Month: August 2024

Enlarge / Everyone loves a wagon, especially when it's an M5. (credit: Fabian Kirchbauer Photography/BMW)

Telling someone they can't have something is a great way to make them want it. Take the station wagon, for example. This once-popular form factor for family transport has all but disappeared from new car showrooms in North America, consequently making the station wagon all kinds of cool in the process. At the apex are the superwagons, factory-tuned models with prodigious power outputs, with one in particular attaining legendary status in large part because BMW chose never to import the M5 Touring across the Atlantic. Until now.

BMW first made a Touring—or station wagon—version of the M5 in 1992 with the second-generation (better known as the E34) 5 series. When I was growing up in the UK, these were unavailable, as they were in the US, quickly giving the five-door M5 an extra level of cachet that the four-door lacked, despite a starring role in Ronin.

Truth be told, the E34 M5 Touring looked very cool, but it wasn't the greatest sales success.

Enlarge / Everyone loves a wagon, especially when it's an M5. (credit: Fabian Kirchbauer Photography/BMW)

Telling someone they can't have something is a great way to make them want it. Take the station wagon, for example. This once-popular form factor for family transport has all but disappeared from new car showrooms in North America, consequently making the station wagon all kinds of cool in the process. At the apex are the superwagons, factory-tuned models with prodigious power outputs, with one in particular attaining legendary status in large part because BMW chose never to import the M5 Touring across the Atlantic. Until now.

BMW first made a Touring—or station wagon—version of the M5 in 1992 with the second-generation (better known as the E34) 5 series. When I was growing up in the UK, these were unavailable, as they were in the US, quickly giving the five-door M5 an extra level of cachet that the four-door lacked, despite a starring role in Ronin.

Truth be told, the E34 M5 Touring looked very cool, but it wasn't the greatest sales success.

Enlarge / For now, "you should see a doctor" remains good advice.

ChatGPT was able to pass some of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) tests in a study done in 2022. This year, a team of Canadian medical professionals checked to see if it’s any good at actual doctoring. And it’s not.

ChatGPT vs. Medscape

“Our source for medical questions was the Medscape questions bank,” said Amrit Kirpalani, a medical educator at the Western University in Ontario, Canada, who led the new research into ChatGPT’s performance as a diagnostic tool. The USMLE contained mostly multiple-choice test questions; Medscape has full medical cases based on real-world patients, complete with physical examination findings, laboratory test results, and so on.

The idea behind it is to make those cases challenging for medical practitioners due to complications like multiple comorbidities, where two or more diseases are present at the same time, and various diagnostic dilemmas that make the correct answers less obvious. Kirpalani’s team turned 150 of those Medscape cases into prompts that ChatGPT could understand and process.

Enlarge / For now, "you should see a doctor" remains good advice.

ChatGPT was able to pass some of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) tests in a study done in 2022. This year, a team of Canadian medical professionals checked to see if it’s any good at actual doctoring. And it’s not.

ChatGPT vs. Medscape

“Our source for medical questions was the Medscape questions bank,” said Amrit Kirpalani, a medical educator at the Western University in Ontario, Canada, who led the new research into ChatGPT’s performance as a diagnostic tool. The USMLE contained mostly multiple-choice test questions; Medscape has full medical cases based on real-world patients, complete with physical examination findings, laboratory test results, and so on.

The idea behind it is to make those cases challenging for medical practitioners due to complications like multiple comorbidities, where two or more diseases are present at the same time, and various diagnostic dilemmas that make the correct answers less obvious. Kirpalani’s team turned 150 of those Medscape cases into prompts that ChatGPT could understand and process.