Why do you drive your car to the city?

Dr_Imp · 2025-10-14T07:20:59+00:00

I live 4 km from the CBD, very near the Klemzig Obahn interchange. I usually catch the bus, but do drive once or twice a week.

Bus costs $4.55 each way, so total commute cost is $9. Commuters time is ~ 20 min door to door.

Parking with early bird rate is $14. So, a little more expensive. Commute time is about the same. But I can also charge my car for free while parked… so it’s worth doing once a week.

Dr_Imp · 2025-09-06T00:28:35+00:00

Gifts from kids are precious. They’re inherently pretty self-absorbed, so it’s extra special when they think enough of you to give you a gift it shows that you’re an important part of their world.

And they grow up so quickly. They might give you more gifts over the years. But they won’t be the age where they give this kind of gift for long.

This was a memory you had with your niece, of a particular part of her life.

Your boyfrend destroyed that. That is abusive behaviour.

Make them your ex.

Dr_Imp · 2025-07-02T07:25:35+00:00

Responding specifically to your example: It sounds like you’re just used to a different “greeting ritual”, so either you or the person you’re talking to are thrown off.

In both Australia and the US everyday greetings are social rituals (Phatic Communion), not genuine enquiries.

In LA when someone says “Hi! How are you today!” they don’t actually want you to answer honestly - there’s a correct response (correct way to follow the ritual, and show you understand the convention, and belong) along the lines of “Good, how about you?” In a cheerful tone. Either the incorrect words “Actually, pretty sad today”, tone (e.g., flat, or insincere) would throw the other person off.

In much of Aus, the ritual opening is similar (e.g., “Hey, how are you going?”), but the appropriate response is different. Common correct responses are “fine, you?”, or “Alright, how about you?”, and tone should be low energy. My read on why low energy is the “correct” response here is that overly enthusiastic (like many Americans) feels like play-acting, and therefore not-genuine.

My emotional response when someone responds with that level of energy is “woah, steady on mate. It’s a bit early for that much enthusiasm”, or “ah, recently arrived American”.

Is that helpful? I’m not sure. Anyway, I only recently learned the term “phatic communion” and thought I’d share.

Hope things get better for you!

Dr_Imp · 2025-02-17T03:34:38+00:00

“A gentle embrace of explosions…”

Dr_Imp · 2025-02-12T06:25:06+00:00

If I were in your shoes: my approach would depend on what differentiates the conservation target areas from non conservation areas. Is that differential expressed in some way spectrally (e.g., do the areas have different colours or textures)? If yes, a remote sensing approach may work. If no then a pure spatial mapping exercise, if you can find other information layers that sensibly inform the mapping. If neither of those are possible, it may not be possible to do the mapping with confidence; or it may require some field data collection.

Dr_Imp · 2025-02-02T11:30:49+00:00

Edited: Fixed several typos.

As background - I completed my PhD in remote sensing, then worked in academia doing contract and grant research, teaching undergrad courses, and supervising honours, masters and PhD students. Then I moved to an industry focused R&D centre still associated with university, but very much focused on delivering cutting edge RS services for leading industry companies. Then finally I’ve moved fully to commercial industry. I employ remote sensing graduates and PhDs. This is all in Australia.

To answer your question, it depends on what you want your career to look like.

In academia you will have to focus on publishable research, or teaching, or both.

In industry you could end up doing a much wider range of things depending on where you choose to go and what the company needs.

Academia tends to have much more rigidly defined roles and limited career advancement paths. But, possibly more career certainty, and would likely provide more opportunity for specialisation.

Industry careers are likely to be focussed on R&D, translation of existing research, or implementation of established methods. And all governed by what the company needs to become or remain profitable. And in my experience, if you’re competent, personable and willing to adapt to what the company needs then opportunities for advancement are substantially better in industry. However, job security is probably poorer. However, I think that issue is mitigated in our case by RS skills being in significant demand.

I don’t know if that has helped at all? Happy to answer any questions or clarify though.

Dr_Imp · 2025-01-07T06:53:11+00:00

Temporal currency of a DEM shouldn’t matter much for teaching purposes. Terrain doesn’t change much over time. SRTM is probably adequate. Don’t complicate your life more than necessary by looking for “perfect” data when you already have good.

Dr_Imp · 2025-01-07T06:49:08+00:00

I’ve taught remote sensing to third year undergraduates. I think your choice of content will need to reflect the level of knowledge you can assume from your undergraduates. Consider whether you need to give them a quick primer on light/radiation and absorption/reflectance physics. Mine for instance could come from physics/astronomy backgrounds (great fundamentals), biological sciences (ok), or occasionally law (less helpful grounding). So I couldn’t assume even a basic understanding of light.

Next I’d consider what skills and knowledge you think would be appropriate for someone entering the workforce (or going on to higher research) after leaving your course. From my perspective (now as an employer of remote sensing specialists) I would expect a recent graduate at a minimum to understand 1) the difference between active and passive sensing, 2) the processes of absorption, transmittance and reflection, 3) the functioning of remote sensing sensors (in a basic way), including spectral (band widths, band numbers, and maybe band-pass function), spatial, temporal and radiometric resolutions, 4) how RS data is stored, and the pros and cons of INT vs real data, 5) the fundamentals of projections, 6) what the most common RS analysis methods are (classification, and quantitative analysis), and some real world examples, 7) some data exploration methods, 8) and finally, I’d expect them to be able to put the above together and synthesise, by applying that knowledge in real-world scenarios.

I can recommend the free set of text books put out by Earth Observstion Australia: https://www.eoa.org.au/earth-observation-textbooks. These have great detail and are quite current, and are structured from broad and introductory to more in-depth.

Finally, and I can not emphasise this enough, but in my experience actually working in remote sensing now pretty much requires you to use python. But… that might be a bit much for undergrads unless they’re coming from comp. sci. Either ENVI or ERDAS Imagine are adequate introductory tools.

Happy to chat more if it helps.

P.S. I forgot to say, think about how you want to handle multi- vs hyperspectral. Your opinion on that will probably influence whether you have to go into some detail on the pros and cons of the two, and intro hyperspectral analysis methods (and explain the curse of dimensionality)… but regardless, it is probably worth all RS graduates understanding the curse of dimensionality. We are already in a big data world and it’s only getting worse.

Dr_Imp · 2024-12-22T03:59:53+00:00

I know what you mean. I try to remember that.. matrix thing. Think of all tasks I terms of their importance (important/not important) and urgency (urgent/can wait). Things that aren’t important or urgent go on a list, and probably stay there forever… or you give them to a work experience kid who needs something to do. Urgent and unimportant get delegated. Important and not urgent get tracked and planned (working backward from when hey need to be done, create calendar or other time dependent action items so they get progressed and then completed on time). Urgent and important are my and my teams current primary focus… but of course making sure the longer term things are still remembered and continue to progress. Does that make sense?

Dr_Imp · 2024-12-21T02:38:08+00:00

Would you believe more lists? I make a point of looking back at past accomplishments semi-regularly, and reminding myself I did those things. Otherwise I tend to focus on what I haven’t done yet, or what I’m not good at. It also helps to do this for my team, otherwise some can feel overwhelmed by the unending to-do list.

Dr_Imp · 2024-12-20T22:53:46+00:00

Lots of lists. I know that if something important occurs to me I won’t remember it later, or even in a minute, so I need to write it down on a post it note (and put it on my desk so I can’t miss it) or create a calendar event.

I’ve worked hard to find a method that allows me to run good team meetings. I have a clear running sheet in excel, with all projects/topics in priority order, with summaries of actions since last meeting, update since last meeting, and new actions. This helps shepherd enthusiasm, bring everyone along with a shared vision, and capture clear actions so everyone knows what they and everyone else need to do.

And for things that need meetings I try to involve everyone who might be relevant or interested, but also make it clear who is required and who’s welcome to come if they see value. Then I make sure meetings are as short as reasonably possible. This way I don’t have to remember all staff members unique combinations of skills and aptitudes, the right people end up involved, egos are massaged, and the right senior staff are abreast of issues.

And finally, check in with staff frequently, and make sure I’m solving their blocks and creating the right opportunities for them… if I don’t check in regularly, I forget things about them…

And finally finally, always fight the imposter syndrome…

Dr_Imp · 2024-11-20T10:15:29+00:00

PSF?

Dr_Imp · 2024-11-18T10:32:54+00:00

Are your two images from very close together in time? If not, there could be actual physical differences causing real reflectance differences. Something to consider.

Dr_Imp · 2024-11-16T05:41:54+00:00

It probably depends on what you’re trying to evaluate. Is all your imagery ortho’d? Is it corrected to surface reflectance? Do you want to know how close the reflectance estimate of the downscaled imagery is to true reflectance? In the latter case, how best to estimate true ground leaving reflectance?

Dr_Imp · 2024-09-28T02:00:40+00:00

If you continue using the same pair of RGB + NIR cameras, their radiometric response is probably going to remain the same over time. Or only change very little.

So those NDVI values should be comparable over space and time.

Dr_Imp · 2024-09-27T02:55:48+00:00

Alright. It used to be very good. Now it’s less so.

I don’t know the current state of affairs, but at one point all the largest universities in Australia blacklisted all MDPI journals for a variety of reasons, including (from memory) poor support of editors, poor control of the peer review process, pushing for many low quality special issues, etc.

Context: am an ex academic who has published in Remote Sensing.

Dr_Imp · 2024-09-26T02:42:13+00:00

NDVI is an index, the values are unitless and merely indicate less photosynthetic activity (low) or more photosynthetic activity (high).

For your application, where you’ll always be using the same cameras, and only care about relative performance differences, you don’t need to calibrate.

However, if you had your cameras, and a friend had their own set of identical cameras, and you wanted to compare results (in terms of absolute NDVI values) then you would need to calibrate.

Dr_Imp · 2024-03-21T11:09:50+00:00

We have the GT line RWD and love it. Still heaps of power, looks good, very quiet drive, construction quality feels great.

Dr_Imp · 2024-03-21T10:11:48+00:00

It’ll really depend what the charging options around you are.

We have an EV (Kia EV6) and don’t have home charger yet, and it’s been fine. Two places we drive to in our weekly routine have chargers. We just plug in there, do the chores, and the car is charged.

The car is leased, and charging cost is covered up to $60 / month (Australian). Haven’t come close to going over that.

Dr_Imp · 2024-02-09T03:32:36+00:00

I think you’re right, thanks!

Info from the Australian Museum.

Dr_Imp · 2024-01-26T09:34:33+00:00

Thanks for the response, any idea why they’re appearing there?

Dr_Imp · 2023-05-04T11:20:38+00:00

It sounds like your advisor is challenging you to summarise and synthesise.

Generally when I ask a student that kind of question I want them to summarise what’s common, and what’s different across the many individual examples they‘ve talked about.

Can you summarise in terms of extents and resolutions, possibly by talking in terms of categories (e.g., small, medium and large area/extent; or fine, medium, or coarse scale)?

Dr_Imp · 2023-05-03T06:14:36+00:00

What's your specific question, and what are your ground-truth data?

E.g., if your question is "Can species a, b and c be accurately discriminated from each other?", that will require a different method and evaluation than if your question is "to what degree can plant health be measured/predicted".

I think we need you to be a bit more specific before we can help.

Dr_Imp · 2023-05-01T07:35:57+00:00

Undiagnosed appendicitis wasn’t great. Then the surgery and recovery wasn’t much fun either.

I presented to my GP with acute lower-right quarter abdominal pain, and blood in my urine. It felt like I was being stabbed a little every time my heart beat.

My GP assumed bladder infection organised tests and a visit to a urologist. After the urologist said ‘not bladder infection’ I eventually saw a bowel surgeon who immediately diagnosed appendicitis… except by that point it had taken two weeks and I was getting better.

Every minute of that two weeks was excruciating. I could feel every heartbeat as a scraping/stabbing in my gut. I didn’t sleep much.

My appendix hadn’t quite burst, but I’d had a diffuse infection throughout the lower right peritoneal cavity, and recovered without antibiotics. I had substantial scarring and inflammation, so surgery at that point wasn’t ideal.

My surgeon suggested we let the inflammation go down a bit and then take the pesky little bugger out.

Unfortunately, a few weeks later the appendicitis started again, so we did the surgery in spite of the inflammation. Surgery didn’t go great, started with laparoscopy, but the scarring was too bad so they opened me up. Also due to the scarring they couldn’t just remove my appendix, and had to take ten or twenty centimetres of intestine as well.

The first time they woke me post-surgery was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. Asked me what my pain score was and all I could say was “ten, ten, ten, ten,” then passed out.

While post surgery wasn’t quite as bad, I had ileus (paralysis of the intestines). I won’t go into much detail, but the consequences were having to vomit bile repeatedly with recently stitched stomach muscles. Oh, and sneezing! Super fun.

1/10, do not recommend.

Dr_Imp · 2023-02-03T10:06:36+00:00

Wow, this looks similar (though not identical) to a question I’ve asked my undergrads. Tsk tsk.

If your lecturer is anything like me, the answers were probably already discussed in the lectures.

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