Here's a simple Python programming task:

**Task:** Write a Python function that checks if a given string is a palindrome or not. A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequences of characters that reads the same forward and backward (ignoring spaces, punctuation, and capitalization).

**Function Signature:**
```python
def is_palindrome(s: str) -> bool:
    """
    Check if the given string `s` is a palindrome.

    Args:
        s (str): The input string to check.

    Returns:
        bool: True if `s` is a palindrome, False otherwise.
    """
```

**Example:**

```python
assert is_palindrome("racecar") == True
assert is_palindrome("hello") == False
assert is_palindrome("A man, a plan, a canal: Panama") == True  # Ignoring spaces and punctuation
```

**Hint:** You can use the `str.lower()` method to convert the string to lowercase and the `re` module to remove non-alphanumeric characters.
==============
```python
import re

def is_palindrome(s: str) -> bool:
    """
    Check if the given string `s` is a palindrome.

    Args:
        s (str): The input string to check.

    Returns:
        bool: True if `s` is a palindrome, False otherwise.
    """
    cleaned = re.sub(r'\W+', '', s.lower())
    return cleaned == cleaned[::-1]
```