Learning Journal

I thought the film Die Welle  that we watched portions of in class on Thursday was interesting. It reminded me of some articles that I had read in The Guardian about the recruitment strategies of some fringe groups in England and other parts of Europe. Like in the movie, those groups create a sense of belonging and can target individuals who feel isolated in different aspects of their lives. In Tuesday's class, I enjoyed the ending activity. I had actually thought it was going to be one of those exercises where no one was the witch. However, seeing that there was actually a "witch" in the game demonstrated a different perspective to me which may have led those Salem residents who did not really believe in witchcraft to still get swept up in the hysteria over the tiniest of doubt that one may have possibly been in their midsts. For one of my classes, I went to the Best Maid Pickle Emporium and analyzed how they designed their store environment. It was funny to see all the ...

This week, I had my first medical school interview, so I spent a lot of time learning about the school. I was anxious about the actual interview portion, so I did some practice questions with one of my professors which helped to alleviate some of my nerves. However, I discovered the thing that worked best for me was to do a little dancing and singing right before hopping onto the Zoom. I enjoyed our classes this week especially applying what we have learned about scams to think of ones that could be used on our own student population. It demonstrated to me how I should be more skeptical of QR codes I scan or websites I go to and that I should not trust everything that claims to be associated with TCU. In one of my other classes, I learned about the techniques that stores use to make you stay longer and spend more money. Our professor also briefly mentioned how Lululemon employees tend to commit extremely violent crimes when they reach their breaking point. Afterwards, I looked up a cas...

This week I was incredibly busy and was reminded the value of good rest. While working on our presentation on deepfakes, I was surprised to learn how easy it is for people to create them. While I had done some image creation with AI for a class during my freshman year, I had not realized how much the tools had advanced in such a short period of time. I was also shocked by the actual number of sexualized deepfakes created with Grok's Image Edit feature at the beginning of this year. While I had read several news articles about it, I had not fully comprehended the scale of images being produced. Additionally, I was astonished at just how much money companies have lost or almost lost to scams involving AI. I did not realize that scammers could simulate video calls until learning about the Arup incident. I felt the same way when we watched the video on Thursday during the phishing presentation about how Facebook and Google were tricked with the deceptive transfer requests. I had two ot...

It was the second week of classes which meant everything started to get closer to full gear. This week, in our class, we learned about propaganda. I found it interesting to be reminded that even things like anti-smoking and safe driving commercials are also propaganda. I feel like the word "propaganda" is mostly used in a negative context, so we forget everything that it includes and that it can be used to benefit society. The example that Dr. Enos gave with the baby Mia and Fang the snake reminded me of how people can try not only to persuade you with the information that they give you but also with the information that they omit. I liked his lesson on taking your time to find out more information before being pressured into a decision. In one of my other classes, I learned that Greek life at the University of Alabama did not desegregate until 2013. In my virology class, we learned how soap works against viruses. Viruses have a capsid that carries their genome, however many ...