The evaluation was based on a random sampling of American opinion toward car brands in seven areas: quality, safety, value, performance, design, technology and environmental friendliness.

FORBES: Back-On-Top Toyota Tests Gains With New Version of Tundra

What if you could perform fraud-detection analytics across all of your transactions in real time, instead of across just a random sampling of only a few percent of all those transactions?

FORBES: The Biggest Big-Data Opportunities: How to Choose the Right One

The 2011 GEM report is based on a survey of 140, 000 adults in 54 economies, including 6, 000 just in the U.S. Researchers looked at responses from a random sampling of participants, as well as population data for each of the countries represented, to draw conclusions about entrepreneurial activity in those nations.

WSJ: Rise in Start-Ups Draws Doubters

MessageLabs, the email-filtering company that Symantec acquired in 2008, posted a set of word maps today measuring the frequency of terms in spam emails from a random one-week sampling of junk mail pulled from the most prolific spam-spewing botnets.

FORBES: The Most Common Words In Spam Email

Public-health officials already conduct random sampling, so getting the participants to name a few friends too should not be onerous.

ECONOMIST: Epidemiology: Infectious personalities | The