THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don't

Like a beachcomber with a metal detector, statistician Nate Silver combs the sands of data in various disciplines—baseball, weather, earthquakes, politics, and more—and identifies the obstacles to predicting their outcomes. Mike Chamberlain narrates this audiobook with a youthful energy that matches Silver’s friendly approach to applied statistics. Faced with a blizzard of unimportant data (the noise), Silver (the bête noire of conservative pollsters) describes how to pick out the meaningful events (the signals). Fortunately, for audiobook listeners, there are no statistical minutiae to track. Instead, Silver sticks to big-picture concepts and instructive explanations—for example, the spurious world of “retro-dictions” (predictions of an event issued after the event has occurred). It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that this audiobook will attract fans of MONEYBALL, FREAKONOMICS, and THE TIPPING POINT. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: DECEMBER 2012]