How often are politicians confronted with public allegations of integrity violations? Which types violations, government levels, and parties do these scandals involve? The Political Integrity Index developed in Netherlands offers information about the number political country since 2013. This article presents a brief overview relevant literature on corruption scandals, summary conceptual framew...

Multimetric indices, such as the Index of Biological Integrity (IBI), are increasingly used by management agencies to determine whether surface water quality is impaired. However, important questions about the variability of these indices have not been thoroughly addressed in the scientific literature. In this study, we used a bootstrap approach to quantify variability associated with fish IBIs...

Background In the report to the Kansas Water Authority (KWA), the Kansas River Channel Degradation Technical Advisory Committee included among its recommendations that the State should update studies to evaluate changes in biodiversity in the Kansas River. At the recommendation of the Kansas Water Office, the KWA endorsed providing funding for the completion of an index of biological integrity ...

The IEC standards 61508/61511 require that reliability targets for safety instrumented functions are defined and verified. The reliability targets are given as one out of a possible four safety integrity levels. For each safety integrity level there are many design requirements, including requirements for the probability of failure on demand. Verification of the requirements for the probability...

Static integrity constraints involve only the current database state. Temporal integrity constraints involve current, past, and future database states; they can be expressed by essentially unrestricted sentences in temporal logic. Certain syntactically restricted classes of temporal constraints have been studied in their own right for considerations of feasibility or practicality; they are usua...

This paper describes a technique for importing automatically an external relational schema into Pegasus, a heterogeneous, multidatabase system. The Pegasus data model is a functional object model which supports specialization, object-identity, and nested aggregation. The import algorithm generates the definition of a Pegasus schema which captures the semantics of a relational schema containing ...

Checking the consistency of a database state generally involves the execution of integrity tests (query that returns the value true or false) on the database, which verify whether the database is satisfying its constraints or not. Many types of integrity tests have been proposed and presented in the literature. The previous works in the area of checking integrity constraints in distributed data...

Traditional chelator-based radio-labeled nanoparticles and positron emission tomography (PET) imaging are playing vital roles in the field of nano-oncology. However, their long-term in vivo integrity and potential mismatch of the biodistribution patterns between nanoparticles and radio-isotopes are two major concerns for this approach. Here, we present a chelator-free zirconium-89 ((89)Zr, t1/2...

In this article we define a new type of integrity constraint in XML, called an XML inclusion constraint (XIND), and show that it extends the semantics of a relational inclusion dependency. This property is important in areas such as XML publishing and ‘data-centric’ XML, and is one that is not possessed by other proposals for XML inclusion constraints. We also investigate the implication and co...