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A partially filled flood detention pond under construction at the Woodridge Village construction site.

As it always does, Christmas is coming to Kingwood. But this year, for some residents whove been flooded, it wont be the same.

When Nancy Veras home in Kingwoods Elm Grove subdivision flooded for the first time in May, the family carefully saved all their holiday decorations. But those boxes didnt survive when Tropical Storm Imelda hit in September, just four months later.

I dont have any Christmas decorations. I lost everything, Vera said. Thats one of my big heartbreaks.

Vera said she was at work during the first flood.

And Im seeing that Kingwood is flooding. My area is flooding. And Im like, that doesnt make sense. We dont flood, Vera said.

But they did flood two feet of muddy water damaged her home. Vera said they used to be surrounded by woods until a year ago, when a developer, Perry Homes, cleared the trees to make room for Woodridge Village, a 260-acre residential development under construction next door to her house. Veras home is right on the county line she lives in Harris County, while the development is in Montgomery County.

She and other Elm Grove residents decided to sue. They argue theyre flooding because the developers violated state law by causing more runoff, while the developers say this years storms were simply more intense. The lawsuit raises questions about how the expanding Houston area is grappling with new development in a changing climate.

A Montgomery County official told Houston Public Media the flooding was caused by the rainfall intensity, not the new development. Vera disagreed.

Hes an idiot, Vera said. Because there were trees there, and for 30 years we never flooded.

In May, she and her husband decided not to rebuild their house right away. Thats because, a few days after that first flood, it rained again.

I stayed home and I saw the retention pond fill up, with less than an inch or two of rain. And I said, well that doesnt make sense. How are we not going to flood again, if its barely any rain at all? So we said were going to wait and see, Vera said.

Houston City Councilmember Dave Martin, whose district includes Elm Grove, said something needs to be done quickly to address the problem.

When you have a two-inch rainfall that youre scared to death about, Martin said, whats going to happen over these next months and years?

The lawsuit

In May, neighbors in Elm Grove banded together to sue the companies responsible for the development, including Perry Homes subsidiary Figure Four Partners Ltd., PSWA, Inc. and Rebel Contractors, Inc. They allege the project violated the Texas Water Code. In court documents, they said were going to flood again which turned out to be true, just a few months later.

Jim Blackburn, a law professor with Rice University, has seen cases like this for decades, where residents blame new development for creating flooding.

We dont really have time to fool with simple issues like getting runoff right from new developments, Blackburn said. Thats a problem that simply should not occur. We know enough to keep that from happening, and if it takes litigation to stop it, so be it. We have strong laws we should use them.

With suburbs continuing to expand all around the edges of Harris County, and climate change producing more intense storms more often, the legal arguments in this case matter to many neighborhoods, not just Elm Grove.

Perhaps the more unusual thing is that in this case it appears that the problem has been discovered in a more timely manner, Blackburn said. But theres a long history in Texas of suing over what one neighbor does to another neighbor with regard to flooding.

The storms

The Elm Grove case hinges partly on one big question was the rainfall in May actually worse than in Hurricane Harvey, when the homes didnt flood?

In the defendants motion to dismiss the lawsuit, the attorneys said rainfall in Elm Grove on May 7 was unprecedented: Early reports show rain fell at a rate of up to 6 inches per hour, with a total of 16 inches within a 24-hour period. This massive rainfall was of historical significance; the rate of rainfall in and around the Elm Grove area over such a short time period surpassed even that of Hurricane Harvey.

Space City Weather meteorologist Eric Berger said, based on data from the Harris County Flood Control District, rainfall in the area on May 7 was very intense, but does not necessarily match that claim.

That is not in the Harris County data, but they may have some more localized information theyre using from some other source, Berger said. Some of the closest [rain gauges] did show rainfall rates above three inches per hour, which suggests that near Elm Grove or just upstream of Elm Grove it certainly could have been higher.

According to the Harris County Flood Control District, the Kingwood area received a four-day total of around 30 inches during Harvey in 2017. In this years storms, the Kingwood area received 6-7 inches total during the May 7 rain event, and a four-day total of around 17 inches during Tropical Storm Imelda in September.

It would be really interesting to know the source of the data behind the claims for total rainfall and rainfall intensity that the defendants are basing their defense on, Berger said. And I think that will be pretty important to deciding the outcome of the case. There could have been localized storm totals not reflected in the government observation sites.

In response, a Perry Homes spokesperson said, That portion of Montgomery County has few, if any, publicly reported rain gauges as far as we know. Because the rainfall information in this portion of Montgomery County is sparse, Figure Four retained a nationally recognized expert to determine accurate rainfall amounts for the 2019 flood events.

Whats next

After the flooding during Tropical Storm Imelda, Martin was outraged. The city of Houston filed cease and desist orders, which Martin hoped would keep that land undeveloped. Martin reached out to Kathy Perry Britton, the CEO of Perry Homes, to talk about incentives to turn the land back into green space.

I wanted to sit down and have coffee with her to discuss some of the things that I think would work well, and they didnt think that was a necessary step, Martin said. Lets have a conversation and see if we can protect the neighborhood, maybe do something unique Perry Homes could be proud of, instead of building a development theyre not going to be proud of, and that the neighbors arent going to want.

Beth Guide, the Elm Grove Homeowners Association Director, said she would like to see the development stopped, too.

Im hoping that human decency wins out in the end and they walk away, Guide said.

A spokesperson with Perry Homes said Montgomery County signed off on the Woodridge Village drainage plan after an engineering firm found that the development wouldnt negatively impact nearby homes. That plan includes detention basins to hold water, which are under construction now.

Houston Councilmember Martin said hes concerned about the region, not just Elm Grove.

What we really need to do, Martin said, is look at our policies and do we continue to build in the floodplains? To put peoples homes and lives at risk?

As for Nancy Vera, shes working on putting her home back together.

I dont know what Im hoping for, Nancy Vera said. Its hard to say. Im just taking one day at a time. Im going through the motions. Because what else are you supposed to do?

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Were Going To Flood Again: This Houston Neighborhood Got Hit Twice In 2019 - Houston Public Media

CAST YOUR MIND back to the beginning of 2010: Ireland was mired in the banking crisis, Instagram had not been founded yet and Alex Ferguson still bestrode the Premier League.

From climate concerns to the influence of social networks, the computing power in our pockets and wearable tech, a lot has changed in the past decade

We asked some of Irelands top business people to look back ten years and pick out what they think has been the most influential innovation, idea or tech shift since 2010 and how has it affected the business world.

Norman Crowley, founder and chief executive of Crowley Carbon and Electrifi:

One can look at it through the lens of the smartphone revolution or the lens of the social media revolution or the wider lens of what will impact humanity most.

When you look at it through the lens of the future of humanity then you would have to say that the most influential technologies are batteries and solar panels.

For the first time in the history of the modern world, we do not have to burn fossil fuels to sustain our modern lifestyle. In light of the threat of climate change, this is truly a game-changer.

Patricia Scanlon, founder and chief executive of SoapBox Labs:

The advancement of deep learning-based machine learning is probably the most impactful innovation of the last decade.

Such advancements have led to high accuracy, real-world applications of machine learning in every area of business from customer service and finance to communications and product development and in every area of our personal lives from how kids learn to read to how we deliver caring services to the elderly, and everything in between.

Iain McDougall, country manager for UK and Ireland at Stripe:

We shouldnt take for granted the enormous computing power that resides in the pockets ofover two billion people around the world. Ten years ago it wasnt there.

The combination ofsmartphones and cloud computing has radically altered nearly every area of society, from howdemocracy works to how families keep in touch. This change has reached deep intothe business world.

A startup today can access a global audience of potential customers fromday one and faces dramatically reduced costs in getting to that point. Large legacy businessoperations have become a hindrance rather than a help, upending the order of multipleindustries.

Sonia Deasy, founder and managing director of Pestle & Mortar:

Since its inception in 2010, Instagram has changed how we experience and share our stories with the world.

It changed how businesses think about marketing. You can get in front of the right audience very easily but when you get there, you have to be absolutely authentic, human and consistent.

Bertrand Van Overschelde, head of Qualtrics in Ireland:

At the start of 2010 things were a littlequieter- then came 4G, Snapchat, Instagram, the iPad, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Slack. A wholeswathe of new ways for consumers and employees to share their viewpoint and stay connected.

As a result, customers and employees have become more demanding of the brands they work for and buy from. The brands that have continued to thrive or emerge as disruptors are the ones that have realised that experiences drive loyalty, not price or product.

Triona Mullane, founder and chief executive of Madme Technologies

A major change since 2010 has been the use of technology to develop platforms that have massively disrupted traditional industries across many sectors. Technology has enabled new peer-to-peer based services like Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Venmo, Deliveroo and many more.

In many cases they have supported businesses by making products more accessible to consumers, such as Deliveroo. In other cases they have massively disrupted and replaced existing service offerings such the impact of Uber on the local taxi industries and the use of Venmo to completely disrupt traditional payment and banking models.

The other side of this whole shift is the importance of consumer feedback and ratings. These models, and the parties within them, depend enormously on positive feedback and positive ratings to thrive.

Across the business world, gathering feedback from customers, understanding customer sentiment and the potential to influence others have been major changes in business focus. The focus is on customer experience because it is now well accepted that positive experience leads to loyalty and referrals and ultimately business success.

Sam Dennigan, founder and chief executive of Strong Roots:

There have been significant innovations in production and distribution. Were committed to sustainability at Strong Roots and are excited about the improvement of compostable, recyclable packaging. We have seen great strides to achieve that over the past decade.

Source: David Sexton

Cillian Kieran, chief executive and co-founder of Ethyca:

The single greatest technology shift of the decade still has to be social media. Facebook came before 2010, but if we examine the last decade at a macro-social, politicaland economic level, it took until the 2010s for the impact of social media to be felt on theRichter scale.

When that impact was felt, what we saw was a sort of backlash against a Utopianvision of the internet that existed in 2010. Weve gone from believing social media will unite usto realising that its architecture and reward systems lead to polarisation.

Its undeniableweve created a golem without understanding the consequences, and the leadership at thesebusinesses are equally at sea in how to remedy the problem. Is this a fun answer forinnovation? No? Ok, how about we just say blockchain and be done with it.

Carl Dempsey, vice president of solution engineering at Salesforce:

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has brought about an incredible wave of innovation and technology. One theme that has generated a lot of buzz in recent years is artificial intelligence, AI.

The excitement is justified; over the last decade, AI has rapidly become part of the fabric of our daily lives as it has moved out of academia and research labs (where perhaps it was a solution looking for a problem) and into the real world, and we are seeing this accelerate in the last number of years.

Today its impact can be seen everywhere from banks analysing countless data points in seconds to detect fraud to call centres where they are deploying chatbots to improve customer interactions. At the broadest level, unleashing the power of AI is allowing the human workforce to be more productive.

Michael Doody, group chief technology officer at Netwatch Group:

The shift to mobility and ubiquitous personal internet access has created huge opportunities for businesses but also challenges in terms of serving relevant up to date content to customers and also treating their personal information securely.

A decade ago it may have been normal for a business such as a restaurant to not to have more than a basic single page web site, but now consumers expect that businesses have an active up to date web or Facebook presence, accurate multilingual menus that are viewable from a phone, good reviews on social rating sites and allow the creation of a reservation online with automated reminders closer to the selected date.

The number of channels that a business has to effectively operate in to fully engage with customers has increased substantially in the last decade, but if done in a way that adds perceived value, it can offer huge potential upside.

Richard Haxby, managing director of MathWorks Ireland:

Over the last decade, wearables have changed the way we view health and fitness with trackers, revolutionised music and gaming with smart headphones and (augmented) reality glasses, and started changing assembly lines and factory floors with glasses that integrate computers to speed hands-free work.

This has created multiple paradigm shifts from blurring the lines between industry (medical), technology (fitness tracker) and consumer (smartwatch), to creating a whole new segment that merges fashion, clothing and technology.

PJ Byrne, chief executive of Flexi-Fi Europe:

Undoubtedly, the smartphone takes top prize. The fact we can do so much on our mobile devices is something that could never have been imagined twenty years ago.

Des Travers, chief executive of DPD Ireland:

The most influential shift in technology in the past decade would have to be the focus on user-friendly applications in the business world. Customers want to self-serve, so the development of technology that allows them to do this has been really important.

For DPD, sending messages with a one-hour delivery window, and then allowing the recipient to opt for an alternative delivery date or location via a link, gives control back to the parcel recipient and makes our job much more efficient.

Were all time poor we want as much convenience as is available and we want to control the use of our time. Equally, these options improve first time delivery rates which has a positive impact on the environment by reducing the amount of travel time per delivery.

Ciaran Mulligan, managing director of Blue Insurance:

Online banking and the way we now buy products or services has changed dramatically and for the better. It has now become very easy to shop online, watch movies or listen to music with a few clicks of a button through many different devices.

This has led to the consumer expecting a more quick and easy service in everything that they do so companies need to be forward-thinking and ensure they are not working with antiquated systems or complicated processes.

Get our Daily Briefing with the mornings most important headlines for innovative Irish businesses.

More here:
Then and now: How Ireland and the business world have changed from 2010 to 2020 - Fora.ie

Several months later, details of a whistle-blower complaint, reportedly from someone in the C.I.A., leaked out and set the stage for the impeachment inquiry. The complaint laid out a conversation between Mr. Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, in which Mr. Trump appeared to pressure him to investigate Mr. Biden and his son. The complaint set in motion the congressional investigation that led to impeachment.

Then: While the F.B.I. and Congress played key roles in the Watergate investigation, President Nixon also faced another investigative adversary: a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, appointed in May 1973 by Attorney General Elliot Richardson. After the former White House aide Alexander Butterfields surprise disclosure of a secret White House taping system that captured the presidents conversations, Mr. Cox issued a subpoena for the White House tapes in October 1973, provoking Nixon to order the attorney general to fire him. Mr. Richardson and his deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, both refused and resigned. It fell to Robert Bork, the solicitor general who suddenly found himself acting attorney general, to fire Mr. Cox. The episode became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

Partly as a result of public outrage over those events, impeachment proceedings in the House began nearly seven months later. Nixon was also forced to approve the appointment of a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who continued Mr. Coxs efforts to obtain the tapes. His willingness to challenge the president in court brought Watergate to the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that Nixon would have to turn over the tapes.

Now: The Justice Department has helped Mr. Trump throughout the Ukraine affair. In March, Attorney General William P. Barr announced that he had concluded that Mr. Mueller had found insufficient evidence that the president obstructed justice. Mr. Trump immediately declared a complete and total exoneration, even though the attorney general noted that the report had not exonerated him. But Mr. Barr then waited more than three weeks before releasing the report to the public, enabling Mr. Trump and his allies to mount a counteroffensive that insulated the president from potentially worse fallout. Democrats chose not to include any of the conduct revealed in the report in the articles of impeachment.

In addition, the Justice Department declined to open a criminal investigation or appoint a special prosecutor in response to the whistle-blower complaint. And in the face of congressional investigations, department lawyers have made the argument that Congress cannot even go to court to enforce subpoenas calling administration officials to testify.

Finally, by opening what would become a criminal inquiry into the origins of the F.B.I.s investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, Mr. Barr has given credence to Mr. Trumps unfounded theory that people in American intelligence agencies worked against him. The attorney general has become perhaps Mr. Trumps most effective defender, a sharp contrast to those who ran the Nixon Justice Department.

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Why Is Trump Finding More Protection Than Nixon Did? - The New York Times

The term marketing is no longer restricted to a particular person, place or thing, unlike traditional marketing. In today's era, marketing, anything under the sky is possible with the increase in social media browsing on the internet, an individual or a company can easily reach its target audience or consumers by online or digital marketing.

Promoting, advertising, marketing any product or service, online or by using digital strategies and technologies on the internet via digital tools, methodologies or mediums like mobile phone apps, emails, social media etc is called digital marketing.

There are different types of digital marketing such as:

Let's discuss the 3 important of these above marketing tools in detail:

In the world of digital marketing, content marketing is like an asset for any kind of business industry as it helps in increasing the sale of products or services, customer loyalty gets stronger and is cost-efficient.

A strategic approach should be adopted for content marketing depending on the goals and budget of your industry or business.

The content plays a major role in content marketing. By which, it means that the objective of content should be to provide the correct and precise information to your anticipated customers. Your content should be perfect, which not only gives the information about your brand or your objectives, but it should also try to satisfy and end your prospects further search of their products or services.

For example, a digital marketing company which holds expertise in rendering services like web development, SEO, web designing, internet marketing etc should have the perfect information about their services and pricing on their web pages which helps it's prospects to get a quote and help them in their buying decision.

A page containing pricing list is also a part of the content.

A lot of people have confused content marketing with blogging. But the fact is that the blogs are just a small part of content marketing.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the practice of making changes to your web page or website so that it can appear in the search engines. In order to attract more traffic in organic (unpaid) and attain top ranking in the search engine results, optimization of your web page or website plays a vital role.

By the process of crawling, search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc scan your website by which they can know how relevant and user-friendly it is. This helps the users to get valid, apt and useful search results. It becomes easier for search engines to recommend your website or can post to applicable search engine user when they search for keywords relevant to your products and services offered. This is only possible when you keep on improvising the SEO of your business.

Most of the businesses aim at getting the ranking on the first page of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc which use the keywords and phrases that are relevant and apt for their services and products. You can boost your ranking on the search engines by making some changes and improving your website.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is digital marketing where the promotion of websites is increased by their visibility through paid advertisements that show on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

These advertisements are also known as Pay-Per-Click ads come in different forms like text-based ads or shopping ads(product listing ads) which are mostly visual, help the customer to get the important information about the products at a glance by which they get a precise review and price of the product.

In short, SEM is a marketing system where the businesses pay to the search engines so that their ads are shown in the search results.

If you think your business is lagging behind owing to an inefficient marketing approach, then you probably need to consider digital marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy. To know how you can adopt digital marketing, get a quote.

To keep up with the fast pace of today's consumers, digital marketing provides the most prompt and immediate medium to reach your target prospects, as more and more consumers are using internet services. Traditional marketing techniques cannot help to reach a larger mass of people.

Link:
Everything You Wanted to Know About Digital Marketing - Cape Cod Today

A new national data privacy legislative framework proposed by Privacy For America, a lobbying coalition that counts the biggest names of both Silicon Valley and advertising companies among its ranks, reveals exactly which points the broader data collection industry is willing to concede on. The centerpiece of the groups vision for data privacy protection in the United States is a model that mostly limits notices and opt-ins to certain protected groups and circumstances, instead relying on increased regulatory power to the FTC and state governments to protect individuals.

In addition to documenting the points that member companies such as Facebook and Google appear to feel are inevitable, the new privacy legislative framework also shows which practices the industry is hoping to keep in place and avoid being regulated more tightly on.

Americas biggest data companies have heavily involved themselves in the national conversation about federal data privacy protections, even calling for regulation at times. This is not out of altruism or concern for the end user, however, so much as it is an attempt to establish an early outsized influence over the process and steer this seemingly inevitable federal law in a direction that is favorable to them.

This new data privacy legislative framework that Privacy For America has proposed has all of the hallmarks of that approach. It is centrally defined as being in opposition to the notice and choice model, the current general framework under which the end user is expected to be notified of how their data is being used and to tick a box indicating their consent.

Before you continue reading, how about a follow on LinkedIn?

While notice and choice has its issues, including confusing legal-ese end user agreements and lack of control over stored data after it has been given up, most privacy advocates would likely agree that the model is an important component of a data privacy protection strategy and needs to be strengthened and improved rather than disposed of. This proposal would replace notice and choice conventions with a set of norms governing data practices backed by a combination of federal and state enforcement.

The Privacy For America proposal focuses heavily on baked-in regulatory protections to prevent the use of data for the purposes of marginalization. For example, it calls for added prohibitions against the use of data for discriminatory evaluations (job applications and housing, for example) and for selective pricing based on stored demographic information. It also particularly focuses on the protection of tweens (age 12-16) who are heavy internet users but not always subject to parental oversight. The proposed privacy legislative framework also includes provisions for simplifying the language of privacy policies, and rights to greater control of stored data.

Some elements of the groups privacy legislative framework are conspicuous by their absence, however. Most notably, that data considered non-sensitive (which would include the web browsing data that is the bread-and-butter of the targeted advertising industry) would not be subject to opt-in requirements. Also, only the protected tween group would have clear access to a right to be forgotten eraser function allowing them to remove any information volunteered while they were a minor. The proposal only provides the right to request access to or request deletion of data for other groups, the only concrete offering being a once-per-year report of the companys data use similar to an annual free credit report.

The privacy legislative framework would also allow companies to collect sensitive information (financial, biometric, location and health information) on an opt-in basis, potentially circumventing existing state regulations on the collection and storage of these special data categories. It is also important to note that the proposal calls for the simplification of language of privacy policies, but not necessarily the actual opt-in or opt-out notification the end user would be clicking on to communicate their consent.

Other important points of note include:

A cursory examination reveals that these proposed data privacy protection rules appear to be an attempt to head off stronger state laws and future federal bills at the pass, particularly the new California Consumer Privacy Act. The proposals prohibitions mostly address things that are already illegal or enforceable at either the state or federal level, while codifying existing business as usual web-based data collection practices. It does not go nearly as far as European Unions GDPR, which a member letter to Congress dismisses on the basis of regulatory costs and uncertainty.

The proposal goes before Congress as several competing data privacy protection bills are either being drafted or considered; these mostly contain stronger protections for consumers that would put more of a burden on data collectors, up to criminal penalties for CEOs in the case of at least one bill.

Interestingly, a small section of the industrys online privacy protection act proactively addresses the issue of third-party data breaches and the need for improved vendor security.

The proposal would require any company that shares consumer data with vendors to develop a contract governing the data sharing terms and to conduct ongoing due diligence to ensure the data is being used appropriately and lawfully. This would require the originating company to play a greater role and take on greater obligations in policing the transfer, storage and use of customer data by vendors.

While the proposed privacy legislative framework contains useful terms, in some areas it is essentially an even weaker version of the more lax federal data security bills already being considered by Congress. While it may have some influence on the legislative process, as-is this framework seems unlikely to be adopted in a regulatory environment in which consumers are increasingly concerned about data privacy protection and how their personal information is being handled.

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Proposed Internet Privacy Legislative Framework, Backed by US Tech and Marketing Giants, Seeks to Head Off Unfavorable State and Federal Laws - CPO...