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Deadly and destructive flash flooding in Texas and several other states in July 2025 is raising questions about the nations flood maps and their ability to ensure that communities and homeowners can prepare for rising risks. The same region of Texas Hill Country where a flash flood on July 4 killed more than 130 people was hit again with downpours a week later, forcing searchers to temporarily pause their efforts to find missing victims. Other states, including New Mexico, Oklahoma, Vermont, and Iowa, also saw flash flood damage in July. The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agencys flood maps are intended to be the nations primary tool for identifying flood risks. Originally developed in the 1970s to support the National Flood Insurance Program, these maps, known as Flood Insurance Rate Maps, or FIRMs, are used to determine where flood insurance is required for federally backed mortgages, to inform local building codes and land-use decisions, and to guide flood plain management strategies. In theory, the maps enable homeowners, businesses, and local officials to understand their flood risk and take appropriate steps to prepare and mitigate potential losses. A federal flood map of Kerrville, Texas, with the Guadalupe River winding through the middle in purple, shows areas considered to have a 1% annual chance of flooding in blue and a 0.2% annual chance of flooding in tan. During a flash flood on July 4, 2025, the river rose more than 30 feet at Kerrville. [Image: FEMA] But while FEMA has improved the accuracy and accessibility of the maps over time with better data, digital tools, and community input, the maps still dont capture everythingincluding the changing climate. There are areas of the country that flood, some regularly, that dont show up on the maps as at risk. I study flood-risk mapping as a university-based researcher and at First Street, an organization created to quantify and communicate climate risk. In a 2023 assessment using newly modeled flood zones with climate-adjusted precipitation records, we found that more than twice as many properties across the country were at risk of a 100-year flood than the FEMA maps identified. Even in places where the FEMA maps identified a flood risk, we found that the federal mapping process, its overreliance on historical data, and political influence over the updating of maps can lead to maps that dont fully represent an areas risk. What FEMA flood maps miss FEMAs maps are essential tools for identifying flood risks, but they have significant gaps that limit their effectiveness. One major limitation is that they dont consider flooding driven by intense bursts of rain. The maps primarily focus on river channels and coastal flooding, largely excluding the risk of flash flooding, particularly along smaller waterways such as streams, creeks, and tributaries. This limitation has become more important in recent years due to climate change. Rising global temperatures can result in more frequent extreme downpours, leaving more areas vulnerable to flooding, yet unmapped by FEMA. A map of a section of Kerr County, Texas, where a deadly flood struck on July 4, 2025, compares the FEMA flood maps 100-year flood zone (red) to First Streets more detailed 100-yea flood zone (blue). The more detailed map includes flash flood risks along smaller creeks and streams. [Image: Jeremy Porter] For example, when flooding from Hurricane Helene hit unmapped areas around Asheville, North Carolina, in 2024, it caused a huge amount of uninsured damage to properties. Even in areas that are mapped, like the Camp Mystic site in Kerr County, Texas, that was hit by a deadly flash flood on July 4, 2025, the maps may underestimate their risk because of a reliance on historic data and outdated risk assessments. Political influence can fuel long delays Additionally, FEMAs mapping process is often shaped by political pressures. Local governments and developers sometimes fight high-risk designations to avoid insurance mandates or restrictions on development, leading to maps that may understate actual risks and leave residents unaware of their true exposure. An example is New York Citys appeal of a 2015 FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Maps update. The delay in resolving the citys concerns has left it with maps that are roughly 20 years old, and the current mapping project is tied up in legal red tape. On average, it takes five to seven years to develop and implement a new FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Map. As a result, many maps across the U.S. are significantly out of date, often failing to reflect current land use, urban development, or evolving flood risks from extreme weather. This delay directly affects building codes and infrastructure planning, as local governments rely on these maps to guide construction standards, development approvals, and flood mitigation projects. Ultimately, outdated maps can lead to underestimating flood risks and allowing vulnerable structures to be built in areas that face growing flood threats. How technology advances can help New advances in satellite imaging, rainfall modeling, and high-resolution lidar, which is similar to radar but uses light, make it possible to create faster, more accurate flood maps that capture risks from extreme rainfall and flash flooding. However, fully integrating these tools requires significant federal investment. Congress controls FEMAs mapping budget and sets the legal framework for how maps are created. For years, updating the flood maps has been an unpopular topic among many publicly elected officials, because new flood designations can trigger stricter building codes, higher insurance costs, and development restrictions. A map of Houston, produced for a 2022 study by researchers at universities and First Street, shows flood risk shifting over the next 30 years as climate change worsens. Blue areas are todays 100-year flood-risk zones. The red areas reflect the same zones in 2050. [Image: Oliver Wing et al., 2022] In recent years, the rise of climate risk analytics models and private flood risk data have allowed the real estate, finance and insurance industries to rely less on FEMAs maps. These new models incorporate forward-looking climate data, including projections of extreme rainfall, sea-level rise and changing storm patternsfactors FEMAs maps generally exclude. Real estate portals like Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, and Homes.com now provide property-level flood risk scores that consider both historical flooding and future climate projections. The models they use identify risks for many properties that FEMA maps dont, highlighting hidden vulnerabilities in communities across the U.S. Research shows that the availability, and accessibility, of climate data on these sites has started driving property-buying decisions that increasingly take climate change into account. Implications for the future As homebuyers understand more about a propertys flood risks, that may shift the desirability of some locations over time. Those shifts will have implications for property valuations, community tax-revenue assessments, population migration patterns, and a slew of other considerations. However, while these may feel like changes being brought on by new data, the risk was already there. What is changing is peoples awareness. The federal government has an important role to play in ensuring that accurate risk assessments are available to individuals and communities everywhere. As better tools and models evolve for assessing risk evolve, FEMAs risk maps need to evolve, too. This article, originally published July 12, 2025, has been updated with another round of flooding in Texas on July 13. Jeremy Porter is a professor of quantitative methods in the social sciences at the City University of New York. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The feeling that you’re not quite qualified enough for a job, yet somehow managed to slip through the cracks without anyone noticing, is known as imposter syndrome. The sneaky form of self-doubt can show up across occupations (and even outside of work). But while imposter syndrome was once thought to impact women at higher rates then men, a new study reveals work environments, not an individuals gender, may be what’s actually fueling the phenomenon.The research, which was published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, included six experimental studies on how competitive work environments can cause an employee to feel like an imposter. The researchers surveyed employees on how competitive their work environment was, while also collecting information on age, gender, educational level, experience level, and how competitive their personalities were. The researchers found employees were more likely to admit to feeling like imposters when they worked for an organization that emphasized competition over cooperation. Likewise, those who expressed feelings of imposter syndrome were also more likely to compare themselves to colleagues that were performing better than them. Previous research has suggested that women have higher rates of imposter syndrome. However, while women may still experience gender discrimination at work, the new research rejects the idea that imposter syndrome is inherently female. “Our findings nuance this gendered perspective as we find no evidence that women report higher levels of impostorism and/or that competitive work climates differently impact mens versus womens impostorism,” the researchers wrote. Imposter syndrome is not just a minor annoyance for those who experience itit can seriously affect mental health. The feeling of not being capable, qualified, or good enough, can lead to upticks in anxiety, depression, burnout, as well as the inability to even enjoy hard-earned successes at work. The report called for workplaces that are prone to fostering imposter syndrome in employees to examine their practices, choosing cooperation and inclusiveness over a competitive culture, rather than placing blame on employees who dont feel good enough.
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Every so often, Microsoft design director Diego Baca boots up an old computer so he can play around with Windows 95 again. Baca has made a hobby of assembling old PCs with new-in-box vintage parts, and so his office has become a kind of shrine to Windows history. Still, Windows 95 stands out, he says, because of how easy it made computing for everyone. Many of its foundational concepts, such as the Start menu and taskbar, are still core parts of Windows today. This story is part of 1995 Week, where well revisit some of the most interesting, unexpected, and confounding developments in tech 30 years ago. “Windows 95 introduced a lot of these really clear, really durable metaphors of how computing could be simpler for customers,” Baca says. He’s not alone in finding ways to appreciate Windows 95 again. Almost 30 years after the operating systems release on August 24, 1995, you can run a fully functional version as an app on your computer (even if it’s a Mac), make Windows 11 look like Windows 95 with third-party software, or follow countless TikTok tutorials on giving your iPhone a Windows 95 aesthetic. Diego Baca [Photo: Courtesy of Microsoft] There are YouTube playlists with nothing but remixes of the Windows 95 startup soundfamously composed by Brian Enoand there’s an entire musical subgenre that uses Windows 95 aesthetics as a visual component. Some of this is just cheap retro nostalgia. But the people who worked on Windows 95and those who still appreciate itoffer another explanation: It really was designed to be simpler, and it succeeded just as people were buying PCs for the first time. When we look back now, it’s a reminder of how computers primarily served their users, not the other way around. Taking design seriously Windows 95 succeeded in part because it was the first Microsoft operating system that actually put designers in charge of the design. Under pressure to compete with the user interface of Apple’s Macs, Microsoft assembled a design team and made usability testing a big part of the development process. Virginia Howlett [Photo: Courtesy of Virginia Howlett] “It was the first time at Microsoft that the design of the product wasn’t completely driven by the engineers,” says Virginia Howlett, who led the Windows 95 design team. “It was a real team effort between research and design and engineering.” A painter by training, Howlett had joined Microsoft as a print designer and consultant on computer-based training software. But she wanted to get involved with Windows after seeing version 1.0, which launched in 1985 as an add-on for MS-DOS and didn’t prove to be a hit. The smattering of colors in odd placesfor instance, bright red scroll bars that drew attention away from the actual contentleft her aghast. “Windows 1.0 was this massive missed opportunity,” she says. “It just sort of hurt me so badly how poorly it was designed.” Microsoft designer Diego Baca’s Windows installations. [Photo: Courtesy of Microsoft] In 1990, Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, the first version to catch on in a big way. Howlett and her team contributed to it and 1992s Windows 3.1, but in a limited role that basically involved designing icons and color schemes. In Windows 95, by contrast, the designers were directly involved with figuring out the best way to do things and how to present them to users. “In Windows 3.1, we were helping with how it looked. In Windows 95, we were helping with how it worked, as well as how it looked,” Howlett says. Meanwhile, improvements in PC hardware allowed Windows 95 to pull off some new tricks. It was designed with 800-by-600-pixel resolution screens in mindup from the earlier video graphics array (VGA) standard of 640 by 480and by default it supported a color palette of 256 colors, up from 16 in Windows 3.1. Those advancements helped Windows 95’s designers give the system a more three-dimensional look. “We used shadows and edges to note all the boundaries,” says Chris Guzak, a Microsoft engineer who worked on integrating much of the design work into Windows 95. “When those show up in the interface today, you’re, like, ‘That’s old.’ But then, it was such a cool thing.” Chris Guzak [Photo: Courtesy of Microsoft] The limitations of mid-1990s computers had an impact as well. Windows 95’s default color schemeall royal blues, medium grays, and the occasional splash of tealstemmed from the restricted color palette available with graphics cards of the era, and the lack of animations relative to modern computers reinforced a sense of quickness and simplicity. “I think because of this minimalism, and really minimal animation, it was a lot quieter of an interface compared to what we have today,” says Suzan Marashi, who worked on the Windows 95 user interface team. Competing with Apple The motivation to make Windows 95 more approachable came in large part from Apple, which had licensed parts of its own graphical user interface to Microsoft for Windows 1.0, but sued over additional elements that Microsoft added in later versions. Apple eventually lost the case, but Guzak recalls “a heightened sense of competitiveness” from Microsoft’s leadership at the time. “There really was a sense that we needed something that people could use, that would be accepted, that people could figure out,” he says. Many people were still in the process of learning to use a computer: Even in October 1995, a Times Mirror Center study reported that only 36% of U.S. households owned personal computers. Suzan Marashi [Photo: Courtesy of Microsoft] This was also a time when Microsoft was approaching its peak as a consumer-centric company. It spent $300 million on marketing for Windows 95, encouraged retailers to hold launch parties, and had Jay Leno host its own enormous and well-publicized launch event on its Redmond, Washington, campus. Friends actors Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry even starred in a video guide to showcase the operating system’s new features. Consumers lined up at computer stores at midnight to get their hands on the new operating system, presaging the later day-one frenzies over early iPhones. Paul Thurrott, an author and a longtime technology reporter who covered Microsoft, says all these factors came together at just the right time. Apple’s own software had started to stagnatethe Mac interface was still largely black and white at the timeand even Mac enthusiasts begrudgingly acknowledged that Microsoft’s designs were catching up. “I think that was the version where they actually had something that made more sense than the Mac did from a UI perspective,” Thurrott says. Reliving the old days Re-experiencing Windows 95 today is easy. Just download the Windows 95 Electron app on any Windows, Mac, or Linux machine, and you can use a version of the classic operating system that runs entirely inside its own app window. Felix Rieseberg, a software developer who currently works on the Claude AI desktop apps for Anthropic, first released the Windows 95 app in 2018, mostly to demonstrate what’s possible with web technologies. But over the years, he’s updated it with new features, including a way to transfer files to and from your actual computer and a version of Internet Explorer that loads old versions of websites from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The Windows 95 Electron app lets you easily run the 30-year-old operating system on a modern computer. [Image: Jared Newman] While Rieseberg says the app was originally supposed to prove a point about the power of JavaScript, it also winds up saying something about how modern software has devolved. The Windows 95 app’s Start button pops up instantly when you click on it instead of requiring a split second to appear, and the preloaded version of Excel loads faster than the one that runs on Windows 11. “It’s remarkable how much you can do inside the JavaScript of [the Windows 95 app] in a way that feels very quick,” he says. “Especially with Word and Excel, it’s very powerful in there, and it covers so much of what people want to do in their life.” Rieseberg has no way of tracking how many people use the Windows 95 Electron app, but notes that it has more than 22,000 stars on GitHub. That puts it in the top 1,000 GitHub projects of all time. Elements such as the Start button remain with us, but Windows design has radically changed over the past three decades. [Image: Courtesy of Microsoft] “I get a lot of emails from people saying thank you, which is, of course, funny because I’m full-time working on software, on big apps with millions of users,” he says. “And this little weekend side project has gotten more thank-you notes than anything else I’ve ever done.” The software maker Stardock has noticed a similar response with its WindowBlinds and Start11 programs, which allow people to customize modern Windows menus and windowing systems. Both offer a “Classic” theme, which in tandem can approximate the feel of using Windows 95 on a modern PC. Stardocks “Classic” theme for Start11 and WindowBlind let you give current Windows a Windows 95-like skin. [Image: Courtesy of Stardock] Brad Sams, Stardock’s vice president and general manager, says that the announcement of its classic theme is a top driver of traffic to WindowBlinds’s product page and of subsequent sales. “The market has responded exactly how we would expect for that kind of nostalgia,” Sams says. “The simplicity of Windows 95, the basic color scheme, the very direct navigation modeling . . . people just enjoy a simpler experience, and I think that’s what’s driving some of this, right?” The next 30 years Three decades later, Microsoft has reasons to be thinking about Windows 95 again. For one thing, Windows 11 was an attempt by Microsoft to bring some simplicity back. The company stripped down the Start menu with a new designalbeit one that longtime users bristled atand it continues to move more menu items out of its old control panel and into a more modern Settings menu. “Windows 11 is in many ways as close as we’ve gotten to 95 from a simplicity perspective,” Thurrott says. Windows 95s Start menus got major makeovers in Windows 10 and Windows 11. [Image: Courtesy of Microsoft] But now, Microsoft also believes it’s building some new foundations for Windows around AI, not unlike how Windows 95’s designers established the patterns that we still use today. Marcus Ash, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of design and research for Windows and Devices, describes it as an effort that spans the entire company. “We look at AI as Microsoft’s opportunity to talk to our customers, learn from them, and build a Microsoft-like model for how this is shaping upand Windows is the delivery vehicle,” Ash says. Marcus Ash [Photo: Courtesy of Microsoft] It’s a lofty goal, but in some way it underscores why people appreciate Windows 95. The modern Windows experienceand the experience of all major computing platformsis one in which you’re constantly on guard against the company that made it. If you’re not careful, Microsoft might replace your default browser and search engine with its own. If you don’t opt out of AI features in Office, you might wind up paying extra, whether you use them or not. Even just playing solitaireone of the original, simple joys of classic Windows versionsnow means getting constantly bombarded with ads. While the idea of Microsoft inventing a new foundation for computing was once exciting, now it’s also a bit unnerving. Windows 95’s design reminds us that computers, even when they were less sophisticated, were at least unquestionably on your side. Those who design software now are likely familiar with the term “dark pattern,” which refers to all the ways that software can get you to act against your best interests. Howlett, the Windows 95 designer who’s since gone back to her roots in painting, says she’d never even heard of it. “It was a kinder, gentler timebefore we were trying to manipulate people,” she says.
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