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In a Washington Post op-ed last month, Senator Joseph Lieberman spoke of “horrific human rights abuses perpetrated daily, including the widespread and deliberate use of rape and other sexual violence as weapons of war.” Lauren Wolfe, director of the Women Under Siege Project, which has curated a map plotting instances of sexual violence in Syria, talks with Brooke about trying to check the senator's claim and the difficulty of verifying claims of rape in a war-zone.

The Chieftains - The Stone

(A version of this article appeared on the political science blog The Monkey Cage)

Last week, On the Media did a story about how the figure of 85% of recent college graduates living at home is based on a more or less made up number. But this is not the only statistic about college graduates routinely cited by the media as a sign of the economic apocalypse. In this article, I take on a number that has more foundation in reality, but, taken out of context, makes it sound like the job situation for recent college graduates is hopeless.

The National Archives published the full records of the 1940 census online today. It's the first United States census to be fully digitalized, and contains details, including names, addresses and income levels, of more than 132 million people. Connie Potter, archivist and senior genealogy specialist at the National Archives, says this trove of information brings out the people behind census statistics.

Rob Neyer, national baseball editor for Baseball Nation and former employee of baseball statistics legend Bill James, discusses sabermetrics and how it did or did not change baseball. Dana Stevens, Slate's film critic and co-host of Slate's Culture Gabfest, joins him to discuss "Moneyball." 

In this week's Movie Date podcast, Kristen, Rafer, join a baseball-loving guest in discussing stats movie "Moneyball," starring Brad Pitt. Can a movie about baseball statistics be remotely interesting? Does Kristen's knowledge of the game run deeper than "Bad News Bears"? Does the movie, in the final judgment, satisfy people who aren't number crunchers? To get answers to these questions, you must listen!  

What if there was a systematic method to develop the best baseball team? Eight years ago, Michael Lewis's book "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" exposed how Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s, found a way to turn a team with poor attendance and no money into a rag-tag contender with one of the lowest payrolls in baseball. He did this by using readily available statistics. Since the book was published, the book's influence has not only extended to other baseball teams, but to other sectors. This weekend, a film adaptation is opening in theaters, with Brad Pitt as Billy Beane.

Belinda Luscombe, Time magazine senior editor, talks about the results of the recent Time/Pew survey on marriage that show opinions sharply divided by age and class.

Belinda Luscombe, Time Magazine senior editor, talks about the results of the recent Time/Pew survey on marriage, showing opinions sharply divided by age and class.

New York Times police bureau chief Al Baker discusses the charges against five NYPD officers in the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn of juking the stats to manipulate crime rates. 

Graham Rayman, staff writer for the Village Voice, continues his reports on the NYPD and whether officers were told to distort crime statistics.

Today is tax day. (So go mail in your paperwork or file for an automatic extension, folks.) It's no surprise that today is the day Tea Party activists have chosen to rally, across the country, against what they call, unnecessary government largess. There will be hundreds of small rallies in cities from Walla Walla, Wash. to Niceville, Fla. They are all loosely related to the Tea Party Express, which arrives in Washington, D.C. at 11:00 a.m., revved up after a speech from Sarah Palin in Boston yesterday.

Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology and philosophy visited The Brian Lehrer Show today to talk about her new book The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life. She spoke with guest host Mike Pesca.

Listen to the whole interview:

Here's an excerpt from their conversation:

Mike Pesca: What’s interesting or significant about “uh oh”?

Alison Gopnik: It turns out that “uh oh” is one of the very first things that young children say which is sort of surprising. When you actually look carefully at how they use it, which is what I did when I was in graduate school, it turns out that they’re actually using 'uh oh' to talk about the fact that they’re trying to do something, that they have vision of the world and it's not working out. That’s a very abstract thing for very young babies to be talking about.

Pesca: Maybe it’s overstating it, but your premise is that babies are not only smarter than we thought they were, they may in some ways be smarter than we are. What do you think of that?

Gopnik: Babies and young children are really designed for learning. One of the puzzles about human beings is, why do we have this long period of childhood at all? Why are we immature for so long and dependent on our parents for so long?

One of the ideas that has come out of both evolution and psychology is that we have that protected period so that we can learn all the things that we need to learn before we actually have to put them into action. From that perspective, it makes sense that babies and young children would be the best learning machines in the universe. Then when you actually look at what they can do, especially work we’ve done in the last 10 years, it turns out that they can recognize statistics they can use probabilistic logic, they can do things that the best machine learning programs and scientists can do.

Pesca: Obvious question is, how do you know they can learn statistics? Maybe it's best to talk about the ping pong ball experiment you set up.

Gopnik: This was actually an experiment that my colleague Fei Xu set up. What she did was show babies a box full of mixed up ping pong balls, 80% of them white 20% of them red. Then she showed babies an experiment, either taking all white balls out of the box or all red balls out of the box.

If you’ve got a mixed-up box, both of those sequences are possible, but it's much more probable statistically that you’ll pick out all white balls for an 80% white box and all red balls. In fact, the babies were very surprised. They looked much longer when they saw the experimenter picking out the red balls from the mostly white box. That means that they must have been sensitive to this pretty abstract statistical fact about the sample that you can take from a population.