Blat (favors)

In Russian culture, blat (Russian: блат) is the system of informal agreements, exchanges of services, connections, Party contacts, or black market deals to achieve results or get ahead. The system of blat can be seen as an example of social networks with some similarities to networking (especially 'good ol' boy' networks) in the United States, old boy networks in the United Kingdom and the former British Empire, or guanxi in China. Accordingly, blatnoy means a man who obtains a job or gets into a university using connections, or sometimes bribes. In the Soviet republics, blatnye were very much in demand as it was difficult to gain a post or enroll in some prestigious majors in universities without proper connections.

Usage

The word was primarily used to describe networks, when people made each a favour in exchange for another favour.

According to Max Vasmer, the origin of the word blat is the Yiddish blatt, meaning a "blank note" or a "list". However, according to both Vasmer and N. M. Shansky, blat may also have entered into Russian as the Polish loanword blat, a noun signifying "someone who provides an umbrella" or a "cover". The word became part of Imperial Russian criminal slang in the early 20th century, where it signified relatively minor criminal activity such as petty theft.

Blat

Blat or BLAT may refer to:

See also

BLAT (bioinformatics)

BLAT (BLAST-like alignment tool) is a pairwise sequence alignment algorithm that was developed by Jim Kent at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) in the early 2000s to assist in the assembly and annotation of the human genome. It was designed primarily to decrease the time needed to align millions of mouse genomic reads and expressed sequence tags against the human genome sequence. The alignment tools of the time were not capable of performing these operations in a manner that would allow a regular update of the human genome assembly. Compared to pre-existing tools, BLAT was ~500 times faster with performing mRNA/DNA alignments and ~50 times faster with protein/protein alignments.

Overview

BLAT is one of multiple algorithms developed for the analysis and comparison of biological sequences such as DNA, RNA and proteins, with a primary goal of inferring homology in order to discover biological function of genomic sequences. It is not guaranteed to find the mathematically optimal alignment between two sequences like the classic Needleman-Wunsch and Smith-Watermandynamic programming algorithms do; rather, it first attempts to rapidly detect short sequences which are more likely to be homologous, and then it aligns and further extends the homologous regions. It is similar to the heuristic BLAST family of algorithms, but each tool has tried to deal with the problem of aligning biological sequences in a timely and efficient manner by attempting different algorithmic techniques.

Match fixing in Romanian football

Match fixing in Romanian football is called blat (plural blaturi).

This term is specifically used in the football domestic competition called Liga I to explain a friendly agreement between two or more presidents of football clubs for fixing matches. Etymologically blat means "dough" and a term for designing clandestine travelling in a city bus (has no plural form). So a blătar fixes matches and a blatist travels without a bus ticket.

Origin

Blats are more related with the period before the Romanian Revolution of 1989.. The Communist local and central administration had a decisive role in designating the teams who will play in the next season in the first division. Hence presidents agreed to help each other to avoid relegation from the first division. This informal and dirty association was called cooperativa (first used in 1992 by former international footballer and current football analyst Cornel Dinu from a term which designated the Communist system of agricultural common association) and was composed by 3 or maximum 5 influential presidents. In 1995 Dumitru Dragomir, a former president of Victoria Bucarest football team and the current long serving president of the domestic league LPF admitted during a televised debate to being formerly involved in such deals.