They took data from numerous sources to provide a view on a companies ethical status.
The lobbyists took data from 13 banks and applied the rule as they interpreted it.
It took data stored on the Internet and used it interchangeably with information on a PC's hard drive.
From government dietary research, they took data on the classic question: Do you think French people eat too much?
But the Midland program took data on which machinery and processes produced the end results, to harvest valuable suggestions for improvements the company itself had missed.
Farah took data from surveys of home life and brain scans of 64 participants carried out over the course of 20 years.
They took data for a sample of 672 British manufacturing firms between 1972 and 1991, and turned to stock-price volatility as their measure of uncertainty.
CAF's report took data from countries accounting for around 75 per cent of global GDP and 53 per cent of the world population.
Citigroup didn't track patterns of activity on its credit card site and failed to notice immediately when hackers took data on more than two million card users, said Avivah Litan, a security expert of Gartner.
In the new research, published in Nature Geoscience, the scientists took data collected independently by centres in Japan and Hawaii and, after accounting for differences in the way it had been collected, showed that typhoons in the north-west Pacific had intensified by 12 15% on average since 1977.
To create the index, Mr. Esty, his Yale colleagues, and members of the World Economic Forum's Global Leaders of Tomorrow (a select group of promising young people who, in the past, have included Bill Gates, the Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Mr. Esty), took data from 57 countries and looked at 65 variables.
