Technology and the built world

Load line (watercraft)

A load line, also called the Plimsoll line, is a mark on a merchant ship's hull showing the deepest safe loading, first required by Britain's 1876 Shipping Act.

Load pull

Load pull is an RF measurement technique that varies the impedance seen by a device under test, usually a power transistor, to find the load giving best power, gain, or efficiency.

Load rating

Load rating is the engineering process of determining a bridge's safe load-carrying capacity, required federally for US highway bridges and driving load posting and permit decisions.

Load rejection

Load rejection is the sudden loss of electrical load on a generating unit, typically when the generator circuit breaker opens, leaving the turbine driving an unloaded generator.

Load shedding

Load shedding is the deliberate, preplanned dropping of electrical load in stages, triggered by falling frequency, to keep a power system stable and prevent a total blackout.

Load shifting is the practice of moving electricity consumption from periods of high demand and high prices to periods when demand and prices are lower, without reducing total energy consumed, typically through storage or rescheduling.

Load-bearing wall

A load-bearing wall is a structural wall that carries loads from the roof, floors, and walls above down to the foundations, typically built of concrete, blockwork, or brick.

Load-sensing hydraulic circuit

A load-sensing hydraulic circuit, usually abbreviated LS, is a hydraulic system in which the pump adjusts to the highest load pressure, supplying only demanded flow.

Loadable kernel module

A loadable kernel module (LKM) is an object file that extends a running operating system kernel at runtime, typically providing device drivers or file systems.

Loader (equipment)

A loader, also known as a front-end loader, is a machine that lifts and moves material such as soil and gravel with a front bucket on hydraulic arms.

Loading coil

A loading coil, also called a Pupin coil, is an inductor placed in series with a telephone line at regular intervals to improve voice-frequency response, making long-distance telephony practical.

Loading gauge

The loading gauge, also known as the clearance diagram, is the maximum height and width profile a railway vehicle and its load may occupy on a line.

Loading test

A loading test, also called a cyclic test, applies controlled mechanical loads, often in repeated cycles, to a structure or material to measure strength, stiffness, and failure behavior.

Lobito Corridor

The Lobito Corridor links the Atlantic port of Lobito in Angola to the Copperbelt of the DRC and Zambia, chiefly to export copper and cobalt via the Benguela Railway.

Lobito Oil Field

The Lobito Oil Field is a deepwater oil field in Block 14, offshore Angola, discovered in 2000 and operated by Chevron as part of the BBLT development.

Local area network

A local area network (LAN) is a data communications system linking devices within a building or campus, dominated by wired Ethernet and wireless Wi-Fi, standardized by IEEE 802.

Local binary patterns

Local binary patterns (LBP) are texture descriptors in computer vision that encode each pixel's neighborhood as a binary code, used for texture classification and face recognition.

Local board of health

A local board of health was a British local authority created under the Public Health Act 1848, with powers to build sewers, supply water, and appoint a medical officer of health.

Local buckling

Local buckling is the out-of-plane buckling of individual plate elements, such as a flange or web, under compressive stress, a governing limit state in thin-walled and cold-formed steel construction.

Local differential privacy

Local differential privacy (LDP) is a variant of differential privacy where each user randomizes their own data before it leaves their device, eliminating the trusted curator.

Local Interconnect Network

The Local Interconnect Network (LIN) is a low-cost serial bus protocol for automotive body and comfort electronics, in which a master node polls responders at up to 20 kbit/s.

Local interpretable model-agnostic explanations

Local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) is a machine learning method that explains individual predictions of black-box models, introduced by Ribeiro, Singh, and Guestrin in 2016.

Local loop

The local loop, also called the subscriber loop, is the physical link between a telephone subscriber's premises and the local exchange, historically a pair of copper wires carrying analog voice.

Local Motors

Local Motors was an American vehicle manufacturer founded in Phoenix, Arizona in 2007, known for crowd-designed microfactory-built cars and pioneering the 3D-printed Strati car and Olli self-driving shuttle.

Local number portability

Local number portability (LNP) is the ability of telephone customers to keep their number when switching providers at the same location, mandated in the United States by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Local outlier factor

The local outlier factor (LOF) is an anomaly detection algorithm that scores each data point by the sparsity of its local neighborhood, introduced by Breunig, Kriegel, Ng, and Sander in 2000.

Local search (optimization)

Local search, also known as the local search algorithm, is a heuristic optimization method that repeatedly moves from a current solution to a better neighbor, stopping at a local optimum.

Localhost

Localhost is the hostname that refers to the machine a program is running on, resolving to the loopback address 127.0.0.1 for IPv4 and ::1 for IPv6.

Locality of reference

Locality of reference, also called memory locality, is the tendency of programs to cluster memory accesses to small subsets of addresses, the principle that makes caching work.