Andrew

I lack social skills because of things that happened in my childhood. Have suffered depression in the past as well but with shear will I took myself out of it but the point I am trying to make is that I am a less than an average person. However, I can tell that the lack if social skills affects a lot at work. I know I am in a team of good people. I have no negative feelings for my teammates. But I have noticed that whenever I bring up bugs in the software (yeah I am a software engineer working on embedded systems) the team ignores it. This I know because the testing process is not that great. However, those are bugs that are just waiting to manifest themselves. It has happened that things that I have brought up have manifested after a couple or few months and even at customer's sight. On introspection, I think I insist a lot on fixing a problem when it is found and not wait until it happens. And that act it looked up on as an offense and thus my teammates do not like me. I also understand that technical skills do not matter, it is the ability to be a team player is what matters the most at work. I see myself as just doing my job of bring forth some problems that I find. I also find that the act of insisting just comes naturally to me, I realize it only when it is too late. Thus, I try to keep quite so that nothing wrong happens. But that is not possible all the time because if teammates asks a question, I have to answer and then things start piling up from there.

There is this person, related to me, who was depressed for many years and recently acquired schizophrenia. He was hospitalized for the same, a few months back, and now I do not see any symptoms of schizophrenia and he is on medication. All that his psychiatrist indicates is that he will have to be on medication for the rest of his life. However, he still looks depressed and without energy or motivation. I asked his psychiatrist as to why aren't we seeing any more improvements? what is the guarantee that the medicines are having any effect if there is no quantitative way to measure the effectiveness. The psychiatrist merely dismisses such questions and merely says that the illness is years old so it is difficult to see any improvements in short duration.

I believe there should be some aggressive but methodical ways to help such person reclaim his life. Has anybody out there applied such method and found positive results? if yes then please share it with me.

This question is for people working in the field of string AI (hopefully they visit this site!)

The question is, after recognizing patterns, what all do you do with it?

How do you represent it?

If there is a change in the pattern, how do you address it?

If there is a damaged object and say the pattern is still recognized but then how do you consider it as an exception rather than modifying the stored pattern?

How are exceptions stored?

Besides NN, do you use any other algorithms to recognize patterns?

Here in US, flu vaccine is taken every year. It just doesn't make sense.

I searched for it on the internet and found a reasoning here http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/fluvaccine.htm#eve... among many other websites.

The reason mentioned there doesn't make any sense. If the flu virus is changing and the vaccine is updated then let the vaccine be given when there is an update, why every year? Secondly, I personally know many people (200+) who have had the vaccine only once in their life and they never had any problems! And there are many countries where flu vaccine is given only once in a person's life and not every year and people still do not have any problems!

So why flu vaccine every year in US?