The Signal and the Noise #1

            For my nonfiction book I will be reading the signal and the noise, by Nate Silver. The reason I am reading this book is because my dad had brought up Nate Silver in a car ride while the two of us were talking about March Madness Brackets. My dad told me that Nate Silver was an ingenious statistician who, among other things, runs a website called 538.com, had predicted all 50 of the state results correctly in the 2012 presidential election, and 49 of the 50 correctly in 2008, he missed Indiana by 1%, but also got all 35 winners of U.S. senate races that year. He had also developed a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to Baseball Prospectus in 2003 and this year he developed a formula that predicts the percent of each team in the tournament to make it to each round (Right image). In 2009 he ranked one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Times magazine. In this book, Nate Silver will examine the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from ever increasing data, and to do so, he looks at a wide variety of fields. I predict that this book will be the most difficult on I have read yet, as whenever my dad gives me a book it is more often than not filled with business jargon, however, I think I will enjoy this book a lot because I am very interested in the field of statistics.