Thanks to Kit Baum, a revised -beamplot- package
is now available from SSC. Stata 9 is required.
-beamplot- is based on a standard graphical
metaphor, the idea that the mean is the centre
of gravity of a distribution. Thus one display
possible shows data points resting on a horizontal
beam with a fulcrum at the mean.
What requires Stata 9 is use of cunning StataCorp
code for drawing arrows, as the fulcrum is an arrow
with only a big arrowhead visible. (Drawing a triangle
symbol just doesn't work in the generality you want,
as it appears impossible to _ensure_ that it
is always where you want it: being slightly
too high or too low is certainly disconcerting
to the user and not easy to overlook.)
-beamplot- relaxes the metaphor to some extent
by allowing you to choose other summaries,
such as the median or geometric mean, so long
as you have access to an -egen- function that
will calculate them. But I've stuck with
horizontal displays. (-stripplot- will do
vertical displays, as indeed will -dotplot-.)
In this version I've fixed a bug that only
bit me, I hope, and added some minor handles
to the code and some interesting references
to the help. Users of -beamplot- are kindly
requested to glance at the references and send
me extra references that spring to mind.
Nick
[email protected]
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