I do not like about systems like these is that they are a closed silo. If there is some relevant Wave activity for me, then I do not get an (email) notification. I first have to enter the Wave system and only then am I submerged in all the Google greatness. If I log out, I am back in the cold vast universe of the Internet. Similar things could be said about social networks like e.g. Elgg, Ning and Facebook. Inside the system there is a multitude of possibilities to communicate. Outside the system you are left with the traditional communication channels.
It would be cool to have some system where you would pick up your phone / skype, enter my number and see something like the footage below, combined with a message that I am ready for a real time, real life call:

If I’d not be available, you would see something like this (note the availability change at around 0:25):

That might sound obvious or ridiculous but the truth is that most office workers have mobile phones, which they bring anywhere, including meetings. Having a system that knows that you are in a ‘don’t disturb’ area (meeting room, client office, toilet) versus a ‘disturb area’ (your working place) would be a first step in increasing real time communication efficiency.

There are constant developments in communication efficiency so some of the annoyances / inefficiencies are already in the past. Some recent examples from Google:

• reply by chat
• forgotten attachments
• See which messages were sent right to you (vs messages where you are CC’ed)
• Send SMS text messages right from Gmail
• Sign out remotely (if you forget to sign out of a public computer: independence of space!)

The nature of communication

To really understand the problem of inefficient team and network communication, I think it is useful to take a closer look at the nature of that communication. First of all there is synchronous versus asynchronous communication.

synchronous:

• telephone
• skype
• instant messaging
• IRC (though you could argue it could be filed under asynchronous as well)
• …

asynchronous:

• email
• blog posts
• microblogging (twitter, identica, yammer)
• …

Second, in communication there are symmetric versus asymmetric relations. Until the advent of Twitter, the asynchronous relations in communication we knew of were traditional print (including books, magazines, news papers but also posters, bulletin boards etc) and web 1.0. Web 2.0 made asymmetric relations possible but not commonplace. In Facebook or LinkedIn, for example, you connect to people with mutual consent (I send you a request, you approve it). Twitter was one of the first asymmetric communication platforms. You can follow anyone you want without their approval (set aside the Cro-Magnons protecting their tweets).

Apart from the technological solutions from the first half of this post I think there is  a wealth of opportunities and possibilities in asynchronous, asymmetric communication. The real solution to inefficient communication is not in curing symptoms (like the technical solutions above) but in changing the way we think about communication. The problem is we are still approaching tools like Twitter from our traditional communication paradigm. I strongly believe there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we think about communication. Such a shift would make the current problems in communication and network efficiency obsolete. Asynchronous, asymmetric tools like Twitter makes such a shift possible. Now we only have to do it!

I will write about that in another blog post: The Twitter iceberg; working towards a paradigm shift in online communication.

Note: it’s really strange recording and watching yourself writing a blog post

I concluded my post on the boundary between private and professional life with:

life is easy, just do the things you like with nice people

I will take that as a starting point for this post. Second, the title is a bit strange because everybody will acknowledge that if you work in a noisy room which is too hot, a shouting boss with an alcohol problem and a colleague keeping his beloved pet skunk in the office, will of course influence your performance negatively. So I rephrase the title slightly into: how to optimize a workspace for performance. Therefore we first have to define performance.

Performance

First let’s be clear about performance. In this post I will be talking about knowledge worker performance. Not how many bricks you can lay per hour or how many articles you can scan per minute at the cashier. I assume that knowledge worker’s performance is best when you do things you like with nice people.

How then, can we optimize a workspace for performance taking into account we want to do nice things with nice people?

Workspace

Again I would like to stress that I will not be discussing the ergonomics of the workspace. There’s a science for that, figure it out yourself and make yourself physically comfortable.

First make your workspace independent of space and time. Being independent of space and time makes you free and puts you in control. Contemporary technologies make it trivial for knowledge workers to be independent of space. You don’t have to physically be in a corporate office anymore to execute your work. You just connect your laptop via VPN to the company network and you have all your companies IT facilities at hand. Cloud based applications like Google Docs or Mindmeister make real time collaboration over the internet a breeze. You just need a mobile, internet enabled device to plug into your virtual office workspace and of you go.

Being physically independent of space also allows you to take control over your own working hours. Your job shouldn’t dictate you to be at the office from 9 to 17, your job should dictate you to finish that document, deliver that code or visualise that new design. How and when you do that is (should be) irrelevant to your boss.

By not being forced to commute to that gray office through endless traffic jams with it’s terrible coffee (dear bosses of the world: coffee being free doesn’t make it taste better) you can decide when the perfect moment  there is to perform.

Second, optimize the relationship between you and your co-workers. As said, I passionately believe that by doing things with nice people, the actual things you do are really almost irrelevant. Motivation also becomes irrelevant. You will always be motivated to work with nice people, no matter what you do. I’d rather dig graves all day with my good friend then being the first man on Mars with Geert Wilders.

To find good people to work with might be one of the toughest challenges in your life. Intuitively most people know who they like. But there can always be hidden gems. As a rule of thumb I always look at the type and quality of connections between myself and others. That connection might be intellectual, humour, emotional, interests, motivational, political etcetra. So, for example, I find it very frustrating to work with someone who is intellectually on a totally different level. Also, I cannot imagine working with a (hidden) racist, even if she is super smart and very funny. Good people to work with are close to you on lots of levels.

Sometimes you are forced to work with not so nice people (clients, bosses). In that case, try to look for the connection that brings you closest and try to build from there. Also, please note that I do not advocate to try to collect and army of brainless worshippers around you. It is good to differ in opinion and have heated discussions to let fresh ideas emerge. Just make sure the heat is generated for the right reasons.

Freedom!

Well then, the recipe for happiness I proposed in my earlier post has just gotten elaborated with two new ingredients:

1. take control of your professional life by striving to make your workspace independent of space and time

2. try to minimize the distance between you and your beloved co-workers

Today’s technology makes these things quite easy (and cheap) to achieve. Fear, on the other hand, living in the heads of the decision makers, makes sure that for most of us freedom will be an utopia for long to come.

Creating a design concept for an e-learning platform like Moodle is not easy.  Whenever I find myself at a difficult task, the first thing I do is make it easier by defining and possibly narrowing the universe of discourse. Here we go.

Instructors and participants

The first condition I set is that the app is an addition to a normal Moodle install. Therefore I decided that administrative tasks like user management, installing blocks and modules, course design or quiz authoring are not the focus of the app. Those tasks should be done in the normal web interface. The mobile application focuses on two particular roles: participants (students) and instructors (teachers, facilitators).

Activities

Second, I think that Moodle is not a course based, user based or content based platform. Moodle is activity based. The heart of Moodle is a multitude of learning activities enabling users to interact with the system or each other. The focus of my design is on activities.

Mobile

Third, it is an application for mobile devices. Giving that some thought made me realise that there is an ambiguous relationship between Moodle and a mobile device. On the one hand a mobile device puts constraints on the design of the application (mainly screen size). On the other hand a mobile device provides new opportunities for Moodle as an e-learning platform. Being mobile makes learning becoming more independent of time and space. You don’t have to be physically behind a computer or in a class room anymore to learn (space). And you can decide to do learning activities whenever you feel like it or when it’s most comfortable for you to do so (time). Moreover, most smartphones being equipped with GPS, there is a whole new world of possibilities and opportunities for new location based activities.

Screen mockups

Here are three simple mockups I created with balsamiq. The first mockup shows the home screen displaying a scrollable list of recent and  / or upcoming activities. Like when someone replied to your forum post, a link to the post will show up high. Or when there is an assignment dead line coming, that assignment will get higher on the list when the dead line is nearing. Furthermore, there is a calendar button for planning and overview and a grade button. The second mockup shows an example forum activity. I modeled the forum to microblogging (Facebooks Wall, Twitter, Elgg’s Wire). On each activity page there are two additional buttons: calendar and resources. The resources button links to informational content like text documents, scorm packages, web pages, databases etc. The third mockup is a simple example of a location based quiz.

Note that the screens are course independent. You might want to show a small course indicator on the activity buttons.

Synopsis

My design concept for a mobile Moodle application can be summarised as follows: keep it simple. The app is activity centered and focuses on participant and instructor roles. Being a mobile app, the often heard adage ‘learning anyplace, adage,anywhere’ is getting one step closer.

Disclaimer

I realise that in this design I did not take into account accessibility. Knowing that the Moodle web application puts a lot of emphasis on accessibility I apologise for that shortcoming. Besides that I didn’t include any ‘helper’ navigational elements like a home button or help icons.

Please, if you ever read a book in your life, and you found this article interesting, sign up to goodreads.com, you can find me and Hans there as well

Reflecting on the title of this post, none of these books actually caused a radical change or severely disrupted the course of my life. Sure is that without these books my current me would have been different. Another certainty is that these books are changing with me. These books shaped me into who I am but at the same time they change themselves as I am the one who values them. I don’t exist without these books and these books don’t exist without me. That kind of symbiotic evolution is what I love about reading. Me and my books; we got each other in a loving stranglehold.

Please note that for the Dutch books I kept the original Dutch title. It feels very strange for me to translate the title to English. Moreover, I don’t believe there are English translations of these works.

1. The Sea Of Fertility - Yukio Mishima
Cheat number 1: The Sea Of Feritility is a tetralogy. The four novels include Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn and The Decay of the Angel. This is Mishima’s Magnum Opus. If I have to summarise this or all of Mishima’s work in one word it would be: decay. Throughout his work Mishima explores the themes of Buddhism, Shinto, nihilism, beauty, post WWII Japan, reincarnation, knowledge and action, truth and suicide. One of his famous quotes is “To know and not to act is no to know” There are so many layers and levels in these four novels that you can just keep reading and re-reading them. Worthy notice is that after the completion of the final work of The Sea Of Fertility, Mishima comitted seppuku, ritual suicide; history is a record of destruction.

First read:
I still clearly remember buying the first two novels of the tetralogy. I was in Jakarta in a mall looking for something to read in the air plane back home. (If you’ve ever been to Indonesia you probably noticed that you hardly see anyone reading a book. I always wondered if there was no one reading books because there are no book shops, or there are no book shops because no one reads.) So I finally found this department store which had a book section. Even an English book section! Well, English book shelf. I never heard of Mishima but judging the back cover it shouldn’t be too bad. After reading one page in the plane it bored the hell out of me. I stopped reading the book and instead watched a Harry Potter movie (Harry Potter movies and body wrecking air plane travels are inextricably connected in my life, having done Harry Potter nor air plane travel any favour). Anyway, the cursed Mishima’s stayed in my book shelf for about 2 years or so until I had absolutely nothing to read any more at home and thus finally gave them another chance. Blessed be that day.

2. Firefly – Haruki Murakami
Firefly is actually a short story and a not novel or a book. Murakami based his later novel Norwegian Wood on this story. Although I truly enjoyed reading Norwegian Wood, I never really liked it as much as Firefly. Firefly has everything that makes a short story really stand out. It’s crisp, it’s got lots of room for interpretation and it’s fragile. How many writers can write fragile stories? Remarkably, this story doesn’t have typical Murakami ingredients like magic-realism or pop-culture references. It’s very focussed on human relationships. For me, this story expresses Japan as Japan really is: the things not said, the things implied, distance, humbleness, to be retreated. Action and consequence.

First read:
On a cold, cold winter night at around 12 o’clock lying in my bed just about to sleep. Reading Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of short stories, I thought “One more paragraph of the next story and then I’ll sleep”. That next story was Firefly. I didn’t put the book down till I finished the story,

3. Een Uitzinnige Liefde – Bob den Uyl
Bob den Uyl is not really a well known writer in Holland. Too bad for the people who never heard of him because he is the funniest Dutch author in my opinion. If you can appreciate ironic, sarcastic observations of the meaninglessness of life, Bob den Uyl is the man. Well, I, for one, based my whole being on ironic, sarcastic observations of the meaninglessness of life. That’s why Bob and me go along pretty well. As a bonus, Bob is fond of biking, just like me. Life is without purpose so why not read one of den Uyl’s collection of short stories. If you’re finished with ‘Een uitzinnige liefde’ try ‘Gods wegen zijn duister en zelden aangenaam’, ‘Vreemde verschijnselen’ or ‘Een zwervend bestaan’ for equal reading pleasure.

First read:
Easy, I picked the oeuvre of Bob den Uyl as my reading list subject for my high school Dutch exams. So I read all his books in 1994/1995. I guess I was one of the few who actually enjoyed reading for his exams.

4. De Man Die Werk Vond -  Herman Brusselmans
Three words: boredom, fear and loneliness. Brusselmans’ best work in my opinion is this early novel of his alter ego Louis Tinner and his days as a librarian in a Brussels Ministry’s library. If you truly still believe life has a purpose, if you still believe there’s a deeper meaning in things, please read this novel and you’ll  be cured for the rest of your life. To top it all of, Brusselmans writes about his misery and pitiful life in a lovely ironic and sarcastic way. Plenty of laughs on the journey to the back cover as well then!

(Did I hear Gerard Reve? Anyone said Reve (‘De Vierde Man’)?)

First read:
Now, there’s a blank in my memory. It feels like I read this book 20 years ago but looking at the publishing date of the edition I got, it can’t be more than 3 or 4 years ago.

5. The Plague – Albert Camus
Of all the philosophers I read or read about until today, Albert Camus stands out as being the closest to my personal thought. The crucial point being that he acknowledges that life in itself is without meaning. Then, if that is true, knowing life is without meaning while still we greatly value it (the absurd paradox of life), why don’t we kill ourselves? That would be the rational consequence to take. However, Camus stated that meaning, though fragile and unstable, can be created through your own actions, interpretations and decisions. I myself love this absurdness of life where meaning is constantly challenged by death and decay. Let it be clear that I am an admirer of the complete works of Camus. In The Plague Camus covers the major themes of exile and separation, solidarity and community. Quoting the English wikipedia entry on Camus: “only by making the choice to fight an irreversible epidemic are people able to create the ever-lacking meaning to a life destined for execution the moment of its creation.”

First read:
Late spring 2006 in Hveragerdi, Iceland. I joined my wife on one of her fieldwork campaigns. Iceland, like Indonesia, is one of the countries which make you think different about life. Add to that a healthy dose of Camus, 160 km of biking through beautiful windy plains, plenty of free time, horrible food and no alcohol and you got your character defining experience.

6. A Feast in the Garden – György Konrád
Konrad is a Hungarian author which I got to know through a tv documentary by Wim Kayzer. Especially the interview with Konrad impressed me a lot so I started reading his novels. I especially like the dualism in Konrad’s work. Quoting (poorly translated by me): “(…) at this moment the duality of everything. Saint and hedonist at the same time. Spontaneity and the beauty of decadence; the attraction of the forbidden.”

First read:
Fall 2004 in Fuji, Japan. One of the enormous pile of books I always drag along on my foreign trips. Fall Japan = late summer Holland; around 20-25 degrees Celsius great food and the most mind twisting country you’ll ever visit. The country actually really suits Konrad’s style of writing. Write and wrong, black and white, plastic and authenticity live right alongside there.

Cheat number 2,3,4,5 and 6: of all the authors mentioned above (including Mishima) I actually love all their work. Reading more than one novel of an author provides new perspectives and insights on previously read work and on his genre as whole. Combine that with your personal growth as a reader and you get a self strenthening spiral.

Bukowski, Deelder, Dostoyevksi, Celine, Verhulst, Lanoye, Selby, Nooteboom,Sartre, Hermans, Mulisch, Pirandello, Kafka,Eco, Slauerhoff, Lucebert, Vlek, Hemmingway, Miller, Proust, Dazai and all the countless others: sorry, I could only pick six…

Poetry is greater than prose

The bums have won

Reading review and comparison sites I found out that Kodak also jumped the band wagon with it’s ZiX series. Comparing the Flip and the Kodak most sites agreed that the Kodak Zi8 was the gadget to have. I bought one for 155 Euro (including shipping) and the mailman delivered it to me in one week.

It’s exactly what I wanted: a camera producing good quality video (HD 1080p though you can also opt for 720p to save space) and easy to operate. I like gadgets for which you don’t need a manual. The whole thing is just self explaining. Hit the camera button and you’re in camera mode. Hit the red button and it starts recording. Hit the red button again and it stops recording. Nice. Plain and simple for a video amateur like myself.

The thing I maybe liked even more is the extra stuff you get with it:

I’m quite happy with my purchase. Now I just have to get expert at video editing.

Verdict

Maradonna as a player: easy to use, lightweight, connectivity, video quality

Maradonna as a trainer: butt ugly sticker (though it peels of easily), no SD card included

Then came Google with Android. Android is an open platform. I like open platforms. But I didn’t like T-Mobile’s G1, which was the only Android phone for a long time in Europe. So I had to wait a few more months and be patient and then there came HTC with it’s new Android phone. Fine, I bought one, I got one, I’m happy and I’m satisfied. Finally I have an internet enabled hand held, pocket size open platform. Great. Now I can be even more productive.

For comparison, here’s my old phone and my new phone together. A small step for mankind but a major leap for me:

When I returned from the shop I figured I’d be the whole evening editing text files and configuring the devide in Linux. But…

Ubuntu

…the days of swearing at your Linux box and threatening to throw it out of the window are over! Here’s Ubuntu 9.04 and my precious new toy worked out of the box! That’s truly amazing to me but I do realise that that is actually what you should expect.

It works!

After playing with it for an evening I produced my first crappy result which is the header on top of this page. Looking back at it after a week I decided my blog theme looks like crap. So why not make a nice project out of it? I will gradually update the blog theme and report on the progress in this blog. As a starter, here’s the screenies for bleeding pre-alpha version (at time of posting it’s actually the current layout):

life is easy, just do the things you like with nice people

Luckily, since I changed jobs, I am filled with tons of energy and a massive amount of ideas flooded my brain. I decided to start setting up projects and ask my friends if they would like to join. So far it has been a great success.

Here’s a short overview of the projects I set up and am working on right now:

Geospatial mashups and usability website

No name yet. The idea is to do mini-projects related to the use and abuse of GIS and geo-spatial data in organisations and institutes, the web and the government. We will write about how to make nice maps, how to improve crappy maps, how to use open source software for your mapping needs and how geo-spatial data can increase the usability of your organisation’s website or service. I do this project with my way back friend who is working in a GIS job for the Dutch government.

www.bikes-r-us.nl

In my spare time I like to ride around on a bicycle (race,CX,MTB,fixie,SS, whatever). This site will host tutorials and how-to videos on how to repair your own bike. Aside from that we will give our own comments on the recent biking news and events and scandals. I do this site with my crazy friend from the biking club.

Secret project X

The guy which replaced me at my previous job in Stoas is such a nice guy that I thought it was a shame we never worked together. But hey, It’s not 1986 any more, there’s the internet and since when does the guy that’s paying you decide who you collaborate with? So we thought of a great idea and currently we’re implementing it. I can’t discuss any details for now yet but when we’re in beta I’ll write a nice post about it.

www.janjanssenclassic.nl

Major biking event in July in the middle of the Netherlands organised by my biking club. I will rebuild the site using Drupal and it’s e-commerce modules.

www.tcw79.nl

The site of my biking club. I will rebuild it using Drupal, integrate with our existing phpBB and provide a richer internet experience for my club mates.

www.keru-korosu.org

I registered this url somewhere like 6 years ago but never did anything substantial with it. Liking the tumblr.com idea very much I’ll make a Wordpress mashup on that. Topics include why you shouldn’t go to Starbucks or McDonalds, music I like, guerilla art and subversive poetry. Some of my friends are contributing content.

www.burntheforest.org

Having been employed in the tropical forest monitoring business for about 6 years, you get really cynical and sarcastic about the void between the political and the real world. This site will be dedicated to all the blabla lobbyists and conference junkies. Expect serious politically incorrect content.

enryo.redcube.nl

The  blog of my wife which I maintain and sometimes write for. For the new year we plan to do Japanese cooking videos! And we’re thinking about making a ‘field-survival-guide for gaijin in Japan‘.

brndmp.redcube.nl

On this blog (brndmp) I will write about these projects, which tools I use, how the project teams are set up and how we collaborate.

www.redcube.nl

and last but not least, the site of the RedCube Foundation itself. RedCube are just a bunch of friends who do some here and there consultancy and web development. I’ll work on the site if I can find the time.

So there you go. Some of the projects already started and I must say it’s really rewarding to be creative and productive. I love learning new things and I find that being productive is a major catalyst in my personal learning.

Reflecting on the title of the post: that was one of the questions which occupied me the last year or so. I see all these creative and nice people around me; how to collaborate and make them productive and actually do something? I defined this problem as ‘collaboration in loosely organised distributed teams’. Distributed because you don’t share a physical location. And loosely organised because there is no economic or professional incentive which ‘forces’ you to collaborate.

The above projects are my answer to the problem. The coming year will tell me if the answer was correct and if I can continue to the next round. I the meantime I’m gonna have lot’s of fun.

I’m not interested in another Swami theory, so please …

Hold your horses, we’re talking about this wikipedia page not this one; remote sensing is the small or large-scale acquisition of information of an object or phenomenon, by the use of either recording or real-time sensing device(s) that are wireless, or not in physical or intimate contact with the object (such as by way of aircraft, spacecraft, satellite, buoy, or ship).

So you’re taking pictures while not actually being there?

Kind of.  Though they’re nothing like the pictures you take with your pocket camera. On the other hand they might be very much like those pictures.

What do you mean?

First, of all, in the case of earth observation remote sensing, the sensor platform is often a satellite. That means that the sensor is at a huge distance from the object of interest compared to you taking a picture of your grandma. Sometimes the latter is referred to as ‘Close Sensing‘ though that is not a common term. It’s used for hand held sensing devices.

Ok, like, when I want to take a city view picture, I climb the highest tower or peak in the area to get a good overview.

Exactly. But you’ll also notice that in those pictures it’s not easy to distinguish far away features like faces or distant bill boards. That’s because the spatial resolution of your camera is only so many megapixel. Likewise the spatial resolution of a satellite sensor determines the size of the smallest object still recognizable in the image (notice how I sneakily swift from your camera picture to a satellite image?). Some satellites have a spatial resolution of 1km which doesn’t make them very suitable for e.g. mapping small rivers.

I see, so to map small rivers they need higher resolution sensors which means more data which means smaller areas being observed.

Yes. Moreover, when you take a picture at night, you see nothing provided you don’t use any artificial lighting. The same applies to the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum of optical satellite sensors.

The visible what?

The electromagnetic spectrum is the range of possible wavelengths (or frequencies) of electromagnetic radiation. Electromagnetic radiation is what we measure with our sensors (your camera and my satellite sensor). The visible range is generally referred to as light or the things we see with our eyes. Your camera usually only has three channels or bands: red, green and blue. Satellite sensors often have a whole bunch of bands including infrared and ultraviolet. The number of bands is usually called the spectral resolution. The sensitivity of the sensor of measuring radiation intensity is usually called radiometric resolution. Your camera would call this colour depth (an 16bit camera can see more colours than an 8bit one).

Aha, so the more bands and the higher the radiometric resolution the more you can see?

True. Conveniently, objects on the earth all have their own typical spectral signature which are collected in spectral libraries. That makes it possible to identify and classify remotely observed objects into thematic maps.

And what about this optical thing in sensors you talked about before?

In remote sensing there are basically two types of sensors: active and passive. The most commonly known and easiest to interpret are active sensors which measure detect natural radiation that is emitted or reflected by the object or surrounding area being observed. Reflected sunlight is the most common source of radiation measured by passive sensors (wikipedia). All optical sensors are passive. Active sensors have their own source of illumination. That makes them independent of sunlight which is very handy because you can also measure at night. The most common active sensing method for earth observation is with imaging radar, more specifically Synthetic Aperture Radar.

So with radar satellites you can ALWAYS make pictures, that’s awesome!

That is awesome. Moreover because radar waves are long (paradoxically, they are called microwaves) they can see through clouds. Those two features make imaging radar satellites very suitable for monitoring purposes. Like monitoring tropical forests. In case of monitoring one more aspect is important which is temporal resolution. That is the frequency of flyovers of satellites.

Radar can see through clouds? That’s BS, I know a website which measures clouds with radar! Moreover, that temporal resolution stuff also puzzles me because on that same website there is continuous near real time information.

Very smart. I agree that it must be confusing me telling you that radar van see through clouds and all the weather guys watching their cloud monitoring radars. The answer is easy: radar bands which detects clouds have a shorter wavelength than radar which can see through clouds (typical bands are X,C,L and P band for imaging radar and K band for cloud radar). The near real time information is provided by the fact that lots of weather satellites are geostationary. That means they are constantly watching one part of the earth. Their temporal resolution is thus infinite.

Great, then lets only build imaging radar satellites from now on and put them in geostationary orbit to infinitely monitor everything!

Yes let’s do that. You pay. Honestly, imaging radar is nice, very nice. Because it has an active sensor you can even do more cool things like interferometry and polarimetry but we’ll not go into that now. The ‘downside’ is that radar waves are most suitable for measuring geophysical characteristics of objects. If you want to know about the biochemical characteristics, you’ll have to use shorter wave lengths like those in passive optical satellites. Another disadvantage of radar images is that it they more difficult to interpret and classify than optical images. An example is the foreshortening effect of high objects like mountains caused in radar images by radar parallax (hey, where did I hear that term before?).

OK, so now we have all this fancy imagery. What’s next, what to do with it?

Rondonia, Brazil, 2006

Rondonia, Brazil, 1995

That is a very sensible question. Every time one of the major space agencies (NASA, ESA or JAXA) launches a new remote sensing satellite, they setup downstream programs offering opportunities to commercial businesses and / or research institutes to come up with useful applications. Examples of these applications can be: Water Quality Mapping and Monitoring, Drought Monitoring, Tropical Forest Mapping and Monitoring.

One of the most commonly known uses of remotely sensed satellite imagery are Google Earth and Google Maps (I find it quite ridiculous to link to any Google site. If you can’t find a Google site, it’s time to see a doctor). In Google Earth you can very nicely see the concept of spatial resolution when zooming in into a place. Moreover, you can see the downside of optical sensors in permanently clouded areas of the globe (e.g. the rain forest on Indonesian Papua).

I think I get the major picture but then how about those movies where the CIA tracks the bad guys running across roof tops in real time using satellites?

You should now be able to understand that that is still far from possible;
1. The resolution (spatial, radiometric) they usually show in such scenes is amazingly high (face recognition anyone?). While the military has some quite advanced high resolution sensors, it’s (still) impossible to stream the amount of data in real time for that kind of resolution from a satellite to a ground station.
2. Look outside right now. What do you see? That’s right, clouds. And we just learned that optical sensors can’t see through clouds making these scenes quite ridiculous.

So it’s actually not always true what happens in the movies?

This topic was supposed to be about remote sensing!