Corruption (disambiguation)

Corruption, when applied as a technical term, is a general concept describing any organized, interdependent system in which part of the system is either not performing duties it was originally intended to, or performing them in an improper way, to the detriment of the system's original purpose. Its original meaning has connotations of evil, malignance, sickness, and loss of innocence or purity.

Specific types of corruption include:

• Political corruption, or the dysfunction of a political system or institution in which government officials, political officials or employees seek illegitimate personal gain through actions such as bribery, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, patronage, graft, and embezzlement. Political corruption is a specific form of rent seeking, where access to politics is organized with limited transparency, limited competition and directed towards promoting narrow interests (rent seeking is not to be confused with property rental).
• Data corruption, or an unintended change to data in storage or in transit.
• Linguistic corruption, or the change in meaning to a language or a text introduced by cumulative errors in transcription or changes in the language speakers' comprehension.
• Putrefaction or decomposition of recently living matter. This physical process is the primary model of the metaphorical meaning of corruption, so advanced states of corruption in, e.g. a political structure are said to result in their putrefaction.

Political corruption is the use of governmental powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain. Misuse of government power for other purposes, such as repression of political opponents and general police brutality, is not considered political corruption. Neither are illegal acts by private persons or corporations not directly involved with the government. An illegal act by an officeholder constitutes political corruption only if the act is directly related to their official duties.

All forms of government are susceptible to political corruption. Forms of corruption vary, but include bribery, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, patronage, graft, and embezzlement. While corruption may facilitate criminal enterprise such as drug trafficking, money laundering, and trafficking, it is not restricted to these organized crime activities. In some nations, corruption is so common that it is expected when ordinary businesses or citizens interact with government officials. The end point of political corruption is a kleptocracy, literally "rule by thieves".

The activities that constitute illegal corruption differ depending on the country or jurisdiction. Certain political funding practices that are legal in one place may be illegal in another. In some countries, government officials have broad or poorly defined powers, and the line between what is legal and illegal can be difficult to draw.

Bribery around the world is estimated at about $1 trillion (£494bn), and the burden of corruption falls disproportionately on the bottom billion people living in extreme poverty.

Data corruption refers to errors in computer data that occur during transmission or retrieval, introducing unintended changes to the original data. Computer storage and transmission systems use a number of measures to provide data integrity, the lack of errors.

Data corruption during transmission has a variety of causes. Interruption of data transmission causes information loss. Environmental conditions can interfere with data transmission, especially when dealing with wireless transmission methods. Heavy clouds can block satellite transmissions. Wireless networks are susceptible to interference from devices such as microwave ovens.

Data loss during storage has two broad causes: hardware and software failure. Head crashes and general wear and tear of media fall into the former category, while software failure typically occurs due to bugs in the code.

When data corruption behaves as a Poisson process, where each bit of data has an independently low probability of being changed, data corruption can generally be detected by the use of checksums, and can often be corrected by the use of error correcting codes.

If an uncorrectable data corruption is detected, procedures such as automatic retransmission or restoration from backups can be applied. RAID disk arrays, store and evaluate parity bits for data across a set of hard disks and can reconstruct corrupted data upon of the failure of a single disk.

If appropriate mechanisms are employed to detect and remedy data corruption, data integrity can be maintained. This is particularly important in banking, where an undetected error can drastically affect an account balance, and in the use of encrypted or compressed data, where a small error can make an extensive dataset unusable.

Corruption (linguistics) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediage). Corruption or bastardisation is a way of referring to certain changes in a language. The most common way that a word can be said to be corrupted is the change of its spelling through errors and gradual changes in comprehension, transcription, and hearing. This is especially common with words borrowed from another language. For example Guangzhou was formerly known as Canton, which is a transliteration of Guangdong following the rules of French sound structures. The terms "corruption" and "bastardisation" carry negative connotations, and are rooted in prescriptivist theories of language. Language corruption may refer to two similar things: · Change of words, as described above. · Difference from the so-called "purity" of standard language. For example, the split infinitive has long been disputed as either a corruption or norm of the English language. Text bastardisation is: · Unauthorized alteration and publication of a text inconsistent with the original purpose or the author's intention. For example: “ A year after rejecting the novel, Gallimard published a bastardised text called Ravages, which dispensed with the first, sexually explicit pages of the manuscript. „

History In the past, with unstandardized spelling for English and other languages, a word would be pronounced differently by people who encountered the word in text and not speech. Eventually, such changes could become standardized. A large number of these changes occurred during the 19th century. English is now highly standardized with some dialectal variation. The mass written communication of the Internet promotes even greater standardization; however, its informal nature often encourages intentional language changes. In online interactive games, chat rooms and other situations, common typographical errors and attempts at humor have created a number of new alternate spellings (see leet).

Examples Some commonly known words and phrases which are the result of linguistic corruption include:

· "vamoose" (from the Spanish verb vamos, which means "Let's go")

· "Cajun" (from "Acadian")

· "spitting image" (from "spirit and image")

· "parting shot" (from "Parthian shot")

· "That doesn't jive (with the facts)." (from "That doesn't jibe with the facts.")

· "to coin a phrase" (meaning: "so to speak" or "to use a figurative expression")

· tow the line (from British parliamentary usage "toe the line")

External links

• Internet Center for Corruption Research, publishing the Corruption Perceptions Index and research on anticorruption
• Tishchenko P. D. Corruption: the Russian Experience