At times the technique, putting biography ahead of analysis, leads Mr Starr astray.

ECONOMIST: The California dream

At the very best, the first hints of these problems came from a re-analysis of data--an unreliable technique--two years after the drug had been on the market.

FORBES: Behind Merck's Fall

The technique of pooling disparate clinical trials, called meta-analysis, has become the most powerful weapon of drug safety researchers.

FORBES: FDA Asks For "Restraint" On Drug Safety Worries

The five main dimensions of human personality were discovered using a statistical technique called factor analysis.

ECONOMIST: Animal behaviour

Researchers using a new systematic analysis technique identified faults in many more regions of DNA in the 1, 000 patients involved in the study.

BBC: Study identifies 'many more' autism genes

In fact, using this technique, we can move beyond the limitations of traditional approaches by running additional analysis to discover new, previously unmeasured categories based on recurring themes within the data.

FORBES: Text Analytics Show Why Bellagio Underperforms Bally's

One finding of this technique, which is known as genome-wide complex-trait analysis, is that many of the same genetic factors seem to explain why people differ in intelligence in childhood and old age.

WSJ: Intelligence Changes Linked to Genes