Naturally, his tax plan has drawn fire from practitioners of static analysis.

FORBES: It's Growth, Stupid: Why Newt Gingrich Is Leading In The Polls

Already, defence planners are considering whether a drone aircraft should be able to fire a weapon based on its own analysis.

ECONOMIST: Robots go to war

He also criticised the government's cost benefit analysis of the benefits of fitting fire sprinklers in homes as being "out of date".

BBC: Why don't homes have sprinkler systems?

The Fire Department of New York today doesn't count any call time in its response analysis, a change from 2008 and earlier, when it included the time during which fire-dispatch staffers handled the call.

WSJ: All Heat, No Light, in Fire Data

"The police back then didn't push as hard as they should have done to get us an answer, " says the bereaved father, although he praised the officers who conducted a second investigation, involving fresh interviews with witnesses and forensic analysis, nearly 20 years after the fire.

BBC: Did the New Cross fire create a black British identity?

On Tuesday, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said it was conducting a chemical analysis of internal short circuiting and thermal damage of the battery that caught fire in Boston.

NPR: US Regulator Asks Boeing For Full Battery History

Security analysis is now show business, with analysts the circus dogs jumping through hoops of fire.

FORBES: Analyze This

Frame-by-frame analysis of the motion of individual soot particles then reveals how quickly gases within the fire are moving, and allows fire behaviour to be scrutinised in detail.

ECONOMIST: Next, the fire forecast

In the United Kingdom the London Fire Brigade (LFB) uses software created by business analytics specialists SAS as part of their Incident Risk Analysis toolkit.

BBC: Can big data help fight fires and save lives?