Changing the aspect ratio of a scatter plot in STATA

This took me forever to figure out, because I kept searching for terms like "change width" which directs you to line width code. Finally I found a snippet of code for xsize and searching that led me to this handy tutorial on aspect ratios and other fun scatter plot techniques.

My code:

twoway (scatter mathach newid, ylabel(-10(5)35)) (scatter meanmathach newid, connect(1) clcolor(red) sort), ysize(3) xsize(5)

Per the bolded code, the resulting graph will be produced in a 3x5 aspect ratio.

On focused dataframes in ArcMap

Q: Why can't I add a north arrow/legend/scale bar to my map?

A: Are you in the layout view (vs. the data view, often the default view)?

Q: Yes, of course. I didn't just install the software this year, you know.

A: OK, I can see I'm dealing with a non-novice here. Let's try something else. Is your layer focused?

Q: Um... it's clear to me, so I guess it's in focus?

A: No, I mean that if you're looking at the data view, is there a diagonal line border around it?

Q: Yes...

A: OK, that means you have that layer focused. It allows you to edit the layer in the layout view. See this thread for more info. To un-focus the layer, hit this button on your toolbar:

For me, it's located a few lines below the word "Selection", but as always the location of the buttons depends on where you have your toolbars anchored.

Graphing in R

Frank McCown outlines a quick and simple intro exercise for graphing in R:

http://www.harding.edu/fmccown/r/

A few notes to keep in mind as you run through the exercise:

• If you need a refresher on creating tab delimited files, ehow has you covered:
http://www.ehow.com/how_5079116_create-tab-delimited-files.html
• If you save your tabbed file with .tab per the ehow instructions, make sure to edit Frank's code:
autos_data <- read.table("C:/R/autos.dat", header=T, sep="\t")
#becomes
autos_data <- read.table("C:/R/autos.tab", header=T, sep="\t"
• Make sure you're using forward slashes when you set the file path! This post discusses that pesky character string error.