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BusinessWeek's 2006 Cover Story, "Math Will Rock Your World," announced a new age of numbers. With the rise of new networks, the story argued, all of us were channeling the details of our lives into vast databases. Every credit-card purchase, every cell-phone call, every click on the computer mouse fed these digital troves. Those with the tools and skills to make sense of them could begin to decipher our movements, desires, diseases, and shopping habits-and predict our behavior. This promised to transform business and society. In a book expanding upon this Cover Story, The Numerati, Senior Writer Stephen Baker introduces us to the mathematical wizards who are digging through our data to decode us as patients, shoppers, voters, potential terrorists-even lovers.

Which brings us to the underlying point of the piece - we are all leaving digital trails behind us, as we make our way around our individual lives. These trails are largely considered individual - even ethereal - yet technology is making these trails more visible and more readable everyday.

Over the last year, I've produced five data-driven pieces for Wired UK. Four of them have been for the two-page infoporn spread that can be found in every issue. I've looked at the UK's National DNA Database, used mined Twitter data to find people's travel paths, and mapped traffic in some of the world's busiest sea ports.