Research summary

For my topic on youth smoking, i did research on smoking statistic why youth smoke, with a personal case study which is myself as a smoker, what are the harmful effects of smoking and how to prevent youth from smoking.

Smoking statistic:

• 360 000 people smoking in singapore
• 1 out of 5 youth smokes

Analysis: Why youth smoke?:

• Curious
• social influence
• media influence
• parents influence
• friends influence
• peer pressure
• fit in to their friends
• stress
• face problems in their life
• want to be like adults

Harmful effects of smoking:

• Heart disease and stroke
• cancer
• Chronic obstructive disease
• bone loss and osteoporosis
• reproductive and sexual health problems

How to prevent a youth to be a smoker

• educate the harmful effect of smoking
• parents should communicate opening and spent more time with teens
• parents should be a good role model

To conclude, youth are the future of singapore, we must not smoke away our lives. Most smokers also start smoking at their youth, this is why we should prevent youth from becoming a smoker. Media influence are strong, we must be strong and not get influence. Peers and people around youth should also not encourage non smokers to smoke. Finally may all smokers cut down on their cigarette and walk the path towards quitting smoking.

Ending of EIR

Time flies, and EIR is coming to an end.

I feel that EIR is a very interesting and benefiting subject. We earn alot of about using internet and doing research. In future, in pursuing a degree or furthering my studies, research is always the base and fundamental and most important part in most career.

What i like most and learn most about in EIR is the forum discussion part. We get to post on forum to hear from people's view and comments. What i did is that i post my personal story on smoking and raise an awareness of problems and also finding the cause of smoking in youth. The results of this is very fun and high when you see many people commenting, although there are some useless comments, most of them are relevant and useful. I get to further my analysis with this forum discussion. It gives a feeling like doing an interview with people and surveying them on a forum. I believe this is very good and i learn alot.

The metaphor i think about EIR is salt, EIR seems like any common and normal subject, just like salt, common and seems nothing special, but when food is tasteless, a little bit of salt makes a lot of difference and can transform the food into a delicacy. EIR will be the salt in my future life of doing research and the skills i learn might seems simple, like search engine ect, but will be very useful.

My dream holiday...

The famous Sin City Las Vegas, yes this is my dream holiday. This is the place that will be filled with entertainment, gambling, nightlife and shopping with luxury. I wanted to go to Las Vegas becuase of the entertainment and shopping there. There are many luxury shopping boutiques there and also mang night life and other entertainments. Most importantly i love to place poker and a little gamble at a grand casino is always what i wanted to try. So while searching for a travel guide about Las Vegas, i stumble upon this website.

http://www.visitlasvegas.com/vegas/index.jsp

This website is more of a information website regarding tourism in Las Vegas. There are many pictures on Las Vegas and i find there. The website introduce on different parts of Las Vegas and all different entertainment.

The website talks about many highlight of Las Vegas, like the Strip (picture above) off Strip, downtown, ect.

The website also introduce on the famous casinos in Las Vegas and what are the games avaliable in each casino.
And most importantly my favorite shopping heaven, there are many branded shops in Las Vegas and they sells things at a discounted price all year round.

Overall, the layout and the presentation of the website is pretty good, but its just that the pictures are a little small, if there are big and nice views of Las Vegas, it would be better. Content and coverage wise, this website have everything that fit into the purpose of a guide to read before visiting Las Vegas. Not only there are all the different parts and entertainment related topics on Las Vegas, there are also information of hotels for staying. There is also a search function that allows the user to search for specific places he or she wants to go at Las Vegas.

To conclude, i believe this is a good website and i learn alot more on Las Vegas from this website, when i hit 21, which is the legal gambling age, im going to go to Las Vegas and ill be thankful on the information this website gives. I would like to emphasise on the site's search function that can allow us to access all different entertainment and other information relating to Las Vegas. This makes our lives easier if we are looking for specific highlight of Las Vegas.

Practical 8&9 Reflection

Today, we learn about website evalution. We learn to determine whether this website is a good or a bad and relevant or not. There are many factors to evaluating a webstie. We learn about, the purpose, coverage, currency, authority, accuracy, accessibility, layout & presentation and usability. We learn how to access a website and how we can identify problems of internet and website.

After learning about how we can evaluate website, i realize that there are many websites out there that are very terrible. Many have bad user interface or bad layout and presentation. Others have content that have no link the the purpose. Before i learn about website evaluating, i always though, this website no bad, its alright for things like that ect. However, after i learn how to evaluate website, i can see good and bad website in a more professional point of view. On the other hand there are also many other good websites that have high standards out there. However, i realize that evaluating website is quite a tedious job and it is quite time consuming.

Practical 7 Reflection

Today we have a class test, the question are rather tough and tricky, thanks to my luck i manage to get a decent grade. After the test, we learn about citizen journalism. Citizen journalism is that normal people like you and i gets to post and update news and topics on the net. It is very successful in countries all over the world. However, i personally dislike the way singaporeans do citizen journalism. I think that singaporeans are using citizen journalism as a gossip corner, its like for coffee shop talk purpose.

We evaluated the website STOMP in our groups. I believe that STOMP meets the criteria of a citizen journalism website. It does sharing, allowing people to post and contribute photos and news. However, i think that most of the news are entertainment and gossip news there. It is indeed interesting to go and read up when we are bored, but in terms of true content, i still think traditional journalism is better.

E-Learning Reflection

Today is open house 1st day, upon hearing there is no lesson, i am delighted. However, we need to do a E-learning activity. There are 2 good things that i found out about E-learning, first is we do not have to go to class!!! means i do not have to wake up early and squeeze on the morning bus. Next is the flexibility of the learning time, it is on time on target for the day, so we just need to post the topic any time before 12 midnight. This allows us to have flexibility in our time as some of us are involve in open house or have other projects to do.

The E-learning activity was like any other discussion forum thing, except with everyone having the same topic. Anyway i posted up my post, most people talked about how good internet research are, so i decided to talk about some cons of internet, the security, the reliability of the information.

Heres's another fact to share, when internet was 1st founded a few decades back, the founder of the internet does not have to worry about security problems. The reason being it is only a few people in the world can access it. However, now with so many people using the net, there are many security issues.

Also, here is the url of the vid by Vint Cerf, father of internet, enjoy:))

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeAIwLp9YmA

Practical 6 Reflection

Today's practical we learn alot about invisible websites and library databases. Although i have already learn how to use them before in a library workshop when i was in year one, this lesson help me refresh my memories on how to use a database to search. There are so many information online that we cannot access through normal search engines and may require training to get access. However, these websites need to pay to use, and it can cost a huge sum of money for good service like GMID.

Fortunately, we have access to certain databases like the one from Tp's Spark, which is paid for by Tp for the students. When using this database, i find that the resource is very relevant and very useful for my research topic. Why youth smokes.. They have the answers with statistics and actual figures. A real useful tool for research as we can have full text document of the article or book. There are articles, reports by professionals, statistic all up there, all we need to do is to search using the right method. Some websites are kind of hard to navigate, they are complicated and not user-friendly, some are like a combination of search engines, directories and scholar, others have so many preferences to set and filtering the search results.

Related -> Relevant -> Reliability

When it comes to internet research, there are some that provides information that are related to topic but irrelevant, others provide relevant information but we might doubt the reliability. From my point of view, invisible web is where the highest level of search comes in, it is a wonderful search engines and the information there are almost 100% RELIABLE.