Co-author Hugh Sweatman said the findings, which were drawn from the world's largest ever reef monitoring project involving 2, 258 separate surveys over 27 years, showed that coral could recover from such trauma.

BBC: Half of Great Barrier Reef coral lost in last 27 years

The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development conducted surveys of some 125 tribally owned companies, and found that when daily operations were shielded from tribal politics, they were five times more likely to be profitable.

ECONOMIST: Trouble at Ho-Chunk

The Bedmap2 project has benefited greatly from the large number of airborne radar surveys that have been flown in the past decade or so.

BBC: Antarctic ice volume measured

First, they inserted a fraud question into surveys that are conducted annually by the Rush Memory and Aging Project, which questions the elderly about the gamut of their health, neurological, physical and mental developments.

FORBES: Fraud Victims Foiled By Their Own Overconfidence

Drawing input from 3, 000 classroom teachers, the project highlighted several measures that schools should use to assess teacher performance, including test data, student surveys and assessments by trained evaluators.

WSJ: Bill Gates on the Importance of Measurement

The project also found that using multiple measures to understand a teacher's performance -- including classroom observations, student surveys and growth in student achievement -- provides a richer and more reliable picture of a teacher's strengths and areas for improvement than any one measure alone.

CNN: Bill Gates: Invest in better teaching