Eighteen months ago, Li & Fung, a firm that manages supply chains for retailers, saw 100 gigabytes of information flow through its network each day. Now the amount has increased tenfold. During 2009, American drone aircraft flying over Iraq and Afghanistan sent back around 24 years’ worth of video footage. New models being deployed this year will produce ten times as many data streams as their predecessors, and those in 2011 will produce 30 times as many.

Everywhere you look, the quantity of information in the world is soaring. According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is difficult enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still. Even so, the data deluge is already starting to transform business, government, science and everyday life (see our special report in this issue). It has great potential for good””as long as consumers, companies and governments make the right choices about when to restrict the flow of data, and when to encourage it.

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Chile is on a hotspot of sorts for earthquake activity. And so the 8.8-magnitude temblor that shook the region overnight was not a surprise, historically speaking. Nor was it outside the realm of normal, scientists say, even though it comes on the heels of other major earthquakes.

One scientist, however, says that relative to the time period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Earth has been more active over the past 15 years or so.

The Chilean earthquake, and the tsunami it spawned, originated on a hot spot known as a subduction zone, where one plate of Earth’s crust dives under another. It’s part of the active “Ring of Fire,” a zone of major crustal plate clashes that surround the Pacific Ocean.

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What you don’t see in the news reports is the deep commitment of people who offer love and compassion in an unimaginable variety of ways.

And this is true in communities of faith that gather all over this city. Until my 15 minutes of fame, I always thought we were completely invisible. I thought no one noticed. But now that rumours of Anglican extinction are being spread, everyone seems to be paying attention.

Institutional religion has run into hard times in our comfortable and privileged culture. We have been hurt by scandals, rocked by controversy and justly condemned for our often arrogant and exclusive attitude toward people whose views differ from ours.

But we in the church are not entirely the authors of our own decline.

The church’s once sacrosanct Sunday spot for sacred worship is now crowded with sports, charity runs, shopping malls and coffee shops. Even I am preparing to join the throng who absent themselves from church when I heed the seductive lure of the Times Colonist 10K run on a Sunday morning.

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