In Reading the Room, renowned systems psychologist and family therapist David Kantor applies his theory of structural dynamics to help leaders and coaches understand and improve communication within their teams. He helps readers understand how and why they and their teams communicate differently...

Stata uses numeric quantities as logical values, and provides logical operators (&, |, ~) to build expressions from basic entities. These operators can be regarded as faulty when missing values are present in the operands. In this context, missing is equivalent to true, which is often not the...

Good graphics often exploit a simple graphical design repeated for different parts of the data, which Edward R. Tufte dubbed the use of small multiples. In Stata small multiples are supported for different subsets of the data through by() or over() options of many graph commands: users can...

The time variable is most commonly plotted precisely as recorded in graphs showing change over time. However, if the most interesting part of the graph is very crowded, then transforming the time axis to give that part more space is worth consideration. In this column, I discuss logarithmic...

Conventions about what information goes on each axis of a two-way plot are precisely that, conventions. This column discusses—historically, syntactically, and by example-the idea that flouting convention in various ways can lead to small but useful improvements in graph display. Putting y-axis...