For example, we scrutinise an average of about 150 published academic papers every day.
"Things like 9/11 and the release of anthrax in the U.S. postal system do have to make us think more seriously about the threats we could face from bioterrorism," says Altmann. "So, for example, you tend to scrutinise your writing and presentations carefully to check that you haven't said anything that could inadvertently fall into the wrong hands and give people ideas for how to generate weapons".
Every procedure, every process, is relentlessly scrutinised, which is why, for example, every job interview lasts 30 minutes and offers of employment are decided by a peer-review process rather than by the most senior manager present.
It was therefore deemed necessary to scrutinise cases diagnosed with for example seborrhoea, alopecia and immune-related skin diseases.
Mergers and acquisitions that were once waved through (Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, for example, or Facebook's of WhatsApp) should be scrutinised sceptically.
Once the list was complete, it was shared for peer review through a specially constructed portal that allowed other academics to scrutinise Rooduijn's classifications and provide detailed feedback, for example on why certain labels might be incorrect.
Population growth projections feed into many other forecasts and models - projections of energy use, for example, or corporate profits - so people like Sanyal scrutinise these UN figures carefully.
It wants agencies to scrutinise their own models and to improve transparency by, for example, ensuring that ratings of structured products are differently labelled from those of less volatile bonds.For the agencies, which had already revised their business methods earlier this year, this is a far cry from the apocalyptic predictions of crippling fines and suffocating regulation.
However, the audit trail for aid delivered outside DfID – for example, the cross-government prosperity fund – is such that MPs have to resort to parliamentary questions to scrutinise even the most basic facts and figures.
It's a "feeling in the bones", as Peter Lanyon, a Cornish painter, has it.That is how Mr Marsden feels place: Leskernick Hill on Bodmin Moor, for example, ringed by higher hills and, on the skyline, 21 cairns which seem to scrutinise him "like the gaze of high-hung portraits in an ancestral home".
