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Why Does a Voting Machine Need Calibration?
New submitter Shotgun writes "I heard on the radio that there were some issues with voting machines in Greensboro, NC (my hometown), and the story said the machines just needed "recalibration". Which made me ask, "WTF? Why does a machine for choosing between one of a few choices need 'calibration'?" This story seems to explain the issue."
TheBlaze (i.e. Glenn Beck) is not a credible news source. Please delete this article.
It should be 'calibrated' right out the window. I am very disappointed that there is so little resistance against these contraptions.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Here's a recap of what the article says 'calibration' means:
The voting machines are touch screens like ATMs, and since the "Obama" and "Romney" buttons are right next to each other there have been reports of people trying to vote for one and the machine registering the touch for the other.
I don't know the story about why they're using touch screens for voting. At a first glance, I assume it's because EVERYTHING IN 2012 THAT IS TOUCH SCREEN IS HIP MODERN NEW FRESH EDGY JAZZ, but there might actually be a real reason. Seriously, I am never more than 30% sure I'm going to get the right amount of money out of the machine until I see the box light up.
This was a problem with electronic voting machines during the 2008 elections:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081029/0131342676.shtml
https://www.google.com/search?q=2008+voting+machine+screen+calibration
I'm speaking from a perspective of someone that regularly works as a poll worker during elections in the state of California.
One of the first things I do once our touch screen system is set up is confirm the calibration of the LCD panel. It's typical for the registration to be off by a few pixels, as our fingers are not perfect pixel-sized points. However, I have yet to experience an issue where the calibration is so bad that the wrong selection is made on behalf of the voter. Remember there are a whole host of perfectly valid reasons why this may be more of a problem for some voters than others, certainly including finger size and physical impairment affecting fine-motor skills.
If a voter did report a problem of this nature, recalibrating the touch screen would be one of the first things I would try.
Anyone that's ever worked with touchscreens before knows that those things need frequent recalibration
Touchscreens—particularly resistive touchscreens—often need recalibration. On a poorly calibrated screen, tapping on one button could select the one adjacent. Not good in a voting machine with a column full of candidates in densely packed rows.
Note: I haven't read TFA, this is just the first thing that came to mind.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
For either/both sides to call shenanigans when the vote does not go their way. I wonder if someone has done a study on the amount of press voter fraud gets vs. party election outcome and if there is as stark of a difference as I perceive. And if people really think that one party only wins when they "cheat", does that just reinforce myopic visions of political views (i.e. Most people think the way I do and so the only explanation is fraud)?
Put one at the left, the other at the right, and make them so far apart that they CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CONFUSED even if the system is out by some number of pixels (or even some fraction of an inch)!
Why is this so complicated?
To the voting machine weasels if their machines need 'calibration' of the touch screen. That's just fucking bullshit. I repair such machines and they don't just go out of calibration without some causative factor.
A ballbat to the balls for all of the voting commissioners who do not have the vendor calibrate the machines with that million dollar dagger hanging over them.
That should be part of the contract, that it is not speaks volumes about the reliability of this electronic erosion of voting.
machines used in the 04 election are giving the current president more screen space. interesting.
Based on my years of software writing This could easily just be a screen issue. Or, a user issue. I have seen many, many user claim they did something but in fact they didn't, they were mistaken.
Anyone who has knowledge of slot machine fraud, know electronic voting is pretty risky.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
duh
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Needs to be calibrated sometimes. I work elections for Clark County, Nevada. I've worked every election the last 10 years. And yes, the touchscreens can fall out of calibration and make it difficult to select the correct candidates. I can't speak to other election districts, but here in Clark County we're trained on how to perform this calibration on site (it's very simple) so that any problems reported by voters can be handled right away.
It usually refers to the coincidence between what the coordinates reported by the digitizer (touchscreen) as the center of the contact area, and the display coordinates underneath it:
“He played around with the field a little and realized that in order to vote for Romney, his finger had to be exactly on the mark,”
Still, the piece is biased starting with the title ("MORE ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES CHANGING ROMNEY VOTES TO OBAMA"), and the issue could be down to the active rectangle being different from what's displayed:
Nancy wrote in an email. She said “the invisible Obama field came down about 1/4 [of an inch]” into what should technically have been the Romney area. In a phone interview with TheBlaze, she explained further that her husband said he felt the area on the touchscreen that could be pushed to vote for Obama was larger than that for Romney.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
that you answer in the description?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Even before reading the article, I knew what the answer was. This is because at my workplace (a public library), we deal with a very similar thing on a regular basis. We have several self-checkout units at each branch, which are basically all-in-one Windows PCs running special software. They have RFID pads for scanning the books, and they take input via a touchscreen. The capacitive touchscreens on tablets and smartphones are generally of good quality, but these are different. They are crappy resistive touchscreens, designed to keep costs down. Accuracy is poor, and a calibration utility must be run regularly or the screens will start to drift. Calibration entails running a program designed for that purpose, then touching targets displayed in each corner of the screen in sequence.
If calibration on a low-quality resistive touchscreen is off, then the mouse click may register at a location as much as 1 full inch away from where the user pressed. I have personally seen this happen many times on our self-checkout units. So if you hear a story that someone on a voting machine pressed the box for the Democratic candidate and it checked the Republican, or vice versa, I'd be willing to bet money that this is what happened. If they were deliberately tampering with the votes, why would they show that to the user?
There are indeed serious concerns with the lack of source availability for voting machines, and the ownership of voting machine companies by individuals with partisan ties. But calibration is not some kind of conspiracy – it's the inevitable result of using cheap touchscreen hardware.
http://xkcd.com/463/
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
A lot of these voting machines still run on Windows CE, similar to Siemens WinCC Flex HMI. They typically come with calibration software built in, once you launch the calibration you have to tap on several cross hairs that appear one after the other. The touchscreen is measuring resistance, when you run the calibration software it adjusts the amount of resistance it looks for to determine where you're tapping on the screen.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
First that letter was all about setting up a legal and public relations basis to question the election later.
Second, yes voting machines need calibration. Different types require different kinds.
For example the touchscreens, usually older resistive touch screens get mis calibrated on position. You have to remeber these things get locks in closets and sit in non-temperature controlled ware houses for a couple years at a time between elections, then they are jostled in trucks, cleaned with cleaners, and sometime run off various power sources. Empirically they do go out of calibration.
I personally have a ballot I saved from an AUtomark paper ballot printer in which all the votes are off by one oval width. that is 100% of the votes are incorrect and you can tell because a few are printed past the range of ovals.
Opscans are fairly easy to allign since they have relatively few degrees of freedom but they do get misalligned and become sensitive to printing tolerances.
Old lever machines used to have the gears wear down.
The solution to all this is not to require perfect everything but to have ways to check things. hand marked Paper ballots and some sampled recounts of those paper ballots such as is done in New Mexico is I believe the best compromise between transparency, robustness and simplicity. It's robust against human and machine errors so mere mortals can carry out very transparent elections. It's also robust against voter turnout variations too since it only takes more pencils to let more people vote, and if a machine breaks, you can still gather the ballots, so you dont get long lines at the polls.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If it did change who you vote for, that would mean you are being coerced.
“He played around with the field a little and realized that in order to vote for Romney, his finger had to be exactly on the mark,”
welcome to the age of tablet computing.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
WTF? Why does a machine for choosing between one of a few choices need 'calibration'?
Because Rich Daley is not on the Chicago ballot anymore for mayor.
For us carnivores, "Sucking the marrow out of life" isn't a transcendentalist philosophy but a practical instruction.
They constantly need recalibration, and can even break internally to the point where it's impossible to calibrate them properly. And they don't do multi-touch, though that's not really important for voting machines.
Why are they used? Because they're cheap and the voting machines are already designed and built, and because capacitive touch screens are too new to have gone through the certification process in significant numbers so far.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
FTA:
I can vote for Invisible Obama?
Dec 15th 2009, claimed that Galileo proved the earth was round and that it revolves around the sun, and that the Dems/Obama are just like the evil people that tried to shut him up (I guess Obama is a Muslim Christian then, or Christian Muslim or something like that).
As soon as I read the title, I knew this had something to do with touchscreens. My question is, or something as important as voting in an election, why would anyone trust something as inaccurate as a touchscreen? Wouldn't it make more sense to just list the names with a physical button next to each, similar to what you'd see on many ATM's?
As for many people here saying they never need to re-calibrate their modern phones and tablets, is it possible that they do some type of self-calibration upon startup? I have an old, old Nexus One and on occasion the touchscreen will begin behaving erratically. Simply pressing the power button to lock the screen, then unlocking again resolves the issue.
we should always use paper ballots
you can cheat with paper ballots, but it's hard and you need a lot of effort and cooperation between many saboteurs
with electronic voting, magnitudes of order more attack vectors are introduced, because it's more complicated, unnecessarily. and one well-placed hacker can untraceably and silently cheat in milliseconds over a broad swath of votes
if people don't believe their government represents the popular will, then we have all sorts of problems
so paper voting only. now and forever, no matter how rich or technophilic the society. the voting in finland should be the same as in bangladesh as in brazil as in the usa: paper ballots only. to preserve the integrity of the process, people trusting their vote matters
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Claimed Sean Smith was a CIA operative sent to Benghazi to cover up Obama's involvement in the Libyan uprising.
If it did change who you vote for, that would mean you are being coerced.
Or that you are afraid of being coerced.... ...and just wait until the machine isn't calibrated and it loudly calls out the name of someone you DIDN'T want to get elected... or at least that's what you tell everyone else....
Why have a touchscreen voting machine in the first place. Wh not go back to a piece of paper and a pencil where you put a cross py the candidates name. You could then get a machine to count the crosses on the paper and still have the origonal vores to check against.
Make casting your vote as low tech as possible so that you can do it under the following conditions:
No mains electricty (there is a high chance that at least one polling station will get a power cut in normal bad weather)
No UPS (in case the power cut is longer than a UPS battery can last)
No generator
Limited transport
I think paper and pencil (or ma be pen) is the lowest tec method pratical.
Why not have physical buttons displayed down the left (or right, or top, or wherever makes sense) that correspond to the location of the screen next to them?
May 26, 2009 Beck claims that Hitler's "empathy" was the cause of the holocaust.
... is, as we say every time this comes up on /., paper ballots marked by the voter with a pencil.
If anyone wants their tablet recalibrated, they can send it to me. In my experience, the 64 gigabyte ipad 4 4g model is particularly prone to miscalibration. Typing errors can be a sign that recalibration is neccessary.
If I can confirm to another person what I voted, I can sell my vote (or be coerced into voting a certain way).
I've never had any calibration issues with my iPad. This kind of thing is a hallmark of older touch-screens, modern devices don't have this problem.
how about something like,
"you have selected . confirm."
WHOA THAT WAS HARD.
In his book "Arguing With Idiots" (alternatively titled "My Inner Dialog"), Beck claims that Article 1, Section 9 Clause 1 of the constitution put a $10 entrance fee on immigrants coming to this country because the founding fathers "actually put a price tag on coming to this country: $10 per person. Apparently they felt like there was a value to being able to live here."
In actuality, Article 1 Section 9 Clause 1 was intended to prevent congress from ending the slave trade.
Even with proof of malfeasance, what do we do with it? Shut up, I have a Dominos delivery and Real Housewives of somewhere is on.
Learn to love Alaska
and I wanted to write a comment that maybe they was technically, scientifically and religiously retarded but I couldn't comment without signing up so I do so here instead.
Also they wouldn't have to use touch screens. Though any switch can fail of course.
But seriously, this hits close to home. I live in the Piedmont Triad (greensboro, nc area), and have voted on these very machines - this year and years past. The hype about this was way overblown and far too political. Most of the stories I've heard of potential fraud from the great north state has been on local media, and from those who may not have the best vision or may suffer from tremors due to age. It's not calibration if you can't choose the right region of the screen, due to medical conditions. That said, I work in Senior living and have not heard any complaints from residents that have voted early. In fact, they loved how easy it is - as most of them have not voted in years in a polling place. The poster seriously needs to stop listening to Clear Channel radio stations (rush radio, I'm assuming?) and perhaps some healthy NPR or our two fine college stations. Also, though it's been said: The blaze? Really, Slashdot?
Resistive Touchscreens all need calibrated. And they should be calibrated before use. This is idiot operators, not a conspiracy. Problem exists between screen and chair.
is that your car in the parking lot? the red one that's leaking turn signal fluid? I'd have that checked if I were you.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
ATM machines do the same thing day in and day out - millions of times. The same ATM machine can be used in all 50 states. The “Get Cash” button is always in the upper left. Incremental refinements.
Elections happens once every 1 or 2 years – and each time it is different. Heck, often each ward is different. And each state has it’s own little quirk.
And if a banks messy up? Go to a branch the next day and it is usually fixed – if not the bank has lost a little good will. Small errors can be tolerated. No so much in an election where every vote counts. You need to beat the error rate of 0.007% in a well-run election..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Senate_election,_2008
When the topic is a grown up topic we love to have a discussion.
When the topic is about an over-blown registration error on one machine and the question is something other than how to fix the machine and prevent the problem, eg: whether or not there is a conspiracy, well you'll have to excuse us if we roll our eyes and walk away.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
You could have just walked away. Yet you're here, and demanding silence on the part of folks you politically oppose.
My point stands.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
There's a reason we don't replace our keyboards on computers with touch screens, and it isn't because the technology doesn't exist. It is because a keyboard is way better for typing than any touchscreen.
To do what? Start the count at a nonzero number to rig the ballot?
Remember folks: you saw it here first.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
You are way behind. But you should patent the idea and sue; just watch them try to use prior art... (only in the supreme court would that work.)
For those who forgot, the story hit the main media at the time but was dismissed because an IT guy was sent to "fix" the problem (which I suspect wouldn't have happened if the race wasn't scrutinized.)
In 2004, a consultant was hired to write testing code which shoved votes to make the result approach 51%. Clearly, things were getting more sophisticated.
Now, a touch screen calibration of a certain sequence could enter in the new approximation target... getting them all wouldn't matter; they could even pre-program them and trigger the bug; a million different things can be done. Even the Chinese hardware could get involved.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Aren't voting machines touch screen based? Some touch screens (usually older /low tech ones, but still) do need to be calibrated. I remember having to do touch all 4 corners + center on my old Win CE devices, as well as the the Nintendo DS and 3DS...
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
I still haven't figured out why all the important things like gas pumps and lotto get a printed receipt but the voting machines don't have a printer.... it would cost too much.
You've never used a touch screen ATM in which the you had to press not quite where the button were rendered?
Never calibrated a palm pilot?
Get off my dam lawn!
"The creepy guy who lives over the road who keeps watching you through a crack in his curtains" is a s/w engineer for Diebold. Get used to watching the West Wing curtains crack open for the next four years.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why do you have machines??
They're obviously using resistive touch screens. Should be using capacitive.
Both sides are quibbling about the voting machines. For instance, there's this article that provides evidence that electronic voting machines have been specifically tampered with to give an advantage to some Republicans (often at the expense of other Republicans.)
I'm not on the left or right, but I don't want anyone to shut up about the problems with these voting machines. Regardless of how similar Republicrats are, non-rigged elections are still extremely important and the current generation of electronic voting machines are far too secretive to be reliable. I'm for anyone speaking up about their problems, though I'd prefer that it not accuse any one party so as to not incite readers to either dismiss it (if they're for that party) or blindly accept it without caring (if they're for another party.)
The reality is that the current state of affairs is ridiculous. We've had cryptography experts present multiple approaches that are both anonymous and yet verifiable by voters in the booth and by election observers. And yet their advice has been ignored and replaced with naively simple systems that are so vulnerable and kept so secret that we have no choice but to assume that it's being done on purpose to rig elections. This is ridiculous and needs to stop. It's not a partisan issue and shouldn't be treated as one.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Whatever happened to all those video games that used to be in the arcades back in the 1980s? They had this amazing technology called a button.
Nowadays, you're not allowed to use buttons until you've paid your dues to the establishment. In order to become licensed to develop for the Nintendo 3DS or PS Vita, which has buttons, you first have to gain "relevant video game industry experience" by either A. working for an established video game developer for five years or B. making and selling several games for a touch-screen smartphone, which lacks buttons.
If you read the statistical analysis showing the vote flipping that was done to get Romney a win in the primaries:
http://www.themoneyparty.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Republican-Primary-Election-Results-Amazing-Statistical-Anomalies_V2.0.pdf
The rigged precincts showing the rigging were 'Central Tabulator' systems (Diebolds), paper vote districts didn't show any 'flipping' for anyone let alone Romney.
http://www.themoneyparty.org/main/stolen-election-2004-plus-the-voter-fraud-scam-series/wisconsin-no-tabulator-versus-tabulator-counties/
It turns out Diebolds Central Tabulator, lets the operator change the vote via a manual override screen!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRFtYGJtOEQ&feature=relmfu
So they didn't even need to do anything special, they just changed the numbers on the central counter.
This is slashdot, right? Everybody knows what can happen to software that ru s devices. It can be manipulated. In Germany, thy tried this. Once. Until somebody filed a lawsuit. Our constitutional court heard experts (including the white hats from the ccc in Germany), gave it a lot of thought and after seeing the evidence (how easy it is to manipulate) came to the following conclusion:
Screw that. The voters have the right to get a result that they can verify (every German has the right to atend the counting of the votes). This is part of the constitution and can not be exchanged for faster results or easier counting. They did not rule out voting machines alltogether, until the results are easally verifyable. The software con not be verified by the public, so there must be a form of proof. Like a printed paper vor each vote that could later be counted. So the government would have to count the votes TWICE. It did not help the case when the ccc installed a chess program on one of the machines on that vote - while nobody was looking - within two minutes, reproducable in the courtroom.
The court ruling was rightout sarcastic when it pointed out that a publicly verifyable counting procedure was indeed a constitutional right, while there is no such thing as a constitutional right for faster projections or making the election cheaper for the government...
As the government found no way to get voting machines in a way that the vote would be equally secret AND verivyable and thus the automated voting procedure could not be made constitutional, those machines are now rotting somewere.
I mean: come on. How often will you rely on something that has failed before? And if we get a relational voting system with paper working: what exactly makes it so hard for the US? Do you like to play chess while voting or what is the f...ing problem with you guys?
Yeah, sure you could. Which is of course why you're glibly saying you could instead of, er, actually doing it.
It's remarkable how simple many, many things appear to be if one is ignorant of how they actually operate and how much work goes into designing them. I used to be routinely guilty of this in machine shop, but I quickly learned to strip the phrase "just" from my vocabulary in light of how damn long it takes to get things right with a mill or lathe.
Most people learn to hold their tongue rather than spout off about how "simple" something they don't understand is because they don't want to look like idiots to those who do understand.
As touch screens on consumer goods haven't really required calibration for the last couple of generations of devices. So why so complex on voting machines?
That all voting machines are shit? Because that's the GIST I'm getting.
I'm pretty sure I could build a better voting machine in my garage for under $100, bet these things cost tens of thousands.
It's been done. See Open voting consortium or Open voting solutions. But the problem is vastly harder than you estimate, to get it right. It's not that it has to be complex. It's the many pitfalls most people fail to anticipate, even one of which, destroys the whole concept.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Why would it have to be the president rigging the vote and not some supporter? Granted, the president would benefit if votes were improperly cast for him, but the reality of the situation is that becomes the reason why it is a concern if its an equipment problem or deliberate act. Someone is getting a vote illegitimately. Remember, these machines are easy to hack, we heard all about it when Bush was winning elections. Now we are hearing that they are temperamental and need adjusting.
If anyone had demanded your silence you'd have a fantastic point.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I have a Diebold voting machine key blank. I'll do my own damn calibrations, thanks.
The only thing I can imagine is that it's the touch screen that needs to be calibrated. :)
Database calibration would be something new to me
Privacy is terrorism.
Okay. Voting machines with a miscalibrated screen, coupled with a dumb user interface that causes wrong choices to be made and doesn't allow the voters to be certain what they voted for.
Scroll to comments.
That’s why the Marxist-in-Chief will be re-selected.
*facepalm*
OF COURSE it's a frigging Obama conspiracy! I mean, Obama did Hurricane Sandy, messing with a few voting machines is easy in comparison, right? Duh.
Seriously, though, this is kind of like an inverse of the common-sense conclusion. Normally, one flaw is a glitch, two is a conspiracy. In voting machines, one election with screwy results is enough to suggest a conspiracy, but when all elections that use voting machines have more or less screwy results, maybe that suggests that the technology just isn't there yet.
According to the article, the area that you could "touch" to vote for one candidate was a MUCH larger area of the tablet.
That means... almost all the miscalibrations (of which some are certain to occur) will favor one particular candidate.
This is a fairness issue. Instead of dedicating areas of a screen to a particular candidate on a ballot; the order that candidates are presented in the list, and which of the screen zones are assigned to each candidate, should be randomized on each ballot, to ensure that no particular candidate or choice gets unequal treatment.
Obligatory: Why Bush took Florida
show up random but count the way that they want to you vote and if they pick wrong just show a error and re random it
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm curious if you have the same lofty standards for the post I was replying to. Here it is, for your convenience:
TheBlaze (i.e. Glenn Beck) is not a credible news source. Please delete this article.
And was it deleted? Uhhh...no. How about this one: dfenstrate, you are not a credible /.er. you need to be banned! Gosh, that got you banned but quick, right? Okay. We can stop having this discussion now because you're banned.
You're behaving like a child. "Mommy! He said Glenn Beck isn't credible! He even suggested that the post containing an article from Mr. Beck's site should be deleted! Waahh!!! I'm being censored!"
Please.
As I said before, if you disagree, then make an argument that supports your position. I know. That's such a novel idea.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Not long ago I saw the documentary Hacking Democracy - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808532/.
I was astonished that nobody can really check how these voting machines work. It's a complete secret.
Another thing that surprised me was voting by telling some other person behind the curtain name of the candidate, believing that this person will really mark the correct one. Pure craziness.
In my country election has to be conducted in a transparent way that allows verification. Every voting "sector" has a list of voters. We show ID, sing next to our name on the list and get the form (forms are anonymous). We vote with pen and paper. We mark X on the form next to candidate name and then put this form to sealed ballot box.
We don't have electronic voting yet because there is no safe system which is easy to audit and allows to check if one is eligible to vote and provide vote anonimity in the same time.
Look, if you want to pretend that there are Dead People voting in Chicago, and that we therefore have to disenfranchise the 5-10% of (mostly poor, elderly, and/or dead) Americans who don't have photo ID because there's a risk that ringers will show up at the polls instead of them, that's one thing.
But this is just trolling - corrupt voting machines were a Republican scam that you guys pushed on the rest of us after the 2000 Florida vote count debacle, because you didn't want any chance that the next time you stuff the ballot boxes some judge might insist on an actual complete recount. (In particular, that's why the original ones didn't have paper records of any kind.)
And there's probably no truth to the rumor that the reason Ireland rejected the American proposal to sell them voting machines was because the "Change The Vote To Republican"/i> feature does something entirely different over there. (And really, as long as those Chicago voters were properly registered, there's no reason to disenfranchise them just because they're metabolically challenged and looking for brainnzzzz.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks