 This is Max Entman here at CSIS with Joey Booth. He's the executive director of the Stevenson Disaster Management Institute at Louisiana State University. And we're talking after the fourth session of the CSIS SDMI series on disaster management and emergency response. A very timely topic tonight about the earthquake and tsunami recovery in Japan. Joey, tell me what you thought were the key points from the discussion. Matt, the similarities between what New Orleans in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast went through after Katrina and what the Japanese culture is going through right now were striking. The same effects that I remember from five years ago, trying to recover the small business community, dealing with large numbers of evacuations, large areas of total devastation, large numbers of people in shelters, and the psychological impact on the community were all enormous issues that we had to deal with as well. And listening to what they're going through now and how strikingly similar that is and how we could probably do more to prepare ourselves worldwide to deal with these foreseeable, repeatable consequences. Joey, tell me a little bit more about what SDMI is doing to apply the lessons from state and federal crisis management to the international crisis. You know, we start off by looking at lessons learned, looking at the research and the data, looking at what happened in previous disasters and figuring out what can we do to recognize those trends early and cut them off and those foreseeable consequences that happen after disasters. What can we do to mitigate the incident, to mitigate the duration and intensity of these consequences and shorten that window and cause a quicker recovery? And we do that by research, looking at the data. We also do that with training, training responders to be more capable of responding quicker and being more effective in their jobs and supporting them with information to make better decisions. Joey Booth of the Stevenson Disaster Management Institute at Louisiana State University. You can watch the fourth session in full at csis.org or on iTunes U. Thanks so much, Joey.