 Greetings from a cloudy day in Melbourne. I'm looking forward to the winter passing soon. I just want to say first of all congratulations on getting through the orientation and getting things set up for the course. I know it can take a little bit of time, so I hope it all went well. If not, let me know and make sure that things are on track so you're not messing around with this stuff as we get into the lessons. So here we are at the beginning of lesson one. I just wanted to sort of touch on some of the main things we'll be covering this week. Most of what we're going to be doing is really background stuff, emergency management on spatial data science and how the two sort of come together. So this is stuff we're going to be building on the whole course. So you have plenty of time to sort of work through the ideas and get your head around them. We'll start with some of the core concepts around how emergency management is considered. So things like the stages of disaster management from response to recovery to preparedness and the like. We'll then talk about some of the emerging trends in geographic information science and geography and geospatial. It's all sort of talked about in some different ways. But then narrow it down to what are the implications for emergency management of these things. We'll talk about emerging themes and this week we'll provide a bit of a background for and a listing I guess of all the topics that we'll be covering as we go through the course. Then you'll transition into a more focused consideration of some of the emerging ways that we're interacting with technology. And some of these are again quite familiar. There's going to be a little bit different and maybe we're not quite there yet technologically speaking but they're on the horizon. You'll take the material from the emerging themes and bring that into a discussion and we'll see how that goes. We'll get everybody sort of going and on the right schedule with developing some ideas there. The final thing is a set of readings and I've actually changed these recently. Before they focused really more on industry and government perspectives on geospatial. What I tried to do is add a few papers that deal more with the spatial big data science or the spatial data science or big data ideas that are kind of taking hold. So that you can sort of see how some of the technological issues we'll deal with sort of fit in with some of these broader technological changes in the light. Right so we'll end with a bit of a discussion around the term project so that will be introduced and you won't have to do anything really heavy this week on that but the idea is to get your head around the topics and sort of what you might want to do. Do you want something that's a bit more sort of technical and you're going to need data and you need to figure out where you're going to get it that kind of stuff or whether you really want to do something more at a higher level that maybe speaks to you know something you're doing at work or what not. So anyway so you get to get a chance to sort of think about that and for me to help clarify any issues and any of the parameters around those assignments. Okay well actually the final thing I would just mention is that as we go through this course we're undoubtedly going to encounter different natural disasters or human related disasters that are occurring around the world. So to the degree that you can it'd be great if you could sort of pay attention to what's going on and think about how the concepts that we're covering sort of play out in the real world particularly with regards to the resources that are available for responding to them how that varies I mean you know how well are sort of hurricanes and the light being addressed in the United States versus typhoons and other parts of the world. So just try to develop this sort of comparative view because there's certainly going to be lots of different disasters unfolding while we go through this course unfortunately. Okay well have a good week and feel free to get in touch anytime and yeah have a good time.