"Privacy is so critical," Davison told me in an interview, "Having people's trust is so critical for this sort of thing.
There is some stunning descriptive writing about the natural world: a bower bird she encounters at a critical moment is "a sort-of crow in fancy dress … clad in a tabard of a yellow so intense that it seemed to burn".
Empirical information has to hold up under critical appraisal, a sort of qualifying exam, in order to be accepted into the higher class of evidence.
But there is a clear difference between this sort of critical analysis and accusations of bias.
"You've got to create a sort of critical mass," he said.
Because we tend not to entrust this sort of critical public infrastructure to the private sector.
"By open, I mean as free in terms of a critical atmosphere, and that sort of ugly specter of patriotism".
Rights, they implicitly assert, should be awarded only to minority communities that have attained some sort of critical mass.
This sort of critical introspection is not exactly a defining feature of the president or his administration.
And even then, the film sparked wildly different critical responses, hardly the sort of vitae you'd expect for one of the leading contenders for best film.
