Clean hands can stop germs from spreading from one person to another and throughout an entire community . When should you wash your hands? Feces (poop) from people or animals is an important sources of germs. A single gram of human feces. Help stop the spread of germs by washing your hands often, especially during key times listed below. Scrub your hands for at least 2. If soap and water are not available, use an alcohol- based hand sanitizer that contains at least 6. Before, during, and after preparing food. Before eating food. Before and after caring for someone who is sick. Before and after treating a cut or wound. Here are the specs on this Leather Tool Roll: Measures roughly 13.5. Each of the five pockets is 2.5. Holds five of my husband’s favorite tools. Parts list: 1 x Mind Flex; 3 x AAA batteries for the headset; 1 x Arduino (any variety), with USB cable; 2 x 12” lengths of solid core hookup wire (around #22 or #24 gauge is best). A PC or Mac to monitor the. Originally developed in early 2004, the Super Cat alcohol stove was first shared with the online backpacking community in January, 2005. Since then, it's become one of the most popular do-it-yourself alcohol stoves. Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Cuomo administration backed away from pipeline nuclear safety study after lobbying blitz. Summary of findings Spectra Energy’s Algonquin pipeline runs in very close proximity to the aging Indian Point nuclear power plant. File URL: http:// HTML Code <a href='http:// Forum Code (BB) Guides and Sample Code Search Guides and Sample Code Documents. Terms of Use; Privacy Policy. DIY - Windshield Wiper Motor Replacement & Adjustment C5 Corvette - General Discussion. After using the toilet. Afterchanging diapers or cleaning up a child who has used the toilet. After blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing. After touching an animal, animal feed, or animal waste. After touching garbage. What is the right way to wash your hands? Follow the five steps below to wash your hands the right way every time. Wet your hands with clean, running water (warm or cold), turn off the tap, and apply soap. Lather your hands by rubbing them together with the soap. Be sure to lather the backs of your hands, between your fingers, and under your nails. Scrub your hands for at least 2. Read the science behind the recommendations. What should you do if you don't have soap and clean, running water? Washing hands with soap and water is the best way to reduce the number of germs on them in most situations. If soap and water are not available, use an alcohol- based hand sanitizer that contains at least 6. Alcohol- based hand sanitizers can quickly reduce the number of germs on hands in some situations, but sanitizers do NOT eliminate all types of germs. Hand sanitizers may not be as effective when hands are visibly dirty or greasy. Furthermore, hand sanitizers might not remove harmful chemicals like pesticides and heavy metals from hands. Be cautious when using hand sanitizers around children; swallowing alcohol- based hand sanitizers can cause alcohol poisoning if a person swallows more than a couple mouthfuls. How do you use hand sanitizers? Apply the product to the palm of one hand (read the label to learn the correct amount). Rub your hands together. Rub the product over all surfaces of your hands and fingers until your hands are dry. Why? Read the science behind the recommendations. For more information on handwashing, please visit CDC's Handwashing website. You can also call 1- 8. CDC- INFO or contact CDC- INFO for answers to specific questions. How to Hack Toy EEGs. Arturo Vidich, Sofy Yuditskaya, and I needed a way to read brains for our Mental Block project last fall. After looking at the options, we decided that hacking a toy EEG would be the cheapest / fastest way to get the data we wanted. Here’s how we did it. The Options. A non- exhaustive list of the consumer- level options for building a brain- computer interface: Open EEG offers a wealth of hardware schematics, notes, and free software for building your own EEG system. It’s a great project, but the trouble is that the hardware costs add up quickly, and there isn’t a plug- and- play implementation comparable to the EEG toys. The Nerosky Mind. Set is a reasonable deal as well — it’s wireless, supported, and plays nicely with the company’s free developer tools. For our purposes, though, it was still a bit spendy. Since Neuro. Sky supplies the EEG chip and hardware for the Force Trainer and Mind Flex toys, these options represent a cheaper (if less convenient) way to get the same data. The silicon may be the same between the three, but our tests show that each runs slightly different firmware which accounts for some variations in data output. The Force Trainer, for example, doesn’t output EEG power band values — the Mind Flex does. The Mind. Set, unlike the toys, also gives you access to raw wave data. However, since we’d probably end up running an FFT on the wave anyway (and that’s essentially what the EEG power bands represent), we didn’t particularly miss this data in our work with the Mind Flex. Given all of this, I think the Mind Flex represents a sweet spot on the price / performance curve. It gives you almost all of the data the Mind Set for less than half the cost. The hack and accompanying software presented below works fine for the Force Trainer as well, but you’ll end up with less data since the EEG power values are disabled in the Force Trainer’s firmware from the factory. Of course, the Mind Flex is supposed to be a black- box toy, not an officially supported development platform — so in order to access the actual sensor data for use in other contexts, we’ll need to make some hardware modifications and write some software to help things along. Here’s how. But first, the inevitable caveat: Use extreme caution when working with any kind of voltage around your brain, particularly when wall power is involved. The risks are small, but to be on the safe side you should only plug the Arduino + Mind Flex combo into a laptop running on batteries alone. If you make a mistake you could damage the unit beyond repair. The modifications aren’t easily reversible, and they may interfere with the toy’s original ball- levitating functionality. However, I’ve confirmed that when the hack is executed properly, the toy will continue to function — and perhaps more interestingly, you can skim data from the Neuro. Sky chip without interfering with gameplay. In this way, we’ve confirmed that the status lights and ball- levitating fan in the Mind Flex are simply mapped to the “Attention” value coming out of the Neuro. Sky chip. The Hardware. Here’s the basic layout of the Mind Flex hardware. Most of the action is in the headband, which holds the EEG hardware. A micro controller in the headband parses data from the EEG chip and sends updates wirelessly to a base station, where a fan levitates the ball and several LEDs illuminate to represent your current attention level. This schematic immediately suggests several approaches to data extraction. The most common strategy we’ve seen is to use the LEDs on the base station to get a rough sense of the current attention level. This is nice and simple, but five levels of attention just doesn’t provide the granularity we were looking for. A quick aside: Unlike the Mind Flex, the Force Trainer has some header pins (probably for programming / testing / debugging) which seem like an ideal place to grab some data. Others have reported success with this approach. We could never get it to work. We decided to take a higher- level approach by grabbing serial data directly from the Neuro. Sky EEG chip and cutting the rest of the game hardware out of the loop, leaving a schematic that looks more like this: The Hack. Parts list: 1 x Mind Flex. AAA batteries for the headset. Arduino (any variety), with USB cable. A PC or Mac to monitor the serial data. Software list: The video below walks through the whole process. Detailed instructions and additional commentary follow after the video. Step- by- step: 1. Disassembly. Grab a screwdriver and crack open the left pod of the Mind Flex headset. The T Pin. The Neuro. Sky Board is the small daughterboard towards the bottom of the headset. If you look closely, you should see conveniently labeled T and R pins — these are the pins the EEG board uses to communicate serially to the microcontroller on the main board, and they’re the pins we’ll use to eavesdrop on the brain data. Solder a length of wire (carefully) to the “T” pin. Thin wire is fine, we used #2. Be careful not to short the neighboring pins. Common ground. Your Arduino will want to share ground with the Mind Flex circuit. Solder another length of wire to ground — any grounding point will do, but using the large solder pad where the battery’s ground connection arrives at the board makes the job easier. For now we’re sticking with the factory configuration and powering the Arduino and Mind Flex independently. Strain relief and wire routing. We used a dab of hot glue to act as strain relief for the new wires, and drilled a hole in the case for the two wires to poke through after the case was closed. This step is optional. Hook up the Arduino. The wire from the Mind Flex’s “T” pin goes into the Arduino’s RX pin. You may wish to secure the Arduino to the side of the Mind Flex as a matter of convenience. Now on to the software. The data from the Neuro. Sky is not in a particularly friendly format. It’s a stream of raw bytes that will need to be parsed before they’ll make any sense. Fate is on our side: the packets coming from the Mind Flex match the structure from Neuro. Sky’s official Mindset documentation. Load up the Arduino. Download and install the Arduino Brain Library — it’s available here. Open the Brain. Serial. Out example and upload it to your board. Test. Turn on the Mind Flex, make sure the Arduino is plugged into your computer, and then open up the Serial Monitor. If all went well, you should see the following: Here’s how the CSV breaks down. More on what these values are supposed to mean later in the article. Also, note that if you are hacking a Force Trainer instead of a Mind Flex, you will only see the first three values — signal strength, attention, and meditation.)If you put the unit on your head, you should see the “signal strength” value drop to 0 (confusingly, this means the connection is good), and the rest of the numbers start to fluctuate. Visualize. As exciting as the serial monitor is, you might think, “Surely there’s a more intuitive way to visualize this data!” You’re in luck: I’ve written a quick, open- source visualizer in Processing which graphs your brain activity over time (download). It’s designed to work with the Brain. Serial. Out Arduino code you’ve already loaded. Download the code, and then open up the brain. With the Mind Flex plugged in via USB and powered on, go ahead and run the Processing sketch. This data is heavily filtered / amplified, so where a conventional medical- grade EEG would give you absolute voltage values for each band, Neuro. Sky instead gives you relative measurements which aren’t easily mapped to real- world units. A run down of the frequencies involved follows, along with a grossly oversimplified summary of the associated mental states. In addition to these power- band values, the Neuro. Sky chip provides a pair of proprietary, black- box data values dubbed “attention” and “mediation”. These are intended to provide an easily- grokked reduction of the brainwave data, and it’s what the Force Trainer and Mind Flex actually use to control the game state. We’re a bit skeptical of these values, since Neuro. Sky won’t disclose how they work, but a white paper they’ve released suggests that the values are at least statistically distinguishable from nonsense. Here’s the company line on each value: Attention: Indicates the intensity of a user’s level of mental “focus” or “attention”, such as that which occurs during intense concentration and directed (but stable) mental activity. Distractions, wandering thoughts, lack of focus, or anxiety may lower the Attention meter levels. Meditation: Indicates the level of a user’s mental “calmness” or “relaxation”. Meditation is related to reduced activity by the active mental processes in the brain, and it has long been an observed effect that closing one’s eyes turns off the mental activities which process images from the eyes, so closing the eyes is often an effective method for increasing the Meditation meter level. Distractions, wandering thoughts, anxiety, agitation, and sensory stimuli may lower the Meditation meter levels. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. We’ve found that the degree of mental control over the signal varies from person to person. Ian Cleary, a peer of ours at ITP, used the Mind Flex in a recent project. He reports that about half of the people who tried the game were able to exercise control by consciously changing their mental state. The most reasonable test of the device’s legitimacy would be a comparison with a medical- grade EEG. While we have not been able to test this ourselves, Neuro. Sky has published the results of such a comparison. Their findings suggest that the the Neuro. Sky chip delivers a comparable signal. Of course, Neuro. Sky has a significant stake in a positive outcome for this sort of test. And there you have it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2016
Categories |