Category Archives: Passions

DL Final Project – Suicide Infographic

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Reflection:

  1. The topic and goal of my question was to achieve a deeper understanding of the amount of suicide in Canada and some other details such as the most common methods used. Most people think that suicide isn’t that common, and a few might die yearly because of it. However, by reading the infographic I created they can learn that there are many suicides per year. I hope people can understand how serious the situation revolving around suicide really is, and can start looking out for others.
  2. I used Canva to create my infographic. I’ve used it before to create book covers and it’s really simple to learn. It allows the user to develop pretty infographics or posters. Even without buying the premium version, it has a wide variety of shapes and elements you can insert into your project. If you’re too lazy to design a poster, no worries! Canva has thousands of premade templates that you can use and all you need to do is edit the information within. I loved playing around with the colours and effects to create my infographic.
  3. Canva is a great way to discover new things as well as create things. Lots of people share their designs online which have information on them. I realized how much of an impact infographics and other things can have on viewers. Canva can create eye-catching infographics to alter the way the viewers think, allowing them to fully immerse in the experience. Technology can also be used to research suicides and dive deeper into the subject. You can learn to recognize the signs of suicidal thoughts in someone else, and potentially save a life.

 

Information Fluency: Exoplanets

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Exoplanets play a crucial role in the future of humanity. Once our solar system no longer becomes habitable, we cannot rely on the other planets in our solar system as a new home. NASA has taken action, and on March 6, 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope was launched. This telescope’s mission was to find as many exoplanets as possible. It did this by focusing on a patch of the sky where the overlapping constellations of Lyra, Draco, and Cygnus lay. It looked for rhythmic dips in starlight from the stars, which revealed the presence of exoplanets crossing in front of their suns. In its 3.5-year primary mission, Kepler monitored about 150,000 stars. It ultimately turned up 2,899 exoplanet candidates and 2,681 confirmed worlds during its nine years of service. This begs the question of what kinds of exoplanets are out there, as well as star systems and day and night systems. Kepler gave us a good start to the exoplanet hunt, and to date, we have spotted 5,332 confirmed exoplanets, orbiting in some 3,931 planetary systems. However, this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. Kepler’s discoveries illustrated that 20% to 50% of stars in the Milky Way have small, rocky, earth-sized planets. There are around 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, which means around 20 million to 50 million stars have planets, possibly even multiple in a system. These rocky planets may have the right temperature to maintain liquid water. With that amount of stars, can’t you imagine the possibilities in landscape or environment variety? Kepler also revealed to us a more common type of world not found in our solar system. These are called “Super-Earths.” A rocky planet larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. Some of these Super-Earths might be habitable. If humans reached a habitable Super Earth, what do you think they would do with all that land and space? More recently, another milestone was achieved, this time by the newest and most high-tech telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The JWST took its first image of an exoplanet. A young gas giant dubbed HIP 65426 b. This is a huge achievement and shows that we now have the ability to image exoplanets, instead of just detecting their presence. “I think what’s most exciting is that we’ve only just begun,” says Aarynn Carter from the University of California. There are going to be new planets imaged in the future, ones that may shape our understanding of physics, chemistry, and science as a whole. The future of exoplanets and astronomy is looking good and will assist us in our evolution as the human species.

 

Bibliography:

JWST takes its first direct exoplanet image. (2022, November). BBC Sky at Night, 13. https://link-gale-com.bc.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/A734677905/GPS?u=43dcbs&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=484d04d7

Hinkley, S. (2023, March 25). Far out: The James Webb space telescope and the search for alien life. Spectator, 351(10152), 16+. https://link-gale-com.bc.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/A743661078/GPS?u=43dcbs&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=8bec97ac 

DICKINSON, D. (2019). The Kepler Space Telescope Comes to an End. Sky & Telescope, 137(2), 12. 

Break the Fake II

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For this assignment, I found an article on Yahoo to debunk. It’s about a ceremony honouring the women killed in the École Polytechnique shooting 33 years ago. It starts by telling what happens at the ceremony, then said that 14 beams of light were lit up in correlation to the 14 women killed in the shooting. Apparently, the short ceremony was attended by Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante, Quebec Premier François Legault and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, among others. Then had this photo: CBC

I tried a reverse image search on Tineye.com, but the only result it gave me was from the article I was reading.

Finding the source was easy since the source was at the top of the article. The source was CBC.

CBC does exist, and it’s a well-known news source that has low-biased and factual information, showing that this article is most likely true. I did a Wikipedia search and it gave me many articles, and all said that CBC is reliable.

Next, I went to Snopes.com and searched if this article was true, but I didn’t get any relative information.

Finally, I did a quick google search and went to the news tab and found lots of articles with the same topic and from different sites. This tells me that this event did happen, and is known enough to have many news sources covering it.

In conclusion, I believe that this article is telling the truth. It comes from a reliable source and also has many other sources talking about it, so this is real.