Please click http://www.meetup.com/Undeniably-Non-Fiction-Book-Club/polls/722662/ to take the poll to decide the book choice for April.  I will close the poll at the end of the day this coming Friday. Please take the poll even if you don't like either of these options or can't attend, there are voting options for both those situations.

Thanks to those who attended the discussion of How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough.  The average rating that the book got on our 5 point scale was 4.1, which put it in a tie for 3rd place among the 14 books we have rated. In general, people agreed with Tough's argument that the education system is too focused on cognitive skills and needs to focus more on "character" skills such as conscientiousness and delaying gratification.  I felt that there was not much commonality among the critiques of the book.  We perhaps had the most spirited discussion around how to set expectations for middle/low students and that you want to push them while not giving them completely unrealistic goals.  This tied into a discussion of community colleges vs. four year institutions and how to bring more respect to traditional blue collar/trade vocations.

The results of our vote on the books at the meeting are posted online. Here are the finalists for the April meeting:

Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein
Knowledge is a big subject, says Stuart Firestein, but ignorance is a bigger one. And it is ignorance--not knowledge--that is the true engine of science. Most of us have a false impression of science as a surefire, deliberate, step-by-step method for finding things out and getting things done. In fact, says Firestein, more often than not, science is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, and there may not be a cat in the room. The process is more hit-or-miss than you might imagine, with much stumbling and groping after phantoms. But it is exactly this not knowing, this puzzling over thorny questions or inexplicable data, that gets researchers into the lab early and keeps them there late, the thing that propels them, the very driving force of science. Firestein shows how scientists use ignorance to program their work, to identify what should be done, what the next steps are, and where they should concentrate their energies. And he includes a catalog of how scientists use ignorance, consciously or unconsciously--a remarkable range of approaches that includes looking for connections to other research, revisiting apparently settled questions, using small questions to get at big ones, and tackling a problem simply out of curiosity. The book concludes with four case histories--in cognitive psychology, theoretical physics, astronomy, and neuroscience--that provide a feel for the nuts and bolts of ignorance, the day-to-day battle that goes on in scientific laboratories and in scientific minds with questions that range from the quotidian to the profound. Turning the conventional idea about science on its head, Ignorance opens a new window on the true nature of research. It is a must-read for anyone curious about science.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't by Nate Silver
People love statistics. Statistics, however, do not always love them back. The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver's brilliant and elegant tour of the modern science-slash-art of forecasting, shows what happens when Big Data meets human nature. Baseball, weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, economics, and polling: In all of these areas, Silver finds predictions gone bad thanks to biases, vested interests, and overconfidence. But he also shows where sophisticated forecasters have gotten it right (and occasionally been ignored to boot). In today's metrics-saturated world, Silver's book is a timely and readable reminder that statistics are only as good as the people who wield them.