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Organized by the New Economics Foundation and the Working Group on Climate and Development, the report (in PDF) is actually pretty good and contains much valuable information on climate change and development (that is, once you get past the hype of the press release and its lack of precision in disaggregating climate and vulnerability as sources of climate-related impacts). The participating organizations have done a nice job integrating considerations of climate change and development, a perspective that is certainly needed. More generally, the IPCC suffers because it no longer considers “policy options” under its mandate. Since its First Assessment Report when it did consider policy options, the IPCC has eschewed responsibility for developing and evaluating a wide range of possible policy options on climate change. By deciding to policy outside of its mandate since 1992, the IPCC, ironically, leaves itself more open to charges of political bias. It is time for the IPCC to bring policy back in, both because we need new and innovative options on climate, but also because the IPCC has great potential to serve as an honest broker. But until it does, its leadership would be well served to avoid either the perception or the reality of endorsing particular political perspectives.

most scholars, whatever their disciplinary background, do not publish negative results.

I would admire it more if he didn’t elsewhere dismiss qualitative literary analysis as “a theological exercise.” (Moretti does not subscribe to literary-analytic pluralism: he has suggested that distant reading should supplant, not supplement, close reading.) The counterpoint to theology is science, and reading Moretti, it’s impossible not to notice him jockeying for scientific status. He appears now as literature’s Linnaeus (taxonomizing a vast new trove of data), now as Vesalius (exposing its essential skeleton), now as Galileo (revealing and reordering the universe of books), now as Darwin (seeking “a law of literary ­evolution”).

Literature is an artificial universe, and the written word, unlike the natural world, can’t be counted on to obey a set of laws. Indeed, Moretti often mistakes metaphor for fact. Those “skeletons” he perceives inside stories are as imposed as exposed; and literary evolution, unlike the biological kind, is largely an analogy. (As the author and critic Elif Batuman pointed out in an n+1 essay on Moretti’s earlier work, books actually are the result of intelligent design.)

Literature, he argues, is “a collective system that should be grasped as such.” But this, too, is a theology of sorts — if not the claim that literature is a system, at least the conviction that we can find meaning only in its totality.

The idea that truth can best be revealed through quantitative models dates back to the development of statistics (and boasts a less-than-benign legacy). And the idea that data is gold waiting to be mined; that all entities (including people) are best understood as nodes in a network; that things are at their clearest when they are least particular, most interchangeable, most aggregated — well, perhaps that is not the theology of the average lit department (yet). But it is surely the theology of the 21st century.

There’s probably a small percentage of companies who will blatantly ignore any attempts to stop tracking. For the rest, it’s more likely a case of not having procedures in place. Their intentions are good, but lack of manpower and the proper tech is probably what’s keeping them from following through on those good thoughts.

Since they can’t go after them with big guns, the Stanford study went with public embarrassment. They’ve published a list of the websites showing which ones are compliant and which ones aren’t. If you’re working with an ad network, you might want to check it out.