The City of Knoxville’s Deputy to the Mayor and Chief Policy Officer Dr. William Lyons discusses the book The signal and the noise : why so many predictions fail-- but some don't by Nate Silver. (Recorded January 16, 2013)

Silver is the statistician behind The New York Times' FiveThirtyEight election blog. In his book, Silver examines successful forecasters on the topics of hurricanes, baseball, poker, pro basketball and Capitol Hill.

"Nate Silver is a master of highlighting and simplifying the assumptions that enable our ability to forecast physical, social, political outcomes," says Dr. Lyons. "In this insightful book he notes the importance of human judgment as a valuable supplement to the use of probability-based models to understand and explain some of the most important recent events.”