BACKGROUND Crack pipe sharing can increase health risks among people who use drugs, yet the reasons for sharing these pipes have not been well described. Therefore, we sought to identify the prevalence and correlates of crack pipe sharing among a community-recruited sample of people who use illicit drugs in Vancouver, a setting where crack pipes are provided at low or no cost. FINDINGS Data f...

Machining of advanced materials, such as composite, encounters high cutting temperatures and rapid tool wear because of the abrasive nature of the reinforcement phases in the workpiece materials. Ultrahard coatings, such as chemical vapor deposition diamond, have been used for machining such advanced materials. Wear of diamond-coated tools is characterized by catastrophic coating failure, plaus...

Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) processing facilities contain large complex networks of pipes of varying diameter and orientation intermixed with control valves, processes and sensors. Regular inspection of these pipes for corrosion, caused by impurities in the gas processing chain, is critical for safety. Popular existing non-destructive technologies that used for corrosion inspection in LNG pipes in...

Probabilistic incremental program evolution (PIPE) is a novel technique for automatic program synthesis. We combine probability vector coding of program instructions, population-based incremental learning, and tree-coded programs like those used in some variants of genetic programming (GP). PIPE iteratively generates successive populations of functional programs according to an adaptive probabi...

Infrastructure systems of many U.S. cities are in poor condition, with many assets reaching the end of their service life and requiring significant capital investments. One primary requirement to optimize the allocation of investments in such systems is an effective assessment of the physical condition of assets. This paper addresses the physical condition assessment of drinking water distribut...