Osteocrinology: Insights from the Great Indian Epics

Indian epics are a storehouse of knowledge and information, which offer an insight into various aspects of health and disease. In this paper, we surmise some of the legendary figures in the great Indian epics, who possibly could have disorders related to osteocrinology. Based on the detailed description provided in Vedic texts, these exemplars from Indian history provide an interesting framework for the study of osteocrinology. These may spark an interest in students and researchers to explore and understand this subject in greater depth

Meaningful Clinical Conversation: Guidance from the Gita

Chronic disease care is a challenging vocation. One of the reasons for this is the need to inform and share decision making with patients. Communication and conversational skills are the pillars of chronic care delivery. In this editorial, we take guidance from the Srimad Bhagavad Gita in order to improve the quality of clinical conversations, and make them meaningful. The Gita encourages us to be ‘saatvik’ or balanced in thought, words and deeds, to perform ‘penance’ of mind, speech and body, and to accept equanimity. This introspective opinion piece should help us polish our communication skills, and improve interaction with our patients

Distributionally Robust Classification on a Data Budget

Real world uses of deep learning require predictable model behavior under distribution shifts. Models such as CLIP show emergent natural distributional robustness comparable to humans, but may require hundreds of millions of training samples. Can we train robust learners in a domain where data is limited? To rigorously address this question, we introduce JANuS (Joint Annotations and Names Set), a collection of four new training datasets with images, labels, and corresponding captions, and perform a series of carefully controlled investigations of factors contributing to robustness in image classification, then compare those results to findings derived from a large-scale meta-analysis. Using this approach, we show that standard ResNet-50 trained with the cross-entropy loss on 2.4 million image samples can attain comparable robustness to a CLIP ResNet-50 trained on 400 million samples. To our knowledge, this is the first result showing (near) state-of-the-art distributional robustness on limited data budgets. Our dataset is available at \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/penfever/JANuS_dataset}, and the code used to reproduce our experiments can be found at \url{https://github.com/penfever/vlhub/}.Comment: TMLR 2023; openreview link: https://openreview.net/forum?id=D5Z2E8CNs

The Spirit and Science: Is the Endocrine System the Essence of Existence?

In this reflective opinion piece, the authors offer a unique insight into the connection between spirituality and science. A reading of the Shrimad Bhagvad Gita, through the eyes of an endocrinologist, uncovers unexpected corollaries and correlations between spirituality or religion on one hand, and science or rationale, on the other

A review of current and future powertrain technologies and trends in 2020

[EN] Fossil fuels are currently the most convenient on-board energy sources for vehicles in terms of energy density and refueling time. However, the increase in global temperature together with the increase in transported people and goods in recent years has forced regulatory authorities around the world to establish strict regulations on pollutant and CO2 emissions. These scenarios are challenging for vehicle manufacturers, but they also create opportunities for the development of new technologies and concepts. For example, automotive companies and researchers are currently exploring hybrid powertrains with either advanced internal combustion engine technologies and low levels of electrification, or with high levels of electrification combined with simpler internal combustion engines. While these hybridization approaches can provide significant improvements in efficiency and emissions. There is also a global movement at the, consumer, manufacturing and government level to accelerate the adoption of zero tailpipe emitting vehicles (e.g., battery electric vehicles and fuel cell electric vehicles). This paper reviews the current state of powertrain technologies, analyzing first the evolution of emissions regulations in major markets and emphasizing the future tighter measures that will be adopted in Europe and the US. After that, an analysis of current global vehicle sales considering the COVID situation is performed, followed by a forecast of future powertrain technology market share trends. Finally, reviews of internal combustion engine, hybrid, and battery electric vehicle technologies announced in 2020 are carried out.Conway, G.; Joshi, A.; Leach, F.; García Martínez, A.; Senecal, PK. (2021). A review of current and future powertrain technologies and trends in 2020. Transportation Engineering. 5:1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.treng.2021.100080115