petabytes per day. When you consider that EMC handles every order that’s analysed and archived by the New York Stock Exchange Euronext markets in America, Ambry Genetics data, media conversions for movies like Transformers, Smurfs, Hugo and Spiderman which incorporates the digital information of 400 artists each week during production, the billions of searches made by LinkedIn members, eBay storage, the monumental JFK Archive and the trillion or so comScore customer processes each month, you get an idea of the sheer volumes being administered by the company. And that’s tip of the iceberg. Sean Gourley is a passionate purveyor of the power within data. His twin passions are physics and politics. The Rhodes Scholar San Francisco resident uses data to understand the nature of human conflict. Some might consider this ‘Dark Data’ but by analysing information on the war in Iraq and in countries around the world, he and his team were able to show a mathematical relationship between the frequency and the fatality of attacks. Taking this statistical information forward the question posed for Gourley was ‘how we do end war?’ But obviously with all things digital and being accessible, the inevitable concerns of security and privacy will follow. Understandable, really considering the highly susceptible and pervasive technological landscape we inhabit. The ongoing newsworthy data leaks notwithstanding, Gold points to the positive side of travelling in the fast lanes of the information highway. He suggests that one positive about having more access to information is the ability to enhance security. For instance