Structuring

Structuring, also known as smurfing in banking industry jargon, is the practice of executing financial transactions (such as the making of bank deposits) in a specific pattern calculated to avoid the creation of certain records and reports required by law, such as the United States' Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and Internal Revenue Code section 6050I (relating to the requirement to file Form 8300).

Legal restrictions on structuring should not be confused with capital controls, which are statutory or regulatory limits on the money that one can take out of a nation, though they can have some of the same economic effects in some economies, as structuring controls effectively limit the flow of capital by magnitude and duration, and can apply equally to taking money out of a nation as well as putting money into its finance system.

Background

Structuring includes the act of parceling what would otherwise be a large financial transaction into a series of smaller transactions to avoid scrutiny by regulators or law enforcement. Structuring often appears in federal indictments related to money laundering, fraud, and other financial crimes.

Structured programming

Structured programming is a programming paradigm aimed at improving the clarity, quality, and development time of a computer program by making extensive use of subroutines, block structures, for and while loops—in contrast to using simple tests and jumps such as the goto statement which could lead to "spaghetti code" which is difficult both to follow and to maintain.

It emerged in the late 1950s with the appearance of the ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60 programming languages, with the latter including support for block structures. Contributing factors to its popularity and widespread acceptance, at first in academia and later among practitioners, include the discovery of what is now known as the structured program theorem in 1966, and the publication of the influential "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" open letter in 1968.

Structured programming is most frequently used with deviations that allow for clearer programs in some particular cases, such as when exception handling has to be performed.

Call

Call may refer to:

In arts and entertainment

In science and technology

Computing

Telecommunications

Other uses in science and technology

In finance

Caller (dancing)

A caller is a person who prompts dance figures in such dances as line dance, square dance, and contra dance. The caller might be one of the participating dancers, though in modern country dance this is rare.

In round dance a person who performs this function is called a cuer. Their role is fundamentally the same as a caller, in that they tell dancers what to do in a given dance, though they differ on several smaller points. In northern New England contra dancing, the caller is also known as the prompter.

Comparing callers and cuers

Callers and cuers serve slightly different functions in different types of dance. Improvisation in modern Western square dance calling distinguishes it from the calling in many other types of dance.

Callers in many dance types are expected to sing and to be entertaining, but round dance cuers do not sing and are expected to be as unobtrusive as possible.

Standardized dances such as round dance, modern Western square dance, and Salsa Rueda consist of a number of defined difficulty levels. Callers and cuers are responsible for knowing all of the calls or cues (respectively), also known as figures, for the defined difficulty level at which their dancers are dancing, as well as all figures belonging to lower or easier levels.

Betting in poker

In the game of poker, the play largely centers on the act of betting, and as such, a protocol has been developed to speed up play, lessen confusion, and increase security while playing. Different games are played using different types of bets, and small variations in etiquette exist between cardrooms, but for the most part the following rules and protocol are observed by the majority of poker players.

Procedure

Players in a poker game act in turn, in clockwise rotation (acting out of turn can negatively affect other players). When it is a player's turn to act, the first verbal declaration or action she takes binds her to her choice of action; this rule prevents a player from changing her action after seeing how other players react to her initial, verbal action.

Until the first bet is made each player in turn may "check," which is to not place a bet, or "open," which is to make the first bet. After the first bet each player may "fold," which is to drop out of the hand losing any bets they have already made; "call," which is to match the highest bet so far made; or "raise," which is to increase the previous high bet.