This morning Craig and I visited a new church.

The worship music was beautiful. People were warm and welcoming from the moment we walked through the doors. There was joy in the room, real joy, not forced or performative. You could feel people genuinely wanting connection, wanting hope, wanting something deeper than the endless noise and division the world keeps feeding all of us lately.

The sermon centered around the parables of seeds. Not just one of them, but several of the seed parables Jesus taught throughout scripture. The pastor said something that stayed with me all day: many of the seeds God places in our lives are actually the answers to the prayers we keep asking for. The problem is that we often overlook them because seeds rarely arrive looking like miracles at first.

That landed deeply.

A seed looks small.

Insignificant.

Ordinary.

And yet inside a seed exists an entire future waiting for stewardship.

I think many of us spend years begging God for transformation while ignoring the seeds already sitting in our hands.

Seeds of discipline.

Seeds of honesty.

Seeds of stillness.

Seeds of forgiveness.

Seeds of courage.

Seeds of repentance.

Seeds of discernment.

Seeds of responsibility.

Seeds of boundaries.

Especially boundaries.

Honestly, the older I get, the more convinced I become that darkness absolutely hates healthy boundaries.

Seriously though, it’s true. Just think about it in your own life.

Psychologically. Emotionally. Relationally. Spiritually. Boundaries interrupt unhealthy systems. They expose manipulation. They force accountability. They remove easy access to someone’s energy, attention, resources, emotions, or peace.

That’s why people often become the angriest precisely when we stop participating in unhealthy dynamics.

I have seen this in relationships, friendships, family systems, churches, coaching dynamics, and even business environments. The moment someone says, “This no longer feels healthy for me,” the entire atmosphere can shift. Suddenly the person setting the boundary becomes “selfish,” “crazy,” “cold,” “unloving,” or “difficult.” Guilt starts flying. Accusations emerge. Revisionist history appears out of nowhere. Emotional manipulation intensifies because unhealthy systems tend to panic when access is removed.

And honestly? That overlap between psychology and spirituality fascinates me deeply lately.

The more I work on Everyday Demons, the more I notice how often destructive spiritual patterns move through profoundly human psychological mechanisms. Fear. Shame. Pride. Narcissism. Addiction. Rage. Victimhood. Compulsive distraction. Emotional chaos. Self-erasure. Manipulation disguised as love. Control disguised as protection. Spiritual superiority disguised as wisdom.

Darkness rarely announces itself dramatically in our lives.

Most of the time it simply whispers agreement.

Agree with the resentment and chaos.

Obsession and bitterness.

Agree with the ego or confusion.

Agree with the lie that peace is weakness and emotional volatility is passion.

One tiny agreement at a time.

That is why I no longer dismiss the importance of what we repeatedly feed in our lives. Scripture speaks about this constantly. Seeds. Fruit. Soil. Harvest. Christ understood human nature far better than many modern people give Him credit for. He knew environments mattered. He knew repetition mattered. He knew what we continually entertain eventually shapes us.

“Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” — Galatians 6:7

That verse feels almost uncomfortable to modern culture because we want freedom from consequences while still feeding unhealthy things daily. We feed anxiety while starving stillness. We feed lust while starving intimacy. We feed ego while starving humility. We feed outrage while starving wisdom. Then we sit confused wondering why peace feels distant.

Seeds always grow eventually.

That truth applies psychologically as much as spiritually.

Carl Jung once wrote, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” I think about that line often now. Many people are living from unconscious wounds, unresolved trauma, unexamined fears, emotional compulsions, and inherited dysfunction while believing their suffering is entirely external. Meanwhile, their inner soil is crowded with bitterness, fear, envy, chaos, resentment, self-abandonment, and emotional fragmentation.

The fruit tells the story eventually.

Every single time.

One of the things I have become increasingly aware of is how modern culture rewards emotional performance while quietly starving the soul. We are encouraged to react instantly, broadcast constantly, consume endlessly, and avoid silence at all costs. Stillness has become terrifying to many people because stillness eventually exposes what is unresolved.

Silence reveals what noise hides.

That’s part of why The Hippie Christian became so important for me to write. Somewhere along the way, many of us lost touch with presence itself. We became disconnected from creation, rhythm, embodiment, contemplation, prayer, groundedness, and deep listening. We started treating spirituality like performance instead of communion.

And communion requires honesty.

Real honesty.

The kind that asks difficult questions.

What am I feeding daily?

What atmosphere am I cultivating inside my home?

What relationships leave me grounded versus chronically confused?

What thought patterns have become normalized?

What emotional patterns keep repeating?

What have I been entertaining that quietly steals my peace?

Those are not small questions.

These questions shape destinies.

One of the most dangerous things about emotional and spiritual dysfunction is that human beings adapt to it remarkably fast. We normalize chaos. We normalize confusion. We normalize emotional exhaustion. We normalize anxiety and overstimulation to the point that genuine peace can start feeling unfamiliar. Some people have lived inside emotional turbulence so long that calmness feels suspicious to them.

Peace is not boring.

Peace is healthy.

Peace creates space for clarity.

Peace allows truth to breathe.

Peace reconnects us to God, to ourselves, and to each other.

And no, that does not mean life becomes easy or painless. Christ never promised the absence of hardship. What He demonstrated was alignment. Groundedness. Integrity. Compassion without self-erasure. Boundaries without hatred. Love without enabling destruction.

That last part matters deeply.

Loving someone does not require participation in their chaos.

I think many of us need to hear that more clearly.

There is nothing unloving about refusing to water weeds that are choking the life out of your garden.

That’s stewardship.

The pastor said something else this morning that I have continued turning over in my mind all afternoon. He said that many people pray for miracles while overlooking the tiny seeds God already placed directly in front of them. A healthy marriage begins with tiny seeds. Healing begins with tiny seeds. Peace begins with tiny seeds. Faithfulness begins with tiny seeds. Wisdom begins with tiny seeds. Entire orchards grow from what initially looked insignificant.

Christ constantly spoke in agricultural language for a reason.

The condition of the soil matters.

And maybe that is the real question many of us need to ask ourselves right now:

What is growing inside me?

Not what am I posting.

Not what am I performing.

Not what image am I projecting to the world.

What is actually growing inside me?

Fear or peace?

Bitterness or compassion?

Chaos or groundedness?

Pride or humility?

Confusion or clarity?

Resentment or forgiveness?

Because eventually, every seed bears fruit.

And the fruit always tells the truth.

That question has been sitting heavy on me all day:

What is actually growing inside me?

Not the image.

Not the performance.

Not the curated version we hand the world online.

The real fruit.

The real atmosphere.

The real condition of the soil.

What we feed grows. Every single time.

So I’m curious… what part of this musing hit you the hardest today? What seed are you realizing you need to stop feeding — or finally start watering?

Drop a thought below. I read far more of these comments than people realize.

And if this stirred something in you, share it. Somebody you love may be watering weeds while praying for a garden.

As always loving and praying for you and our world,

Rene Schooler

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By Daniella Jiménez

Julie Hendrickson was nervous about her 87-year-old father’s move to a San Diego County assisted living facility and wanted to make sure they both understood the rules and conditions before signing the contract. The person who admitted her father was walking them through the document line by line, when two words caught Hendrickson’s attention: family council.

“I’d never heard of it before,” Hendrickson said. “I was looking for a way that I might transition to give him some space and independence but still advocate, you know, still be supportive.”

But the worker offered no information, directing Hendrickson to the executive director. While waiting for that person to respond, Hendrickson turned to Google.

It told her that under California law, residential care and skilled nursing facilities must inform new residents and their families of the existence of a family council. And if a council doesn’t exist, relatives must be told of their right to form one.

But to her dismay, Hendrickson found that the facility her father was moving into in 2024, didn’t have a family council and that it would be up to her to form one.

Hendrickson is among many who learn about family councils only because they ask. Family councils are independent groups of residents’ relatives or friends that meet to discuss issues to raise with staff members, who are not allowed at the meetings unless invited. California strengthened these rights in 2023, giving family councils some of the strongest protections in the country. Among other things, the law now requires facilities to respond to a council’s written requests within 14 calendar days.

Facilities with active councils often see higher quality care because families are more engaged, said Tony Chicotel, a senior attorney with California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform. But creating one can take persistence.

“Family councils are like a precious desert flower,” Chicotel said. “They can do beautiful things, but they need lots of tender and loving care to thrive.”

Consequently, family councils remain rare, often forming only after care issues arise, he said.

In nursing homes, short stays make it harder for relatives to invest in organizing. In assisted-living facilities, families may fear backlash or simply lack information, Chicotel said. Although facilities are required to disclose the right to form a council, Chicotel said those notices often get buried in voluminous admission packets.

Getting started

Patti Marin and her sister, Ruby Marin, formed a family council last year, because they were not satisfied with the way their mother’s assisted living facility in Long Beach responded to their concerns about her medication schedule.

When their complaints went nowhere, Patti Marin drove to Los Angeles County’s Social Services Community Care Licensing Division to ask how the system was supposed to work. A supervisor pointed her to Title 22, California’s regulatory framework for long-term-care facilities, where Marin said she learned for the first time about family councils.

Marin said that soon after forming the council, she casually invited others to join. “I remember saying, ‘Hey, we have a family council, if you have any concerns, please come,’” she recalled.

Now a year old, the council has 10 active members and has raised dozens of concerns with the facility’s administrators. Some complaints have resulted in changes, including a shift away from high-carbohydrate meals and the hiring of a new chef to design more balanced, nutritious menus.

Help from the state

In San Diego, Hendrickson’s research led her to a county ombudsman. They act as advocates, making sure facilities comply with state rules.

The California Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program has representatives in counties who support residents in care facilities and their families, including in forming family councils. Fay Gordon, the state’s long-term care ombudsman, said her office supports about 200 family councils. She encourages relatives to ask early about whether a council exists and to contact their county’s ombudsman office if it does not.

“Once they get past that initial process, it can be hard to reengage, and I think that’s a really critical moment for that caregiver to feel supported,” Gordon said.

After talking with her local ombudsman, Hendrickson began her own outreach, designing flyers and postcards and posting them on bulletin boards near the front desk as families gathered at the San Diego facility for Fourth of July festivities.

A month later, she had connected with one other family member and convened the first meeting. Now the council has about a dozen participants, and monthly meetings typically run about an hour.

With support from the ombudsman, the group works through issues, brainstorming strategies for supporting residents, engaging staff and management, and elevating complaints to the state’s licensing division when needed.

Neither the San Diego nor the Long Beach facility responded to multiple requests for comment about the difficulties Hendrickson and Marin had in getting information about family councils.

Both women said stronger state and county oversight is needed to ensure facilities address complaints raised by families. Those families, they noted, are overwhelmed, intimidated and unsure how to navigate the care system. They shouldn’t then be tasked with figuring out how to form a council that is supposed to support, rather than stress, them.

Hendrickson is no longer involved with the family council, because eventually her father decided to move. But she recommends the experience to family members who are trying to ensure their loved ones get the best possible care. Connections formed through the council, she said, offer something invaluable: a community.

“The positive is you get to meet people,” Hendrickson said. “You just get to meet people who are doing the same thing with their life energy that you’re doing.”

Daniella Jiménez is a writer with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley. She reported this story through a grant from The SCAN Foundation.

This article first appeared on California Health Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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By Clark Merrefield

In their 2025 series “Power Struggle,” Tony Schick and Monica Samayoa of Oregon Public Broadcasting found legislators who had supported green energy initiatives in Oregon and Washington knew little about how to connect wind and solar sources to the existing power grid.

“One of the most shocking things for me, while we were reporting on this, was talking to legislators and finding out they weren’t talking to the most important entity to talk to if they want to connect these renewables on the grid, which is the Bonneville Power Administration,” Samayoa said during a recent webinar with The Journalist’s Resource.

In “Power Struggle,” Samayoa and Schick write that “Bonneville, under a setup that is unique to the Northwest, owns most of the power lines needed to carry green power from the region’s sunny and windy high desert to its major population centers. Bonneville has no state or local representation within its federally appointed bureaucracy and, by statute, operates as a self-funded business.”

The series, produced in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, found Oregon and Washington trailed almost every other state in bringing new renewable energy online. This, despite commitments from Oregon and Washington to go 100% green. The reporting led authorities in Washington to fast track renewable energy projects and Oregon to do the same for solar and wind permits.

I recently spoke with Schick and Samayoa for a behind-the-scenes look at how they reported the series and explained highly technical energy infrastructure concepts to a broad audience. Watch our conversation:

Keep reading for three quick takeaways if you don’t have time to watch the whole hour.

1. Pursue unanswered questions raised during prior reporting.

Schick has been reporting on salmon in the Pacific Northwest for years — from economic inequities related to decimated salmon populations to federal subsidies that failed to increase their numbers to the history of salmon in the region as told through the voices of one Yakama Nation family.

While covering endangered salmon in the Snake and Columbia Rivers, Schick reported that the administration of then-President Joe Biden was considering removing some hydroelectric dams whose construction had depleted salmon in the rivers decades prior.

“Which led to the question of, how do we replace the power from those dams?” Schick said. “Which led to questions about how we are adding renewable energy and our capabilities of adding renewable energy in the Northwest.”

Those questions then led Schick to discover that droughts in the Northwest had cut output from hydroelectric dams, and there weren’t enough renewable energy sources to make up the deficit. Instead, Oregon and Washington turned to power supplied by coal and gas sources. Carbon emissions from energy were, in fact, increasing in the region, contrary to much of the country, Schick said.

“I was just really interested in why that was the case,” he added.

That’s when Schick turned to Samayoa, who covers energy and climate change, for help understanding regional energy systems.

“Each state, Oregon and Washington, has renewable energy goals to meet by mid-century,” Samayoa said. “And what that means is, by that time, our electric utilities need to deliver carbon-free electricity, meaning no coal, no natural gas, just wind and solar.”

But the states were missing important benchmarks, exacerbated by dwindling federal support for carbon-free electricity. For example, last year the federal government rescinded Oregon’s authority to build offshore wind farms.

2. Compare systems elsewhere to show how other locales provide services.

Most other parts of the country use a central energy operator called a regional transmission organization that covers multiple states over a large area, Schick and Samayoa reported. Texas uses a regional grid operator, spends more than Bonneville on infrastructure upgrades, and spreads those costs across more customers, they found.

“Texas brought more energy online in the past two years than any other power region,” Schick and Samayoa wrote. “That’s helped the oil and gas powerhouse become the country’s biggest producer of wind and solar energy.”

They also looked into the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, a transmission organization that supplies power throughout the Midwest and part of Canada. It has “a very diverse profile in terms of where they’re getting their energy at different times,” Samayoa said.

The comparisons to other energy systems showed there were alternative, effective ways to bring green energy into regional power grids. Bonneville recently rejected joining an energy market based in California “that advocates described as the Northwest’s best bet at accelerating the adoption of renewables,” Schick and Samayoa reported.

Bonneville, a federal entity, told the reporters it was unfair to compare it with regional operators.

“I think there’s something to that, but one of the points of the piece was — the fact that it’s apples and oranges is kind of the point, because so many people are saying that the way that these projects are funded in other regions allows for better maintenance and expansion of the grid,” Schick said during the webinar.

3. Track important facts and the reporting behind them.

Schick and Samayoa created a spreadsheet with key facts and the data supporting those facts. Part of their reporting included filing Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain data on how long energy projects stayed in Bonneville’s review queue, information that other energy entities made public.

When Bonneville pushed back on their reporting, such as the comparisons to regional operators, Schick and Samayoa were ready with their findings. That included independent analysts telling them that Bonneville’s recent infrastructure investments weren’t especially forward looking, but rather long overdue, Schick said.

“When we were vetting the project, we just wanted the actual assertion from the story in [the spreadsheet] and the data that was backing it up,” Schick said.

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This article first appeared on The Journalist’s Resource and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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An exclusive interview with the visionary founder navigating enterprise technology, client trust, and the next wave of mobile innovation.

There are entrepreneurs who build companies, and then there are those who build movements. Pramod Jangid, the CTO of Dev Technosys, belongs firmly in the second category. Since establishing the company over a decade ago, he has grown it from a lean startup into one of the most recognized names among top mobile app development companies worldwide, with offices spanning Dubai (UAE), the United States, and India, and a portfolio of more than 1,200 delivered products.

We sat down with Pramod to discuss how he thinks about technology, what separates great apps from forgettable ones, and why he believes the best days of mobile innovation are still ahead.

“Every App Is a Promise to the User”—On the Philosophy Behind Dev Technosys

Q1. Let’s start at the beginning. What was the core idea when you founded Dev Technosys?

A: The core idea was actually quite simple—we wanted to be the development partner that clients never had to second-guess. When I was working early in my career, I noticed a consistent pattern: businesses would approach a mobile app development company with a vision, and somewhere between the first meeting and the final delivery, that vision would get diluted. Miscommunication, scope creep, and cost overruns—the usual suspects.

I wanted to build a firm where technical excellence and transparent communication were equally non-negotiable. That philosophy is still the backbone of everything we do today.

Q2. How has that original philosophy evolved as the company scaled?

A: Honestly, it has only deepened. When you’re working with startups building their first product, trust is earned quickly because the relationship is very personal. But when you start winning enterprise mobile app development contracts—large banks, healthcare networks, and government-linked entities—the stakes change entirely. Enterprise clients don’t just want a working app. They want a strategic partner who understands compliance requirements, legacy system integration, data governance, and post-launch scalability.

So the philosophy didn’t change, but the vocabulary did. We learned to speak the language of enterprise, and that opened a completely different tier of opportunities for us.

On Technology Choices: Native, Hybrid, and Everything in Between

Q3. One of the most persistent debates in the industry is native versus hybrid development. Where do you stand?

A: I try hard not to take an ideological position on this, because the honest answer is: it depends entirely on what the client is building and who they’re building it for.

Native mobile app development services give you the highest ceiling. When you build natively for iOS and Android separately, you get direct access to device APIs, the smoothest possible animations, and the kind of performance that users feel even if they can’t articulate why. If you’re building a fintech app processing millions of transactions or a healthcare platform where a one-second lag could matter, native is almost always the right conversation to have.

But hybrid mobile app development solutions have closed the gap dramatically over the last few years—and for many clients, they’re not just “good enough”; they’re genuinely the smarter choice. React Native and Flutter have matured to a point where you can ship one codebase to both platforms with near-native performance, a fraction of the timeline, and significantly lower cost. For startups validating a concept, for internal enterprise tools, and for B2B platforms where speed to market matters more than pixel perfection, hybrid is the conversation I’d start with.

The real expertise is not in mastering one approach. It’s in asking the right questions to know which path serves the client’s actual goals.

Q4. Does the choice of platform—iOS versus Android—still matter the way it once did?

A: The platform split used to be a much bigger strategic decision. Today, most serious products launch on both. But the Android app development side of that equation is often underestimated, particularly by clients who come to us with a primarily Western, iOS-oriented mindset.

When you look at global market share, Android dominates—consistently holding over 70% of the worldwide smartphone market. If a client wants genuine global reach, particularly across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, Android is not an afterthought. As a dedicated Android app development company, we’ve built some of our most technically sophisticated products on Android first, and I think that experience has made us stronger across the board.

On Clients, Cost, and the Conversations Nobody Wants to Have

Q5. What’s the conversation you find yourself having most often with new clients?

A: Cost. Almost always, it comes back to mobile app development cost.

And I don’t mean that cynically. It’s a completely rational thing to want to understand before committing to a project. The challenge is that cost is genuinely the hardest thing to give a reliable answer to before proper discovery has been done. An app that “looks simple” can be enormously complex on the backend. An app with ten screens might require three separate API integrations, a real-time notification system, a compliance audit, and a custom CMS — none of which is visible in a wireframe.

What I tell clients is this: don’t start by asking what it costs. Start by asking what you need, and then we can engineer a scope that fits what you can invest. We’ve built MVPs for $15,000 that went on to raise venture funding. We’ve built enterprise platforms for $500,000 that paid for themselves in the first quarter of deployment. The range is vast, and the only number that matters is the one tied to the right scope.

Q6. Are there red flags you watch for on the client side?

A: The biggest red flag is a client who has a fixed budget and a completely undefined scope. Those two things together are a recipe for disappointment on both sides. The second red flag is a client who has spoken to ten development firms and is purely shopping on price. If price is the only variable, you’re going to attract the vendor who’s willing to cut corners, and you’re going to discover what those corners were at the worst possible moment—usually post-launch.

The clients we work best with are those who value partnership. They come to the table with a real problem, a genuine vision, and an understanding that quality is an investment, not a line item to minimize.

On Building and Leading a Technical Team

Q7. Dev Technosys has grown to over 450 engineers. How do you think about hiring and retaining exceptional technical talent?

A: When businesses choose to hire mobile app developers, whether through a firm like ours or independently, they’re making a bet on people. The code is a byproduct of the thinking. So the question I’ve always asked when evaluating engineers — at any level — is not “can you write this?” but “can you think about why this should or shouldn’t be written?”

Technical skill is table stakes. Problem-solving curiosity is the differentiator. And increasingly, so is the ability to communicate. A developer who can build something extraordinary but can’t explain their decisions to a non-technical product owner is only half as effective as they could be.

In terms of retention, I think the industry has learned some hard lessons over the last several years. Developers don’t leave for salary alone—they leave because they’re bored, because they feel invisible, or because they don’t believe in what they’re building. We’ve invested heavily in creating a culture where engineers are brought into strategic conversations early, where their architectural opinions are genuinely heard, and where there’s a visible path to growth that doesn’t require becoming a manager to be respected.

Q8. How do you keep up with how fast the technology landscape is moving?

A: Honestly, I rely on the team as much as I contribute to the team. The people we hire are often deeper experts in their specific domain than I am—that’s the point. My job is to understand enough to ask the right questions, make sound architectural bets, and recognize signal from noise when new technologies emerge.

The noise-to-signal problem in mobile development is real. Every year there are a dozen new frameworks, platforms, and paradigms that are declared the future of everything. Most of them are not. The ones that do tend to share a common trait: they solve a real, persistent pain point rather than create a solution looking for a problem. Flutter was a genuine leap forward. AI-assisted development tooling is a genuine leap forward. I try to focus there and not get distracted by the next shiny object.

On the Future of Mobile App Development

Q9. Where do you see mobile app development heading over the next three to five years?

A: Several directions at once, which makes it genuinely exciting.

First, the line between mobile apps and AI assistants is going to continue blurring. We’re already building products where the “app” is partly a conversational interface—users describe what they want, and the application responds intelligently rather than presenting a static menu of options. That shift requires developers to think not just about UI/UX but about intent architecture, which is a genuinely new discipline.

Second, enterprise mobile app development is going to accelerate faster than consumer development over the near term. Enterprises sat on the sidelines for years while consumer apps set the design and experience standards. Now they’re catching up aggressively, and they’re doing it with budgets that reflect how seriously they take mobile as a channel. Some of our most ambitious projects right now are internal enterprise tools that are as well-designed as any consumer product I’ve seen.

Third, I think the hybrid mobile app development solutions story is going to continue getting stronger. As Flutter matures and React Native’s architecture improves, the practical gap between hybrid and native narrows further. For the vast majority of use cases, hybrid is going to become the default, and native will become the deliberate premium choice—rather than the automatic assumption.

Q10. Is there a particular type of project that excites you most right now?

A: Super apps, The concept that a single mobile application can be a wallet, a social platform, a commerce engine, a services marketplace, and a communications tool all in one—that’s where I think the most interesting design and engineering problems live right now. We’re seeing it evolve across Southeast Asia and the Middle East in particular, and it demands a kind of full-stack, full-discipline thinking that I find genuinely energizing.

The apps that will define the next decade aren’t going to be single-purpose utilities. They’re going to be ecosystems. And building ecosystems requires partners who can think at multiple levels simultaneously—product, architecture, security, scale, regulation, and user experience—all at once. That’s the kind of challenge that Dev Technosys was built for.

On Dev Technosys’s Place in the Industry

Q11. Dev Technosys consistently appears on lists of top mobile app development companies. What does that recognition mean to you personally?

A: It means something, but not everything. Rankings are useful signals—they reflect client satisfaction scores, portfolio breadth, and industry reputation. We’ve been recognized by Clutch, GoodFirms, AppFutura, and others, and I’m genuinely proud of that because most of those rankings are driven by verified client reviews. You can’t game a client saying “they delivered exactly what they promised, on time and on budget.”

But the recognition I value most is the one that doesn’t show up in any ranking: the client who comes back. Repeat business and referrals are the truest measure of whether you’re actually delivering value, and a significant portion of our revenue comes from both. That tells me we’re doing something right.

Q12. Final question: what advice would you give to a business today that’s trying to decide whether to invest in a mobile app?

A: Stop asking whether to invest and start asking why you haven’t already. The smartphone is the primary computing interface for most of the world’s population. If your business has a relationship with a customer — any customer — that relationship can be deepened, accelerated, and made more valuable through a well-built mobile experience.

The question isn’t whether mobile matters. It’s whether you have the right partner to get it right. Find a team that has done what you’re trying to do, that communicates with honesty about cost and complexity, and that will still be there two years after launch when your user base has grown and your requirements have evolved.

That’s what we try to be for every client who walks through our door. And in my experience, when you genuinely succeed at that, everything else follows.

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By Andras Molnar, University of Michigan

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By Johanna Younghans Baker

Psoriasis is a chronic immune-mediated inflammatory skin disease affecting more than 8 million Americans and nearly 125 million people worldwide.

Characterized by painful, scaly, and inflamed skin lesions, the disease often begins in adolescence or early adulthood and persists through life.

Although highly effective therapies are now available, psoriasis remains incurable, and lesions commonly recur in the same skin location after treatment is stopped.

“Even when the skin appears clinically clear, tissue resident memory T cells, or TRMs, can persist within the tissue and drive disease relapse,” explained Rundong Jiang, Ph.D. student, first author of the study and a researcher at Michigan Medicine.

“Understanding how these cells survive long term has been a major unanswered question in psoriasis research.”

A new study from researchers at Michigan Medicine provides important insight into how one of the most widely used classes of psoriasis therapies, IL-23 blockade, achieves durable disease control.

By mapping the immune landscape of psoriasis lesions before, during, and after treatment, the team identified how these therapies reshape the inflammatory environment over time and uncovered mechanisms that may explain both prolonged remission and eventual disease recurrence.

Exploring how IL 23-blockade works

Anti-IL-23 therapies, including widely used drugs such as Skyrizi, have transformed the treatment of psoriasis. However, exactly how these therapies produce long-lasting disease control within the skin itself has remained incompletely understood.

“Although these drugs are highly successful clinically, we still did not fully understand how they work within the tissue microenvironment of psoriasis lesions,” said Rundong Jiang.

“We wanted to define the cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible for their durable effects.”

Using high-resolution single-cell analyses, the researchers found that pathogenic immune cells remain embedded within the epidermis, the outermost layer of the skin, where they can persist for years or even decades.

“What was remarkable is that IL-23 blockade, particularly at higher doses, profoundly reduced these TRM cells within the epidermis,” said Johann E. Gudjonsson, M.D., Ph.D., senior author of the study.

“These cells appear to function as a reservoir for disease recurrence.”

The study also identified additional signaling pathways that may help sustain these residual pathogenic cells including IL-7 and IL-34 signaling.

These findings suggest that combining IL-23 blockade with therapies targeting survival pathways in TRMs could potentially drive deeper and more durable remission.

“We think we may now understand why these drugs are so effective, but also why the disease eventually returns,” Gudjonsson said.

“Current therapies dramatically suppress the inflammatory response, but they may not completely eliminate the cells capable of reigniting disease.”

Towards deeper remission and potentially disease reset

The team’s next goal is to determine whether these residual TRM populations can be more completely eliminated or functionally reprogrammed to achieve prolonged remission or potentially reset the disease state.

“We’re still quite a way from that goal,” Gudjonsson cautioned, “but this study provides an important roadmap for how we might eventually get there.”

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Previously Published on michiganmedicine.org with Creative Commons License

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By Michael Egan

Somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, I remember César Aira writing that “monsters manage to escape from the net that brings humans to the surface.” It’s a compelling image, but I don’t think he’s right. I’m not so sure there is a clear distinction between humans and monsters—or that the net is so selective, or that monsters are particularly good at escaping the net’s clutches.

After years of teaching history, I can assert that monsters are good to think with. They are instantly recognizable and one of the great universals across time and place: because monsters are everywhere, their study invites comparative investigation of myth, stories, and beliefs all over the world. Monsters constitute a familiar entry point into tackling a broad array of social and cultural questions, because they hold up a mirror and reflect the fears and anxieties of a people as a means of warning. This prompted me to develop a course on the history of monsters at McMaster University in 2019; I have been teaching variations of that original course since. HIST 2GR3 (the course code may be some of my finest work…) meandered through foundational mythologies from every continent, the medieval and early modern worlds, before turning its attention to modern popular culture and the horrors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I never pretended toward any kind of comprehensive survey, but rather invited students to follow their own enthusiasm within (or beyond) the content I laid out. I subscribe to the notion that teaching and learning the tenets of historical methodologies is infinitely easier if students are already captivated by historical content that is meaningful to them. My presentation of the course had a clear narrative arc, but the real thrust of the course was around student discovery and helping them to navigate their own wonder and curiosity.

The Latin roots for monster—monstrum and monstrare—mean divine omen and to point out or show. These roots suggest that monsters have always been meant to show us something about the world. Contemporary scholarship takes that charge seriously, asking what lessons these creatures have to offer. Through these warnings, monsters and their stories foster conformity and discourage deviance. And they continue to possess considerable currency in the modern world. But history is full of human monsters too, and it is equally important to recognize the shared space between human and mythical monsters within a singular narrative.

PAZI SNAJPER: watch out: sniper. One of many such markings in Sarajevo. Photo credit: Paalso, July 1996

The tagline for my course was that every society gets the monsters it deserves. It’s a cute way of suggesting that monsters are a product of their time and place. It’s no accident that Bram Stoker’s Dracula captivated a late Victorian period worried about immigration and a loosening of sexual mores. It might be equally easy to recognize how and why Godzilla emerged from post-World War II nuclear fears in Japan. In a more contemporary world, zombies do a lot of heavy lifting. Not unlike Dracula, they offer another xenophobic image of barbarians at the gates, but they also speak to the mindlessness of capitalist labour and the fatuous, all-consuming twitterings of social media and entertainment echo chambers. Recent reports suggest that North Americans check their phone over 100 times a day, which maybe speaks to an undead-like erosion of presence, patience, and attention (but that’s another essay).

Of course, monsters and their place in human societies have changed over time.  In broad brushstrokes, the course identified distinct periods, and I split my survey of the history of monsters across three imperfect and overlapping chapters:

The Monster as the Unknown. The earliest chapter leaned into monsters in a world shaped by magic, myth, mysticism, and the supernatural, where not everything can be explained and morality tales provide stark warnings about what’s “out there.” This is the bump in the night or the fear of the deep dark woods; those stories were designed to keep communities close to the hearth.

The Monster as Other. Somewhere between the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment—I’m deliberately a little loose with my timeline: this is a slow and uneven transition—the bent toward explaining and justifying the cosmos was revolutionary in demystifying the world. The rationalization of the world provoked a doubling down on the othering of monsters from creatures that were unknown to known, demonized miscreants or, simply, non-conforming others. This demonization of difference took on unsavoury forms of racial ideologies and established “rational” racial and gendered hierarchies that continue to underpin contemporary thought.

The Monster as Self. We are all monsters. Alternatively, we are all legacies of the history that made us, and the history of the modern world is replete with catastrophe: war, genocide, violence, exploitation. On the one hand, this third chapter turns the exploration of monsters inward to strike at the imaginative fears that have always concocted and created monsters. On the other, it is a meditation on the “banality of evil.” This is a function of the unspoken, compassionless social complicity that ignores the suffering of others—a lack of imagination—but also the tendency towards conformity and unquestioning order. We are our own monsters, and that’s something with which the contemporary world ought to reckon.

Implying that we are products of the horrors that preceded us—and we are all monstrous—is a difficult (but important) pill to swallow. Where monsters in popular culture spark the imagination and invite some entertainment, play, and wonder, the alchemy of connecting these kinds of safe monsters to the real-world horrors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in this final chapter can be discombobulating. In the classroom, I found I needed to find a way to walk back some of the darker implications with which the course was wrapping up in order to help students make more thorough connections across the various themes we’d covered. The monster as self was unsettling, and I discovered that many students were depressed by the historical and psychological legacies that came with kinds of compassionless social complicity that recent history suggests might lie at the heart of the human condition.

I landed on a conclusion that submitted the imperative of loving monsters, or understanding them, which maybe amounts to the same kind of thing. This was less advocating forgiveness for past transgressions and more about appreciating, reveling in, difference. I quoted Anne Carson in Autobiography of Red quoting Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “I will never know how you see red, and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.” The belief in an undivided being between us as first movement is, I have come to think, one of the central tenets of understanding the importance of radical dignity through the study of history and a critical step in making connection in an evermore disconnected world. Making space for the idea that we aren’t in constant confrontation with each other (and our perceived monsters)—and that we might insert ourselves into a more complex ecosystem—means that the idea of monsters does not disappear, but it loses its harsh oppositionality. It becomes an acceptance of otherness and an appreciation for variety through practicing a kind of kinetic energy that treats all living things with dignity.

That is how we might all accept our monsterhood and come to love our monsters. Yes, there are monsters; yes, we are all monsters in one way or another; yes, these are dark times. But the mission remains the same: there is hope for a better world and it begins with according love and dignity to ourselves and to each other. And the best way to do that is in cultivating the imagination so that it doesn’t fail us and we are better able to recognize our complicity in the suffering of others or our failure to embrace variety. It’s a punchy ending. It flirts with edginess. It makes a case for the importance of a liberal arts education. But it is also just another iteration of the imposition of conformity omnipresent in morality tales. It’s a jeremiad warning of darkness and danger but offering redemption in the final analysis.

Maybe there’s a little more to it than that. Histories of monstrosity challenge students to reflect on the power of stories and the limits of their empathy. Where every society gets the monsters it deserves, not all monsters deserve the societies that make them. And make no mistake: monsters are very frequently invented. Natalie Haynes’s novel, Stone Blind, reminds us that Medusa is unfairly portrayed as a monster; her story is far more complicated. She was a beautiful priestess to Athena until she was violated by Poseidon. Because Athena couldn’t punish Poseidon, she transformed Medusa into a monster capable of turning all those who looked upon her (men) to stone. Lost in this account, of course, is the reversal of the ubiquitous male gaze which, when turned back on men, petrifies them. In a similar vein, Maria Dahvana Headley has gone to some length in humanizing Grendel’s mother in her streetwise translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf as well as in her contemporary adaptation, The Mere Wife, a novel set in a post-Iraq, suburban United States. In both treatments—Haynes’s and Headley’s—the traditional concept of hero is due a reckoning. Perseus and Beowulf are one-dimensional creatures, intent on restoring a violent and patriarchal order. Both authors ask us (in much the same way that Mary Shelley did in Frankenstein): who is the real monster here? Compare, too, the Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest with the Caliban in Aimé Césaire’s anti-colonial adaptation, and maybe it’s possible to challenge preconceived notions about what, who, and why is a monster. There is a further lesson here: monsters make convenient scapegoats (and excuses) for human cruelty in the name of policing and performing a moral conformity.

But, and this is really what I wanted to say, there are monsters: real monsters so unfathomable that they cannot be reconciled with the hopeful ending advocating greater kindness and empathy. And they live among us, drawn up to the surface by the same net. A growing body of evidence suggests that during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, well-to-do bankers, lawyers, and doctors from Europe and North America (Canadians among them) engaged in weekend “sniper safaris.”^[i] Hunting and weapons enthusiasts paid exorbitant prices for the experience of shooting Sarajevans in the streets. From Trieste, these hunters were flown to Belgrade, where the Bosnian Serb militia provided them passage to and positioning in the 1984 Olympics concrete bobsled track on Mount Trebevi?. Emblem of the Winter Olympics turned fortified sniper’s nest gave rise to a new kind of “weekend warrior” driven by some pornographic Nietzscheian fantasy. What kind of monster is it that can travel into a distant war zone, pay for the privilege to hunt human game, and deny that it is looking at another self through the crosshairs of its rifle? In addition to travel and logistics, fees were assigned for targets. Elderly citizens were free. Children cost extra. Between 6 April 1992 and 29 February 1996, 11,541 Sarajevans were killed by shelling and sniper fire. More than 1,500 were children.

I will abdicate meaning and conclusion to readers as well as the problem of how to square this kind of monster with other historical and mythical horrors. This is not some variation on Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil or some grotesque lack of imagination. Something else is at play here for which psychopathy is insufficient as explanation. I have locked Sarajevo and its international band of hobby shooters deep inside for a long time, but it rattles around in my mind at the most inopportune times. Maybe for obvious reasons, I have not shared it with my family even as its intrusive images haunt me at the dinner table. It is also a story that I was unable to wrap into the last iteration of my history of monsters course, because it seemed to suggest an ineffable category of monstrosity for which I lacked language, category, and imagination (who is the monster now?).

A part of me is sorry to share this story with you, reader—to infect you with such monstrosities—but my own stunned silence is counterbalanced by the kind of compulsion or obligation that drove Coleridge’s ancient mariner” to tell his tale. Maybe this is a selfish act of gaining temporary relief from the “woful agony” of wrestling with  knowledge of the Sarajevo story. But maybe it is in shining a light on the darknesses in the human psyche that a more fulsome reading of the past can be realized. Modern history is a violent and untidy enterprise. If monsters serve as a lens or mirror through which to read a particular historical moment, and we are all the legacy of those past moments: What is the nature of the undivided being that connects us with such monsters? And what can history offer as pathways toward redemption?

^[i] Inspired by the Slovenian director Miran Zupanic’s 2022 documentary, “Sarajevo Safari,” and research conducted by the Italian writer Ezio Gavazzeni, just published in I Cecchini del Weekend: L’Inchiesta Sui Safari Umani a Sarajevo (Rome: PaperFIRST, 2026), a formal inquiry was initiated in Milan in late 2025 to investigate these sniper safaris and to bring to light who was involved. The first suspect was called to testify in February 2026. Should more perpetrators be identified, this could become one of the great trials of the century, and a critical confrontation with a monstrous evil that should rattle the cage of what it means to be human.

Michael Egan is an historian and academic director of the INSPIRE Office of Flexible Learning at McMaster University. In addition to writing a history of monsters, he is at work on a book about the abduction and murder of the Moroccan anticolonial activist Mehdi Ben Barka in 1965. Toxic Fear: Pollution Anxieties in the American 1980s is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press later in 2026.

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Previously Published on activehistory.ca with Creative Commons License

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Photo credit: PAZI SNAJPER: watch out: sniper. One of many such markings in Sarajevo. Photo credit: Paalso, July 1996

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By Christine Leong

There is a quiet pattern anyone who has worked behind a pharmacy counter for any length of time can recognize. The patient showing signs of distress. The patient disclosing struggles with making ends meet in a new country. Or the patient asking questions about their medication in a way that suggests they may not be coping.

These encounters are not uncommon. Research has shown that as many as 86 per cent of community pharmacists interacted with at least one patient they perceived to be experiencing a mental health problem or crisis. Three-quarters have seen patients they believed were experiencing anxiety or depression. Thirty-eight per cent have encountered a patient they believed was experiencing suicidal thoughts.

But pharmacists are not trained to respond to these situations. And in a country with a mental health system as strained as Canada’s, that gap is more consequential than it sounds.

The good news is that the training exists. The evidence on whether this training works is good and getting better. And the place pharmacists occupy in the Canadian health-care system makes them the right people to receive it.

One of the training options is Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) – a two-day course that was developed in Australia in 2001 and has been delivered in Canada since 2007 through Opening Minds, a program of the Mental Health Commission of Canada. Anybody can take this course, which is structured around a simple premise: just as anyone can learn physical first aid to help in an emergency until professional help arrives, a person can learn to support someone experiencing a mental health crisis until appropriate help is reached.

The most pronounced impact of MHFA training on pharmacists is on their confidence to intervene, their likelihood to engage in conversations about mental health with patients and their likelihood to offer compassionate support. A pilot study we conducted, the first in Canada to evaluate MHFA training in pharmacy practice, found pharmacist confidence in assessing a patient for risk of suicide and harm rose from 46.7 per cent before training to 100 per cent after training. This can make a meaningful impact on individuals who may take few chances to voice they are struggling.

Patients themselves have voiced that pharmacists are part of how they manage their mental health. In our 2026 cross-sectional survey of 228 Canadian adults, we found that roughly one-third of respondents had met with their pharmacist about a mental health concern in the past month. Nearly 19 per cent had received help from a pharmacist related to suicide. Moreover, the proportion of Canadians who said they would be comfortable discussing mental health with a pharmacist rose from 53.5 per cent for an untrained pharmacist to 61.8 per cent for a trained one. Provincial regulators should include MHFA in contributing education requirements. Pharmacy schools should embed the certification in undergraduate training, as several Australian programs already do.

The not so positive news is that more training on its own will not be enough. Pharmacy is, by every measure, a profession under significant strain. Burnout among Canadian pharmacists has been climbing. Pharmacist associations across Canada have published reports calling attention to staffing models and corporate pressure to meet metrics that hurt the time for pharmacists to engage their full scope of practice. Asking a pharmacist who has been on her feet for nine hours, alone, with 12 prescriptions in queue and a phone ringing, to also conduct a careful suicide risk assessment in a patient consultation room is not a training problem. It is a structural one.

Large pharmacy chains, which now employ a substantial proportion of Canadian community pharmacists, have a direct role to play. Mandating meaningful pharmacist overlap during peak hours would change what is possible at the counter. It would allow one pharmacist to step away with a patient in distress while another continues dispensing safely. It would make the time and space that mental health conversations require possible when needed.

Pharmacists are by some measures the most frequently visited and most accessible health professionals in Canada. The average Canadian on regular medication sees their pharmacist every month. No appointment. No referral. No wait list. For patients whose mental health is deteriorating, the pharmacy counter may be the only health-care touchpoint in their life that month, and the pharmacist may be the only health professional in any position to notice.

This is true in ways that other health professions cannot quite replicate. We know who is on which medications, and we know when refills sometimes slip. We see the over-the-counter products that are being purchased alongside their prescription medications. In short, we see a different kind of clinical picture than what other health-care providers are able to see.

Universal MHFA training would not solve mental health care in Canada. It would not replace the family doctors, psychiatrists and counselors we do have, or the important services available. What it would do is make the most accessible health professional in the country competent at the first conversation, the one that decides whether someone leaves the pharmacy with a phone number and a sense of being seen or leaves with a quiet conviction that nobody noticed.

Funding for the two Canadian research studies was provided by the Canadian Foundation for Pharmacy and Bell Let’s Talk Community Grant

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Previously Published on healthydebate.ca with Creative Commons License

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By Claire Spasojevic for Degree

Picture this: Eighty thousand fans in a stadium are on their feet and holding their breath, anticipating a penalty kick that could decide everything. In that suspended moment, players and supporters alike feel that familiar prickle of sweat that has nothing to do with the afternoon sun. That’s anxiety sweating, and it’s completely different from the sweat people break during a workout or a hot summer commute.

Aside from being interesting science, understanding the difference is practical knowledge that helps you stay comfortable and confident when you need it most. Degree explored the differences between heat sweat and anxiety sweat while providing tips for managing both kinds.

Two Types of Sweat, Two Different Triggers

The body has two distinct sweating systems, each activated by different circumstances and with different purposes. Also, how much you sweat is unique to you. “The amount of sweat that an individual produces varies from person to person,” Unilever R&D scientist Matt Annecharico explained. “This is due to a number of factors that include environmental temperature, physical effort, emotional stress, and fitness level.”

Anxiety sweat

Also known as stress sweat, this type kicks in when your brain senses a high-stakes situation. Anticipation, fear, excitement—all of these can trigger it. “Stress sweat is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, and when adrenaline or the heart rate rises, this system triggers sweat that contains lipids and proteins, which bacteria naturally found on the skin love,” Annecharico said.

Importantly, this type of sweat has nothing to do with your body temperature. You could be sitting in an air-conditioned room, watching your team take a penalty in the FIFA World Cup final, and still experience a sudden rush of nervous sweating on your palms, in your armpits or on your soles.

Heat sweat

This is your body’s natural cooling system. When your body temperature rises during exercise or in warm weather, it releases sweat, which then evaporates from your skin to help bring your temperature back down.

Same output, very different cause.

The Glands Behind the Sweat

Heat sweating is managed by eccrine glands, which can be found throughout the body. These glands produce a clear, watery sweat made mostly of water and electrolytes. Because it’s used for quick evaporation and cooling, it’s odorless on its own.

Stress sweat, on the other hand, comes from the apocrine glands found mainly in the underarms and groin. “Apocrine glands are activated by an emotional response and produce an oily sweat. This fatty and oily sweat does not have any odor on its own, but when certain skin microbes feed on it, this breaks it down to produce a strong odor,” Unilever Personal Care R&D manager Bivash Dasgupta explained.

This is why, when anxious or stressed, your sweat can smell more intense than the sweat your body produces during a long run. It’s not about how much you sweat; it’s about which glands are active.

What Each Type of Sweat Is For

Heat sweating is one of your body’s most effective ways to cool down. As sweat evaporates from the skin’s surface, it draws heat away, helping to regulate your body temperature during physical activity or when it’s hot. You can think of it as your body’s natural thermostat at work.

Anxiety sweating has a different purpose. It’s part of the body’s natural fight-or-flight response, a physical reaction to stress or stressful situations. It’s an old survival system that once helped prepare the body for quick action in moments of danger. Today, that same response can still kick in during everyday situations like writing an exam, waiting for a job interview, or watching a last-minute penalty shootout from the stands.

Easy Ways to Manage Both Types of Sweat

For stress sweat

Breathing exercises, mindfulness, and regular physical activity can all help calm your body’s stress response. Before high-pressure situations, slow, controlled breathing can help reduce the physical reactions that lead to nervous sweating.

For heat sweat

If you’re heading to a stadium on a hot day, a little preparation can go a long way. Stay hydrated, choose breathable, moisture-wicking fabrics, and dress in a way that helps your body stay cool naturally. This means loose, comfortable clothing, a hat or cap, sunglasses—and don’t forget the sunscreen.

Protect Against Sweat

Antiperspirants are one of the most effective ways to manage sweat. Unlike deodorants, which only help with odor, antiperspirants work by reducing sweat production, which also means less odor.

Regular use, especially after your evening shower before bed, when sweat glands are less active, can provide reliable protection against both types of sweating.

FAQs

Why does emotional sweating feel different from heat sweating?

Emotional sweating is triggered by stress or anxiety rather than changes in temperature. It often shows up in areas like your palms, feet, or underarms, which can make it feel quite different from heat-related sweating. Heat sweating occurs across the body and helps cool you down.

How can I manage emotional and heat-related sweating effectively?

Managing both types of sweating can involve stress-reduction techniques, staying hydrated, using an antiperspirant, and wearing appropriate clothing.

When should I seek help for excessive sweating?

If you notice sudden changes in your sweating pattern, night sweats, or sweating alongside symptoms like weight loss or fever, it could point to an underlying health issue. It’s a good idea to speak to your doctor to get it checked out.

Anxiety sweat, nervous sweat, stress sweat, whatever you call it—it’s completely normal. The same goes for heat sweat. Both are simply your body doing what it’s designed to do: responding to its environment, regulating itself, and preparing for what’s ahead.

The difference comes down to what triggers it, which sweat glands are involved, and the composition of the sweat itself. Understanding these differences can help you choose the right tools and approaches for each, so you can stay fresh, dry, and confident—even at the game.

This story was produced by Degree and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.

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Previously Published on hub.stackernewswire

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For local businesses, visibility is everything. Whether customers are searching for a nearby restaurant, service provider, retail store, or professional agency, appearing prominently in search results can significantly impact traffic, leads, and revenue. However, achieving strong online visibility requires more than simply having a website. Businesses need a strategic approach to search engine optimization that aligns with local search behavior and evolving search engine algorithms.

This is why many businesses choose to work with an SEO specialist in the Philippines. With the right expertise, local brands can improve their online presence, attract more qualified customers, and build a sustainable foundation for long-term growth.

The Growing Importance of Local Search

Consumers increasingly rely on search engines to find products and services in their area. Before making a purchase or contacting a business, many people search online to compare options, read reviews, and gather information.

Local search results often influence these decisions. Businesses that appear in prominent positions are more likely to receive clicks, inquiries, and visits compared to competitors with limited visibility.

While local search opportunities are significant, competition has also increased. Many businesses are investing in digital marketing, making it more challenging to stand out. Effective SEO helps bridge this gap by improving rankings and ensuring that potential customers can easily find a business when they need it.

Why an SEO Specialist Philippines Professional Adds Value

Search engine optimization involves numerous factors, including keyword research, content optimization, technical improvements, user experience, and link building. Managing all these elements requires knowledge, experience, and ongoing attention.

An SEO specialist in the Philippines understands how search engines evaluate websites and how local businesses can improve their visibility in competitive markets. Their expertise helps businesses avoid common mistakes while focusing on strategies that deliver measurable results.

Some of the key benefits include:

• Better keyword targeting
• Improved website performance
• Enhanced local search visibility
• Higher quality organic traffic
• Stronger online credibility
• More effective content strategies

Rather than relying on guesswork, businesses can benefit from a structured approach that aligns SEO efforts with specific business goals.

Local SEO Helps Businesses Reach Nearby Customers

One of the biggest advantages of working with a local SEO consultant is their ability to optimize a business for location-based searches.

Local SEO focuses on helping businesses appear when users search for services or products within a specific geographic area. This includes optimizing business profiles, local citations, website content, and location-specific keywords.

For example, customers searching for a nearby service provider often use terms that include a city, neighborhood, or region. A properly optimized website can increase the likelihood of appearing in those search results.

A local SEO consultant can help businesses:

• Improve local search rankings
• Optimize location-based content
• Enhance Google Business Profile visibility
• Strengthen local citation consistency
• Increase customer engagement through local searches

These improvements make it easier for potential customers to discover and connect with a business.

Building Authority Through Quality Link Acquisition

Links remain one of the most important factors in search engine rankings. Search engines view quality backlinks as signals of trust and authority. However, earning relevant links requires a strategic and ethical approach.

Many businesses lack the time or resources needed to conduct effective outreach campaigns. This is where white-label link-building services can play an important role.

These services help acquire quality backlinks from relevant websites while following search engine guidelines. By focusing on reputable sources and meaningful content placement, businesses can strengthen their authority and improve search visibility.

An experienced SEO professional often incorporates white-label link-building services into a broader SEO strategy to support long-term growth. This approach allows businesses to benefit from specialized expertise while maintaining focus on their core operations.

Technical SEO Is Essential for Long-Term Success

Many business owners focus primarily on content and keywords while overlooking technical SEO. However, technical factors can significantly affect how search engines crawl, index, and rank a website.

An SEO specialist in the Philippines can identify and address technical issues that may limit search performance.

Common technical SEO improvements include:

• Enhancing website speed
• Improving mobile usability
• Fixing crawl errors
• Optimizing site structure
• Strengthening internal linking
• Improving indexation

These optimizations help search engines better understand a website while creating a smoother experience for visitors.

A technically sound website often performs better in search results and supports other SEO efforts more effectively.

Creating a Sustainable Digital Marketing Strategy

SEO is not a one-time project. Search algorithms change, competitors adjust their strategies, and customer behavior evolves. Businesses need a long-term approach that can adapt to these changes.

A knowledgeable local SEO consultant helps businesses develop sustainable strategies based on data, performance analysis, and ongoing optimization.

This includes:

• Monitoring keyword performance
• Analyzing competitor activity
• Updating content regularly
• Tracking user engagement metrics
• Refining local search strategies

Consistent optimization allows businesses to maintain visibility and remain competitive in changing search environments.

Helping Small and Growing Businesses Compete

Many local businesses operate with limited marketing budgets. Competing against larger organizations can seem difficult, especially when those competitors have greater resources and brand recognition.

An SEO specialist in the Philippines can help level the playing field by focusing on targeted strategies that maximize available resources. Instead of trying to compete broadly, businesses can prioritize specific opportunities where they have the greatest chance of success.

By combining local optimization, content development, technical improvements, and white-label link-building services, smaller businesses can improve visibility and attract highly relevant traffic without relying solely on paid advertising.

This makes SEO an attractive option for businesses seeking long-term growth and consistent lead generation.

Conclusion

Local brands face increasing competition for online visibility, making effective SEO more important than ever. Businesses that invest in search optimization are better positioned to reach potential customers, build credibility, and generate sustainable growth.

Working with an SEO specialist in the Philippines provides businesses with the expertise needed to navigate the complexities of search engine optimization. Combined with the support of a local SEO consultant and strategic white-label link-building services, organizations can strengthen their online presence and improve their ability to compete in local markets.

As consumer search behavior continues to evolve, businesses that prioritize SEO will be better equipped to connect with customers and achieve long-term success.

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By Ashoka Mukpo

• Global Energy Monitor released its annual review of global coal use, saying power generation dropped slightly in 2025.
• While its overall use decreased, the amount of coal-fired power capacity rose by 3.5%, primarily due to new projects in China and India.
• In the EU, nearly 70% of planned retirements of coal plants for 2025 failed to materialize, partly due to concerns over energy disruptions.
• The U.S. was a major outlier, with policy interventions leading to a 13% increase in coal electricity generation.

Coal use across the world continued to drop in 2025, but there was an increase in the capacity to burn it, according to an annual report by data analysis group Global Energy Monitor. Overall power generation from coal declined by 0.6% last year, but the amount that was on call if needed for power grids rose by 3.5%.

Most of that growth was concentrated in China, where additional coal capacity is increasingly considered a backup option to ensure energy security. While China added 78.1 gigawatts of coal power capacity in 2025, its actual use of coal power fell by 1.2%.

This decline was notable as it came amid an overall rise in Chinese energy demand. According to the report, more than 90% of that increased demand was met not with coal, but with wind and solar. While China remains far and away the world’s largest user of coal, more of its energy needs are being met with renewables.

India added the second-highest coal power capacity in 2025, but it also showed movement toward a cleaner grid. Along with record solar and wind power additions, renewables made up more than half of the country’s overall power capacity for the first time.

Christine Shearer, lead researcher of the report on the global coal power fleet, said most of the new coal capacity added in India and China was commissioned years ago, before the market dynamics around renewables had changed.

“By the time all these coal plants began operating in 2025, cheaper alternatives like solar and wind had undercut them in both China and India,” she said. “So, you’re seeing the tail end of an older investment wave arriving into a market that has already moved on. The key question is how quickly policymakers and utilities acknowledge that shift and begin planning around it.”

China still maintains 1,243.3 GW of coal power capacity — more than the rest of the world combined — but renewables make up an increasing share of its overall power makeup. According to Shearer, while coal accounted for 55% of its total electricity generation in 2025, renewables like wind, solar and hydro provided 35%.

But the capacity of “new and reactivated” coal-fired power plants in China reached a record high in 2025, reflecting concerns over the reliability of renewable energy sources even as the country transitions toward increased usage of them.

The report painted a mixed picture of coal reliance across the world, with variations by region. The number of countries either constructing or proposing new coal plants dropped from 38 to 32 in 2025. After Brazil and Honduras pledged to end their use of coal, Latin America now has no new coal power proposals in the works.

The European Union’s steady transition away from coal is also continuing. Last year, coal represented only 10% of the bloc’s total power capacity, down from 30% in 2000, and for the first time more electricity was generated by wind and solar than by fossil fuels.

However, close to 70% of planned coal power plant retirements in the EU scheduled for 2025 failed to materialize, reflecting a broader global trend. Disruptions in energy markets caused first by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and now the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran have made some governments hesitate to get rid of their coal capacity, fearing that it could be needed in case of fuel shortages.

Shearer said the overall impact of higher prices for coal and other fossil fuels caused by the war in Iran will be to spur greater adoption of renewables.

“The crisis is reinforcing the underlying lesson that dependence on internationally traded fossil fuels creates economic and geopolitical vulnerability. That is likely to accelerate investment in renewables over the longer term,” she said.

While coal usage dropped at the global scale, a major outlier was the United States, which saw coal electricity generation rise by 13%. The U.S. was the only major economy to post an increase in coal usage — a direct result of policy intervention by the Trump administration and part of its larger rollback of clean energy incentives.

In 2025, the U.S. federal government ordered five coal plants in four states to continue operating despite plans to retire them. More than $600 million in public funds were directed toward modernizing and extending the life of coal facilities in the U.S., a decision the report said is contributing to rising household electricity prices.

Outside of China and India, proposed coal projects in 2025 were often for “captive” plants to power industrial activities like mining or minerals processing. In Indonesia, captive coal capacity rose to 20 GW last year, primarily to service the nickel and aluminum industries, and an additional 14 GW is currently in the development pipeline.

While African nations overall represent a tiny fraction of global coal usage, Zimbabwe and Zambia announced a combined 5.2 GW of new planned coal capacity, primarily intended to power their mining industries.

Overall, Zimbabwe has the fourth-largest amount of coal capacity under development in the world, at 8.6 GW.

“Both governments, when it comes to industry, have a very agnostic approach to the type of energy they’re using,” said Kudakwashe Manjojo, just transition adviser at the Kenya-based climate and energy think tank Power Shift Africa. “So basically, any energy is good energy.”

Zimbabwe is one of the world’s top lithium producers. Manjojo said it’s ironic that as it exports material for renewable energy sources, it’s forced to use coal for its own industrial activities. While climate-related drought has reduced the amount of hydropower available to Zimbabwe, he said the increased production at Chinese-owned coal mines is a bigger factor in the country’s use of the fossil fuel for electricity generation.

“About four or five years ago, China said it wouldn’t be building new coal mines in Africa, but that didn’t negate them increasing production in the already existing coal mines,” he said.

In the long run, Manjojo said he worries the reliance on coal will become a constraint for Zimbabwe.

“Coal is dying, oil and gas are dying, we all know renewable energy is cheaper, but [coal-mining] towns will become sacrifice zones for the transition, and that will be dangerous,” he said.

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By Associated Press

By Garance Burke and Sonia Pérez D. / Associated Press

Eleven-year-old Ederson Galicia Alva had just stepped off the plane and into the Miami airport’s dim hallways when federal agents pulled his mother aside for questioning.

Again.

Panic welled up. His excitement at soon being back at recess with his Florida classmates fell away. Would the government take her away again?

This was not his first trauma. In 2018, when he was just 3 years old, Ederson was taken from his mother’s arms at the U.S.-Mexico border under the first Trump administration’s family separation policy and kept apart from her in a government facility for months.

They were finally reunited after lawyers intervened. Then, in June of last year, he and his mother were separated a second time, despite legal protections meant to keep them and families like theirs together.

He later joined his mother in Guatemala. After a destitute, torturous 11 months in the indigenous highlands, Ederson’s family was allowed to return to Florida last week, following a federal judge’s order that the government had acted illegally.

Now, eight years after President Donald Trump’s forcible border separations came to an official halt following global outrage, an Associated Press investigation has found that the government has re-separated dozens of children from their families, despite a landmark legal settlement meant to keep them together. Some of their parents have been locked in immigration detention facilities for months, others deported back to their home countries after being taken from their families once again. In some cases, immigration officials conducting interior arrests deported people despite discovering they were legally off limits for removal, according to emails obtained by AP.

“Not only has the government refused to acknowledge the horror of the initial separations during Trump I, but it is now detaining and deporting these same families,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union and lead counsel in the lawsuit that ended the policy. “These children have suffered enough without re-traumatizing them.”

Trump successfully ran for reelection on an anti-immigration platform. Under his second term, the administration has vowed to deport more than 1 million people per year. Federal agents have been plucking people from their communities so swiftly that, according to the Brookings Institution, now the parents of tens of thousands of children have been detained.

This time, family separations often look different from Trump’s first term. In 2018, Ederson and other children at the border were taken from their parents, who were detained separately and overwhelmingly charged criminally with illegal entry. Then, the government was unable to reunite them for months because adults and children’s information was kept in different computer systems.

A judge barred the government from separating most families at the border and ordered the government to bring the families back together after the ACLU filed a class action lawsuit. Later, a court settlement banned most family separations to deter immigration until December 2031.

Today, if parents are arrested or deported under the president’s push for mass deportations, they are being made to choose whether to leave their children behind in the United States.

“DHS complies with all court orders, even as radical NGOs shop for the most favorable forum and activist judges seek to thwart our operations,” acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said in response to AP requests for comment about the government’s policies toward separated families.

Government attorneys have argued in recent court filings that there are no legal restrictions on “the government’s statutory authority to execute orders of removal.”

Bis added that enforcing immigration law was “not optional,” and that “every removal of an illegal alien helps restore order and reinforce the rule of law.”

Ederson’s family recently was allowed to return, but their status is still on shaky ground.

Separated at the border, then again in Florida.

After being taken from his mother, Mirsy Maricela Alva López, and confined to a government shelter in Arizona as a toddler for four and a half months, Ederson barely recognized her once they were reunited, she said. Vivid nightmares haunted him throughout his time in elementary school, where he learned to read in English in classrooms amid lush lawns and palm trees less than 10 miles from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Winter White House.

Once a federal judge approved a settlement to the class action suit under the Biden administration, Ederson’s family and those like his got legal status to stay in the U.S., with pathways for residency and asylum, and his mother got a work permit. And after months of mental health services to address his ongoing fear that his mother would never return, in early June last year — about five months after the beginning of Trump’s second administration and the president’s resumed anti-immigration push — his therapist finally said he had made so much progress he could put his weekly sessions on pause.

Two weeks later, Alva López was stopped by federal agents as she and co-workers were en route to a landscaping job near Mar-a-Lago. The agents, wearing brown uniforms, never gave a reason for the stop or identified themselves before transferring Alva López to two Florida jails, then to ICE custody in Louisiana, and finally to a plane full of shackled deportees heading to Guatemala City, she said.

“I felt the very same thing I went through the first time,” Alva López said, weeping. “I was living it all over again.”

MORE FROM AP: ICE detainees are dying by suicide at an ‘alarming’ rate, an AP investigation finds

Alva López was separated from Ederson and his older sister, Briseidy, for a week, and not given the chance to speak with an immigration official about her status or legal protections, said Kelly Kribs, an attorney with the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, which has supported Alva López’s family’s return to the U.S.

When she finally managed to call Ederson and Briseidy, they couldn’t stop sobbing. Alva López said she asked her sister to buy airplane tickets to send them to Guatemala City. She met them the next day at the airport and traveled with them nine more hours down highways and rutted roads to reach San Martín Cuchumatán, a hamlet in the highlands where the children were born.

The three of them shared a tiny bedroom with a dusty floor with Alva López’s parents and brother in an adobe brick home with a sheet metal roof, nothing like the leafy cul-de-sacs of South Florida. The school, where all lessons are in Spanish, was a mile’s walk, and none of the children in town spoke English, Ederson said.

Instead of clocking in to trim the gardens of West Palm Beach estates, each day Alva López fed the chickens and ducks in a small coop behind the house, washed the family’s laundry by hand and cooked meals on an open fire.

And Ederson was back to waking up at night fearing his future. At Northmore Elementary School, he had been doing well in fifth grade. In Guatemala, he repeated fourth grade, this time in Spanish, and was quizzed on the history and culture of a country he barely knew. His friendships weren’t as close as in West Palm Beach. Sometimes when he felt sad, he watched the school’s old online videos to see his old friends.

“We used to play and chat. Sometimes they would help me when I didn’t understand the lesson, and I would help them with math,” he said, fighting back tears. “I have very few friends here.”

Ederson still doesn’t want to talk about the separations, and he can’t stop asking his mother why she went to work that day. But he is clear on one thing: he never wants to be apart from his mother again.

‘Lasting, excruciating harm’

In late 2017, immigration officials began forcibly separating parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border, under a policy championed by Stephen Miller, Trump’s then-senior policy advisor who is now White House deputy chief of staff. After advocates got word, the ACLU filed a lawsuit in February 2018 to halt the practice called Ms. L v. U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, on behalf of a Congolese mother the Trump administration separated from her 7-year-old daughter for four months. It later became a class action suit.

It wasn’t until thousands of families were torn apart that a judge ordered the government to end separations, saying it caused “lasting, excruciating harm.”

According to the ACLU’s most recent accounting, the number of separated parents and children, and their impacted family members covered by the settlement is far greater than had been previously reported — over 11,800 — and because the government deported so many people before the practice was banned, the full scope may never be known.

The ACLU also provided AP with new information surrounding Ms. L class members who have been detained and deported during the second Trump administration, including that dozens of children were re-separated. Legal filings in the Ms. L case and other immigration attorneys working with separated families also detailed the re-separations of children.

Under a 2023 settlement agreement signed by the Biden administration, Ms. L class members — including separated parents, children and other close relatives — received special legal protections, pathways toward asylum and access to attorneys, work permits and support services. And over eight years, advocates and attorneys have been trying to help the families reunite and recover, traveling to the Guatemala rainforest and remote Honduran villages to inform class members of their rights, and offering them to apply for everything from humanitarian parole to work authorization permits to psychological counseling, benefits meant “to prevent any ongoing harm caused by the initial separation,” according to the settlement.

That changed when Trump began his second term. Support for separated families was never encoded by an act of Congress, and soon it started shrinking.

First, funding for legal services temporarily ended. Instead, the Trump administration said it would charge families $1,000 each to enter or stay in the country. Then, attorneys said, some parents were told to appear for more frequent ICE check-ins, and ordered to wear ankle monitors to record their movements. Many class members lost access to counseling.

By late last year, emails show the government had deported some protected family members even after being told by the ACLU that they were off limits as protected Ms. L class members.

Seven days before Christmas, ACLU attorney Natalie Behr wrote an urgent email to Department of Justice contacts, saying her team had learned that a protected relative was once again in ICE custody.

“We ask that you tell us why we were not notified of this class member’s detention within 24 hours. … this class member should not be removed,” Behr wrote.

A Washington DOJ trial attorney emailed back, saying he would ask ICE. ACLU attorneys followed up.

By the day after Christmas, it was already too late. He had been deported.

The problem is still surfacing. While the government is required by judge’s orders to immediately tell the ACLU when Ms. L class members are detained and to return re-separated families who have been deported, the Trump administration only disclosed in April that it had deported another protected person to Guatemala back in September, court filings show.

The same thing nearly happened to one of Alva López’s neighbors, who was picked up in West Palm Beach a few months after her deportation. The father also had done landscaping near Mar-a-Lago and had been separated at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2017 from his daughter. Under the first Trump administration, he was swiftly returned to Guatemala.

As ACLU attorneys and government lawyers hashed out what separated families were due, he came back to Florida in 2021 to reunite with his children, one of whom had been released after spending months in a government detention facility.

In October, the government locked him up, first in Alligator Alcatraz, an immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades, then inside Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, Kribs said.

At Camp East Montana, he was fed moldy food with worms, berated by guards and learned that a fellow detainee died after being mistreated by ICE officials, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of government reprisal. ICE said the detainee died after experiencing “on-site medical distress,” and the El Paso medical examiner’s office later ruled the detainee experienced “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.”

Christmas and New Year’s Eve came and went, and by January he found it hard to keep up his hopes when his children called.

The ACLU filed a motion about Ms. L parents being detained, and the father was released from government detention in April. While he’s grateful to be back home in Florida with his children, he told AP he feels like he is still being tracked through his ankle monitor and the ICE check-ins he’s required to do every two weeks. His children still worry he won’t be there when they get out of school, he said.

Bis said DHS could impose conditions on parole, including electronic monitoring, regular reporting requirements, and even detention.

‘A place where we can all be safe’

Sinri Baltazar, a mother from Honduras who was first separated from her then-5-year-old daughter in 2018, also was allowed under a judge’s order in April to return to Louisiana with her three children, including her youngest, a U.S. citizen.

It has not been easy. Baltazar, a member of the Afro-indigenous Garifuna community that faces discrimination in Honduras, was deported with her children last year after she said immigration officials told her to sign a document they said would permit her to keep her family together — only if they all left. Back in New Orleans, she said she was grateful her children could seek a better life, but they have been struggling to get by while living with an acquaintance from church.

“The only thing my children say is that they want to be home, in their own house,” Baltazar said. “I’m just trying to get us to a place where we can all be safe, and I hope for that for all the other families.”

As deportations have risen in the last year and a half, attorneys say separated families have become increasingly fearful about filling out government paperwork and many don’t know they can apply for asylum, a key benefit of the settlement that expires in December. The administration also hasn’t said whether it will extend a current, trimmed-back legal services contract for families that ends in August. Another deadline is looming as well: thousands of separated families need to request for any pending removal orders to be cancelled by December, or lose their ability to stay in the U.S. legally.

“There was never enough funding to keep up with the need,” said Anilú Chadwick, an attorney and senior director at the legal nonprofit Together & Free, which she said has supported 15 families that have been re-separated, including Baltazar’s. “Now we have to see if the government awards a new contract, and I gotta say as someone who has been on the clock to find and locate services, that is not enough time even in the best of circumstances.”

For separated families who are waiting for loved ones to be released from detention, or for paperwork to return to the U.S., however, time has been moving at a glacial pace.

Ever since Alva López was deported back to Guatemala nearly a year ago, she checked her phone each morning for word of when she and her children could return. Money started drying up. The children began forgetting their English slang. Briseidy, now 14, worried she would drift away from her American friends. Finally, two weeks ago, there was news: the government would bring her and her children back to Florida on an American Airlines flight, under a judge’s order.

The puppies she had bought Ederson to lighten his mood had died, and there were few friends and relatives to say goodbye to. So she packed up the siblings and their few possessions, their clothes now loose on their frames after losing weight since returning to Todos Santos Cuchumatán.

And finally, in the last week of May, passports and travel documents in hand, the family flew to Miami. Ederson said it felt like a miracle.

But soon after landing, immigration officials pulled Alva López in for questioning, taking her photo and fingerprints all over again and re-examining every document she held. Their stay in the U.S. may be short. An immigration official granted her just two weeks’ humanitarian parole.

The government declined to comment specifically on Alva López’s case.

“I still haven’t told the children” about the two weeks’ parole, Alva López said the first day she woke up back in the family’s old neighborhood in West Palm Beach. “They’re going to worry that the same thing will happen again.”

Burke reported from San Francisco. Pérez reported from San Martín Cuchumatán, Guatemala. AP photographer Rebecca Blackwell in Miami contributed reporting.

This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Previously Published on elpasomatters.org with Creative Commons License

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The post Trump Administration Has Separated Dozens of Children From Their Parents for a Second Time, AP Finds appeared first on The Good Men Project.

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Anyone who has tried to build a sustainable content operation knows the transition point that changes everything: the moment when the volume of video you have produced exceeds the volume you can keep organised using the systems you started with.

For most teams, that transition is not a dramatic event. It is a slow accumulation of small frictions that compound over time — a file that cannot be found when it is needed, a cut-down that gets remade because no one knows the original exists, an approved asset that gets republished after its rights window has expired because the expiry date was in a spreadsheet that nobody checked. Each individual incident is manageable. The cumulative effect is an operation that is spending increasing amounts of time and money managing content rather than producing it.

Managing video assets at scale requires a deliberate approach to systems, metadata, and workflow that most teams only adopt after the friction has already become painful. This guide covers the strategies that work — and the mistakes that are worth avoiding.

The Foundation: Metadata Standards Before Platform Selection

The most common mistake in video asset management is choosing the platform before defining the metadata strategy. The platform is a vessel. The metadata is what determines whether it is useful.

Before evaluating any software, define the metadata schema: what information needs to be attached to each asset to make it findable, usable, and compliant. Typical schema elements include project and campaign attribution, talent and rights information, format and technical specifications, approval status and approval history, territory and distribution restrictions, and content descriptions that enable search by what is in the video rather than just what it is named.

Getting this right is harder than it sounds, because the schema needs to serve multiple stakeholders with different requirements: the editor who needs to find footage by visual description, the rights manager who needs to track usage windows, the compliance reviewer who needs to see the approval chain, and the distribution manager who needs to know what formats and territories are cleared.

The schema that serves all of these needs simultaneously is not complicated, but it requires input from each function before it is finalised. A schema designed only by the production team will be missing the fields that matter to rights and compliance. A schema designed only by the legal team will be over-specified on rights and under-specified on creative discoverability.

Ingestion Workflow: Getting It Right From the Start

The quality of a video library is determined at the point of ingestion. Assets that enter the system with complete, accurate metadata stay organised. Assets that enter without it create debt that compounds over time.

Building a disciplined ingestion workflow — one that requires minimum metadata fields to be populated before an asset can enter the production library — is the operational discipline that keeps libraries manageable at scale. This feels like friction at first, especially when teams are under deadline pressure. The investment pays back quickly when assets are easily found weeks or months later.

AI-assisted tagging has significantly reduced the manual burden of this process. Current platforms can analyse video on ingestion and automatically generate descriptions, identify faces and objects, transcribe spoken dialogue, and apply content categories. This does not replace the requirement for project-specific metadata — the campaign attribution, the approval status, the rights information — but it eliminates the time investment required to describe the visual and audio content.

Version Management: The Practice That Prevents the Most Expensive Mistakes

Version confusion is the source of some of the most costly errors in content operations. Distributing a pre-approval version of a video, republishing a cut that was withdrawn for compliance review, or losing the master file for a piece of content that needs to be re-edited — each of these is a version management failure.

The solution is a platform that enforces single-source-of-truth version tracking: every iteration of an asset stored with a timestamp and status, a clear designation of which version is the current approved deliverable, and access controls that prevent distribution of non-approved versions regardless of who requests access.

This sounds like an obvious requirement. It is surprising how many organisations manage this with a combination of naming conventions and email threads, and equally unsurprising how often those systems fail.

Archive Strategy: The Long Game

The immediate business case for video asset management is usually about efficiency in current production workflows. The longer-term case is about the value of the archive.

Video content has a longer useful life than most teams appreciate at the moment it is produced. Footage from a campaign three years ago may be exactly what a current brief requires. Behind-the-scenes material that felt like b-roll may have significant value for anniversary content or licensing. Training videos produced at significant expense remain relevant long after initial deployment.

An archive that is organised, searchable, and maintained is a creative and commercial resource. An archive that is disorganised is a storage cost with an occasional lucky find. The strategy of managing today’s content well, with the same metadata standards and platform capabilities that will serve the archive tomorrow, is what converts the former kind of archive into the latter.

Start well. The compounding benefits of good organisation arrive sooner than you expect.

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That feeling of instant connection with someone.

That pull. That electricity. That overwhelming sense of “this is different, this is real.”

What if it has almost nothing to do with the person in front of you — and almost everything to do with something your body learned decades ago?

What the Brain Calls Chemistry

That intense, magnetic pull toward someone new is one of the most convincing feelings a human being can experience. It feels like fate. Like recognition. Like something bigger than logic or reason.

But neuroscience has a less romantic explanation for it.

Your nervous system spends your entire childhood building a detailed emotional map. A blueprint of what love feels like, what it sounds like, what temperature it runs at. Whether affection arrives freely or has to be earned. Whether closeness feels safe or dangerous. Whether love is consistent or something that appears and disappears without warning.

By the time you’re old enough to date, that map is already drawn. And every new person you meet gets compared to it instantly, unconsciously, without your permission.

When someone matches that blueprint — when their emotional patterns feel familiar in that deep, unspoken way — your nervous system fires off a signal. And your conscious brain translates that signal as chemistry. As attraction. As that rare feeling people spend their whole lives chasing.

It doesn’t stop to check if familiar means healthy. It just says — I know this. Go toward it.

Familiarity Is Not the Same as Love

This is the part that takes the longest to fully absorb.

If you grew up in an environment where love was unpredictable, where affection had to be earned, where emotional warmth came in inconsistent doses — your nervous system filed all of that under “this is what love feels like.” Not because it was right. But because it was what was there.

So when you encounter someone who runs at that same emotional temperature — hot and cold, warm then distant, available then suddenly not — something in you relaxes into it. It feels like home. It feels like chemistry. It feels like the kind of connection people write songs about.

What it actually is, is recognition.

The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between familiar and good. It only distinguishes between familiar and unfamiliar. And familiar, no matter how painful the original source was, will always feel safer than unfamiliar. Even when unfamiliar is actually better for you.

This is why so many people find themselves in the same relationship over and over again, with different people, wondering why the pattern keeps repeating. The pattern repeats because the nervous system keeps recognizing the same emotional signature and calling it love.

Why Healthy Love Can Feel Wrong

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that almost nobody talks about honestly.

When someone shows up consistently — when they’re emotionally available from the beginning, when they don’t run hot and cold, when their affection doesn’t need to be earned — it can feel like something is missing.

Too easy. Too calm. Not enough tension.

And so it gets dismissed. Written off as “no chemistry.” Moved past in favor of something that feels more intense, more uncertain, more alive.

But worth asking — is that feeling of “something missing” actually the absence of connection? Or is it the absence of anxiety?

Because for a nervous system that learned love through inconsistency and uncertainty, calm doesn’t register as love. It registers as unfamiliar. And unfamiliar feels uncomfortable. So the brain invents a story to explain the discomfort — “we just don’t have that spark” — and moves on.

This is one of the quietest and most painful ways people reject exactly what they need. Not out of stupidity. Not out of bad taste. But because the body genuinely does not recognize healthy love as love yet.

These are the patterns that tend to repeat when this is happening:

— Feeling most drawn to people who are emotionally unavailable or unpredictable
— Losing interest once someone becomes consistently kind and present
— Describing anxious, uncertain relationships as passionate and alive
— Describing stable, healthy relationships as boring or lacking chemistry

None of these are character flaws. They are all nervous system responses to an old blueprint that never got updated.

The Question Worth Sitting With

There is a difference between feeling happy and feeling relieved.

In the body, they can feel almost identical. But they come from completely different places. Happiness is the presence of something good. Relief is the removal of something threatening.

If most of the good moments in a relationship feel like relief — relief that the other person is in a good mood, relief that an evening passed without tension, relief that warmth returned after a period of distance — that’s worth paying attention to.

It means the nervous system has been quietly running a threat response. And if that threat response feels like love, it’s worth asking what the original template for love actually looked like.

This isn’t about blame. Not toward the people who shaped that original blueprint, and not toward yourself for following it unconsciously. Most of the people who passed their emotional patterns down to you were themselves just repeating what they inherited.

But awareness is where the cycle can start to break.

What Actually Changes Things

The nervous system is not fixed. It can be retrained. Slowly, imperfectly, nonlinearly — but genuinely.

The first shift is learning to get curious about intense feelings instead of just following them. When that overwhelming pull toward someone arrives, instead of immediately calling it chemistry, it’s worth pausing and asking: is this excitement or is this recognition? Does this person make me feel genuinely good or do they make me feel that specific anxious aliveness that I’ve spent years confusing for passion?

The second shift is learning to sit longer in the discomfort of calm. When something feels too easy, too steady, too without drama — instead of immediately deciding something is missing, try asking if what feels like absence is actually just the absence of chaos. Let the nervous system adjust to a temperature it hasn’t felt before. Give it time to learn that safe doesn’t mean boring. That consistent doesn’t mean dead.

The third shift is probably the hardest one:

— Accepting that the most convincing feelings are sometimes the most worth questioning
— Understanding that the heart and the nervous system are not always saying the same thing
— Recognizing that real love might feel quieter than expected at first
— Trusting that calm can deepen into something genuine if it’s given enough time

None of this is quick. None of it is linear. There will be days when the old pull feels louder than everything you know intellectually about why you shouldn’t follow it.

But the fact that a feeling is powerful doesn’t make it true. And the fact that something feels familiar doesn’t make it right.

The nervous system chose based on what it knew. The real work is slowly teaching it that it’s allowed to know something different now.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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The post Your Nervous System Chose Your Partner — Not Your Heart appeared first on The Good Men Project.

By U. Washington

This year, both Google and Microsoft—the two biggest companies at the forefront of the AI boom—announced major investments in AI training for teachers.

But what do teachers think of this transformation of their work?

Katie Davis, a University of Washington professor in the Information School and codirector of the Center for Digital Youth, studies how technology affects young people’s learning and development. Davis has also been teaching for over two decades—first as an elementary school teacher and now as a professor—so she’s acutely aware of how earlier technological revolutions in teaching have not always played out as hoped.

Davis and a UW-led team of researchers interviewed 22 teachers in Aurora Public Schools in Colorado—a district that’s investing heavily in AI through systems like Google’s Gemini and MagicSchool, an AI tool that helps teachers plan.

Overall, teachers were ambivalent about the technology. They liked that it could reduce workload, especially for rote tasks, but worried that it could erode the social aspects of teaching.

The team presented its research at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Barcelona.

Here, Davis talks about the study and how ostensibly democratizing technologies can widen disparities in schools:

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This post was previously published on FUTURITY.ORG and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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At The Good Men Project, we are glad to syndicate work from Futurity, a publication dedicated to making research and science news accessible to the public. We value Futurity because it takes serious work from universities and researchers around the world and translates it into clear, readable stories that help people understand what is changing in science, health, technology, behavior, and public life.

That matters to us for more than one reason. We believe good information is part of how people live well in a rapidly changing world. Research can sometimes feel distant, technical, or intimidating, but it often speaks directly to the questions people are already living with: how relationships work, how stress affects behavior, how health is shaped, how communities change, and how new discoveries may alter daily life in the years ahead. Futurity helps close that gap. It also plays an important role in making evidence-based knowledge more accessible at a time when misinformation, cynicism, and distrust of expertise can make it harder for people to know what to believe. That is one reason we are glad to share this work with our readers.

FAQs – About The Good Men Project

What is The Good Men Project?

The Good Men Project is a mission-driven media platform founded in 2010 that explores modern masculinity, men’s mental health, relationships, fatherhood, identity, and social change through personal stories, expert insights, and cultural analysis.

What is The Good Men Project’s mission?

Our mission is to expand the conversation about what it means to be a good man in the 21st century — in ways that are inclusive, emotionally honest, and grounded in real human experience.

How does GMP approach content about science and technology?

We examine science and technology through their impact on human lives. From AI and automation to social media and climate science, GMP explores how rapid technological change affects identity, work, relationships, mental health, civic responsibility and the future we all are inheriting and civic responsibility. We partner with other trusted sources, and believe in science and research to inform good decisions in a rapidly changing world.

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The Good Men Project is a mission-driven media platform founded in 2010 that helps writers, brands, agencies, and organizations build credibility, audience, and long-term authority. By publishing stories about masculinity, mental health, relationships, fatherhood, identity, and personal development, GMP provides a trusted ecosystem where ideas gain visibility, trust, and resilience in both search and AI-driven discovery. The platform supports individual contributors as well as high-volume agencies through paid guest posts, sponsored content, and bulk publishing systems designed for scale.

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The post What Do Teachers Really Think of AI in the Classroom? appeared first on The Good Men Project.

By Guest Commentary, Buckeye Flame

By Ainslee Johnson-Brown

In the card game Uno, a Draw 4 card changes everything in an instant. One player shifts the color, the balance of power changes and everyone else is forced to respond. For LGBTQ+ Ohioans, that card has already been played. The color is now rainbow.

Marriage equality in Ohio today sits in a dangerously familiar position. Before Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, reproductive freedom depended heavily on federal precedent, while many states lacked explicit constitutional protections. Americans watched longstanding rights disappear with startling speed once the political and judicial environment shifted.

Same-sex marriage now occupies a similarly vulnerable space.

Without constitutional protections in Ohio, LGBTQ+ rights remain exposed to the shifting priorities of courts, legislatures and political movements that target marginalized communities. Two proposed amendments from Ohio Equal Rights – to guarantee marriage equality and nondiscrimination protections in Ohio – represent an opportunity to establish the structural safeguards we need to protect our families.

The warning signs are already here.

Over the last three years, our General Assembly has subjected transgender and gender-nonconforming Ohioans to a relentless wave of legislation targeting healthcare, education and public participation. These measures are often discussed as isolated debates, but they collectively reshape the legal and political environment surrounding LGBTQ+ rights. Every restriction creates additional vulnerabilities. Every successful attack opens the door for broader ones.

National political organizations have made these efforts with increasing systematic coordination. Project 2025 openly outlines strategies for dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across every branch of government. In Ohio, we are already watching versions of that blueprint unfold at the state level. Senate Bill 1 did not emerge from nowhere. It reflects a broader campaign to weaken institutional protections and reshape public life around exclusionary ideology.

The consequences reach beyond politics. This month, the American Bar Association repealed its accreditation rule requiring law schools’ commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion; that decision may have profound long-term implications. Limiting pathways for LGBTQ+ scholars and advocates weakens future legal defenses for LGBTQ+ communities.

Meanwhile, recent court decisions continue to narrow protections for minority representation. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which struck down the congressional map in Louisiana, centered on race and voting rights, but history shows that legal reasoning developed around one marginalized group rarely remains confined to that issue. Arguments used to weaken protections in one context often become tools to attack others.

Ohio’s LGBTQ+ community cannot afford to assume that existing rights will remain untouched simply because they exist today.

We have already seen how quickly established protections can disappear when they are not anchored in a state constitution. The lesson of the post-Dobbs era is immediate.

First, both Ohio Equal Rights amendments must reach the November 2026 ballot. Then, Ohio voters must decide whether equal protection belongs permanently in the foundation of this state or remains vulnerable to the next political Draw 4 card.

IGNITE ACTION

• Ohio Equal Rights will have petitions available to sign at Pride celebrations and various events throughout the summer. For a full list of events, click here.
• To learn more about Ohioans Against Extremism, click here to visit their website.

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The Buckeye Flame is an online platform dedicated to amplifying the voices of LGBTQ+ Ohioans to support community and civic empowerment through the creation of engaging content that chronicles their triumphs, struggles, and lived experiences.

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Photo credit: thebuckeyeflame

The post Draw 4: Marriage Equality Is a Losing Game of UNO Unless Ohioans Take Action appeared first on The Good Men Project.

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Finding the right team to handle your search engine optimization (SEO) is the fastest way to turn Google searches into consistent revenue. For local Filipino brands, the landscape has changed dramatically. It is no longer just about stuffing keywords into blog posts; it is about keeping up with generative search engines, optimizing for localized intent, and building authority that Google trusts.

If you are looking for SEO services in the Philippines, you need to understand what you are paying for, how to spot an actual expert from a sweet-talking amateur, and how to protect your investment.

4 Critical Questions to Ask Before Hiring an SEO Specialist in the Philippines

Before signing a contract or sending a down payment, you must vet your provider with questions that cut through typical marketing fluff.

1. How do you measure SEO success?

If an agency or freelancer tells you “rankings” or “traffic” are the ultimate goals, proceed with caution. Rankings are vanity metrics if they do not convert into business outcomes. An expert will focus on organic conversions, qualified leads, and revenue growth. They should immediately map out how traffic translates into phone calls, contact form submissions, or e-commerce checkouts for your specific brand.

2. What is your approach to modern AI search changes?

Search has evolved past standard blue links. With Google’s AI Overviews and the rise of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), your provider must know how to make your business show up inside AI-generated summaries and answer engines. Ask them directly how they plan to adapt your content strategy for these semantic search models.

3. How do you approach link building for the local market?

Low-cost SEO providers often use automated software or spammy, low-quality blog networks to build links. This will get your website penalized by Google. A legitimate local SEO consultant will secure natural, manual links from highly relevant local directories, regional news sites, and niche blogs that actually pass authoritative value to your domain.

4. Can you show me a case study where you grew a business’s revenue?

Do not just look at graphs showing upward traffic lines. Ask for a breakdown of the strategy: What was the technical issue? What intent-focused keywords did they target? How long did it take to see inquiries increase? A transparent specialist will gladly walk you through their real-world framework and practical results.

Cost Comparison: SEO Service Pricing in the Philippines

Local brands need to understand the financial reality of search engine optimization. Cheap SEO packages often do more harm than good, leading to poorly written AI spam and technical errors that destroy your search presence.

The table below outlines the realistic cost structures and deliverables across the industry.

Essential Checklist for Local Brands Before Hiring

To guarantee you are hiring a reliable SEO specialist in the Philippines, use this checklist during your discovery calls:

• Platform Competence:Ensure they have deep technical experience with your specific Content Management System (CMS), whether it is WordPress, Elementor, Shopify, Squarespace, or Webflow. Relying entirely on basic automated plugins is a red flag.
• Clear Reporting Framework:Avoid reports filled with confusing jargon. Demand regular updates that track clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): organic traffic growth, conversion rates, and toxic backlink monitoring.
• Adherence to Webmaster Guidelines:Confirm that they practice strict “White-Hat” SEO techniques. Any mention of buying thousands of backlinks, hiding text, or mass-producing duplicate pages should result in an immediate skip.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How long does it take to see actual business results from SEO?

Generally, expect to see noticeable improvements in rankings and organic leads within 3 to 6 months. SEO is a long-term compound asset. The timeframe depends entirely on the current technical state of your website, your existing domain authority, and the competitiveness of your industry.

What is the difference between a general SEO agency and a local SEO consultant?

A general agency might focus heavily on global keywords and broad informational content. A specialized local SEO consultant hones in on geographical intent—ensuring your business ranks prominently when users nearby search for your specific services (e.g., “dental clinic near me” or “best catering in Manila”). They focus heavily on map packs, local directories, and city-targeted landing pages.

Should I hire an in-house SEO or outsource to a specialist in the Philippines?

Outsourcing to a skilled freelancer or agency is usually more cost-effective for local brands. Building an in-house team requires paying for monthly salaries, government benefits, and expensive premium SEO tools (like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Screaming Frog). Outsourcing gives you instant access to specialized expertise and enterprise-grade tools at a fraction of the overhead cost.

Can an SEO specialist guarantee a #1 spot on Google?

No. Any provider guaranteeing a top spot on Google is lying to win your business. Google’s algorithms change continuously, and no third party has direct control over search engine ranking scores. A true expert guarantees clean execution, transparent strategies, and measurable growth in conversions—not arbitrary rankings.

Conclusion: Partner with a Proven Professional

Navigating the local digital market requires more than theoretical knowledge; it demands a partner who understands the nuances of Filipino consumer behavior and the technical realities of search engine algorithms.

If you want to stop guessing and start scaling your organic visibility, you need to work with an established industry veteran. Cyrel Nicolas is a prominent, results-driven SEO specialist in the Philippines with nearly 15 years of hands-on experience in digital marketing, web development, and search optimization. Operating as a dedicated local SEO consultant, Cyrel rejects vanity metrics and empty marketing hype in favor of clear execution and sustainable growth systems.

Whether you run a local service business, an expanding e-commerce store, or an international brand, Cyrel Nicolas fixes deep-seated technical issues, designs high-intent content strategies, and builds authoritative local profiles that directly translate into leads, bookings, and revenue. By aligning your website’s architecture with modern search intent and AI engine standards, he helps you dominate search engine result pages and build a highly profitable online asset

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This content is brought to you by Muhammad Asim

Photo provided by the contributor.

The post Looking for SEO Services in the Philippines for Local Business: Guides and Tips Before Hiring appeared first on The Good Men Project.

By Saanvi Doshi

Dear EarthTalk: What does the science say about how common pesticides affect human health?

—Jay Jackson, New York, NY

Pesticides are used to control the spread of or eliminate pests in the agricultural field. The primary purpose of using them is to control invasive species that can impact crop growth. By using pesticides, crop yield is increased, leading to a higher supply of a particular crop. Some of the most commonly used pesticides are herbicides, insecticides and fungicides (to control plants, insects and fungi, respectively).

While pesticides have benefits in the agricultural industry in increasing crop yield, pesticides are not only harmful to pests; they can harm humans as well. “Early symptoms of pesticide exposure can include headaches, nausea, dizziness and respiratory secretion,” says Michelle Perro, founder of GMOScience, a non-profit which facilitates discussion among physicians about the impact of genetically modified crops.

Prolonged exposure to pesticides can also lead to skin and eye irritation. Additionally, more serious conditions linked to pesticide exposure include cancer and neurological disorders.

Several studies have been conducted that back the idea that pesticides have detrimental effects on human health. A study conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after reviewing the prominence of pesticides and the impact of pesticide residue asserts that exposure to pesticides is indeed a health concern, especially for farmers. Gabriel Counsens, a homeopath and author, says there is “suggestive evidence that the use of pesticides…increas[es] the incidence of Parkinson’s disease up to seven times.”

Pesticides can harm us in many ways. In 2014, there was a case of pesticide poisoning in the Bordeaux region of France. There, 23 schoolkids experienced nausea, headaches and skin irritation after fungicides were sprayed in vineyards near their school. Pesticide traces in water and food are also common.

There have been efforts to regulate the use of pesticides to mitigate their impact on human health and the environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has regulations in place to assess the risk of various pesticides. Agreements like the Rotterdam Convention, a treaty among countries engaged in the trade of harmful chemicals, also promote responsible pesticide management.

Consumers can also play a role in pesticide impact mitigation. By thoroughly washing produce, we can lower the chances of exposure. Additionally, by supporting sustainable practices and Integrated Pest Management, we can advocate for a shift to an agricultural industry with fewer pesticides. Finally, by supporting organizations such as the Pesticide Action Network and local pesticide regulation organizations, we can educate ourselves and advocate for more sustainable practices.

CONTACTS

• Pesticide Action Network
• Beyond Pesticides

EarthTalk® is produced by Roddy Scheer & Doug Moss for the 501(c)3 nonprofit EarthTalk. See more at https://emagazine.com. To donate, visit https://earthtalk.org. Send questions to: question@earthtalk.org.

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Previously Published on emagazine

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The post Are Pesticides Worth It? Trading off Human Health for Less Bugs appeared first on The Good Men Project.