CUBE
CUBE turns up in 3 fields: hydrography, automotive, shop slang. Here is what it means to the people in each one.
CUBE in hydrography
Combined Uncertainty and Bathymetry Estimator: an algorithm that builds a depth surface by weighting soundings by uncertainty.
Combined Uncertainty and Bathymetry Estimator is a gridding algorithm that estimates depth at each node from nearby soundings, weighting each by its total propagated uncertainty and distance. Where soundings disagree it keeps competing depth hypotheses and picks the most likely one, which handles noise without hand-editing every ping. Processors then review only the nodes where the chosen hypothesis looks wrong.
"Run a CUBE surface first and only clean where the hypotheses look strange."
Cube in automotive
A slang term for a cubic inch of engine displacement.
A unit of measurement used by hot rodders and engine builders to describe engine displacement in cubic inches. The term is most commonly used in the plural to boast about the internal volume and resulting torque of a large V8 engine.
"There's no replacement for displacement, and this big block has 502 cubes ready to tear up the track."
Cube in shop slang
A small partitioned workspace in an open-plan office environment.
A modular office workstation enclosed by low fabric or plastic partitions rather than full walls. In industrial environments, these are often set up on the shop floor or in adjacent administrative areas for supervisors, planners and engineers. They offer minimal privacy and zero soundproofing from the surrounding machinery.
"Take those schematics over to the engineering cube and see if they can authorize a substitution."