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There's a strand of the data viz world that argues that everything could be a bar chart. That's possibly true but also possibly a world without joy.
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Amanda Cox
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We are more likely to be swayed by a single person who testifies with passion than by a bar chart containing data compiled from thousands of people.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson (Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization)
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Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the world is intelligible. The stones are wet and mossy and in the crevices are black toads. A big door bars the entrance to the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with bat dung. The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but there is an enameled sign on it, in perfect condition, which says: “Be sure to close the door.” Why close the door? I can’t make it out. I look again at the sign but it is removed; in it’s place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my artificial eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting. In the corner of the room I see an iron bedstead and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse from the bed and absent mindedly throws it out the window. She returns to the huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve and one by one the continents slide into the sea; only the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography. I lean out the window and the Eiffle Tower is fizzing champagne; it is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace. The sewers are gurgling furiously. There are nothing but roofs everywhere, laid out with execrable geometric cunning.
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Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1))
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People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly un-charted territory—whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the "fag hag" label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are -patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our-parents or schools or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends' tricks and tricks' bar friends and gal pals and companions "in the life," queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from many straight people. Who among us would give them up?
Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room. (In some circles this is a common party sport already.) You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends.
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Michael Warner (The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life)
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Well, Gordon assigned me to write a major piece of software for the Apple Macintosh. Financial spreadsheet, accounting, that sort of thing, powerful, easy to use, lots of graphics. I asked him exactly what he wanted in it, and he just said, ‘Everything. I want the top piece of all-singing, all-dancing business software for that machine.’ And being of a slightly whimsical turn of mind I took him literally. “You see, a pattern of numbers can represent anything you like, can be used to map any surface, or modulate any dynamic process—and so on. And any set of company accounts are, in the end, just a pattern of numbers. So I sat down and wrote a program that’ll take those numbers and do what you like with them. If you just want a bar graph it’ll do them as a bar graph, if you want them as a pie chart or scatter graph it’ll do them as a pie chart or scatter graph. If you want dancing girls jumping out of the pie chart in order to distract attention from the figures the pie chart actually represents, then the program will do that as well. Or you can turn your figures into, for instance, a flock of seagulls, and the formation they fly in and the way in which the wings of each gull beat will be determined by the performance of each division of your company. Great for producing animated corporate logos that actually mean something. “But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your company accounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well. Well, I thought it was silly. The corporate world went bananas over it.
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Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently #1))
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As long as she lived Stephen never forgot her first impressions of the bar known as Alec's—that meeting-place of the most miserable of all those who comprised the miserable army. That merciless, drug-dealing, death-dealing haunt to which flocked the battered remnants of men whom their fellow-men had at last stamped under; who, despised of the world, must despise themselves beyond all hope, it seemed, of salvation. There they sat, closely herded together at the tables, creatures shabby yet tawdry, timid yet defiant—and their eyes, Stephen never forgot their eyes, those haunted, tormented eyes of the invert.
Of all ages, all degrees of despondency, all grades of mental and physical ill-being, they must yet laugh shrilly from time to time, must yet tap their feet to the rhythm of music, must yet dance together in response to the band—and that dance seemed the Dance of Death to Stephen. On more than one hand was a large, ornate ring, on more than one wrist a conspicuous bracelet; they wore jewellery that might only be worn by these men when they thus gathered together. At Alec's they could dare to give way to such tastes—what was left of themselves they became at Alec's.
Bereft of all social dignity, of all social charts contrived for man's guidance, of the fellowship that by right divine should belong to each breathing, living creature; abhorred, spat upon, from their earliest days the prey to a ceaseless persecution, they were now even lower than their enemies knew, and more hopeless than the veriest dregs of creation. For since all that to many of them had seemed fine, a fine selfless and at times even noble emotion, had been covered with shame, called unholy and vile, so gradually they themselves had sunk down to the level upon which the world placed their emotions. And looking with abhorrence upon these men, drink-sodden, doped as were only too many, Stephen yet felt that some terrifying thing stalked abroad in that unhappy room at Alec's; terrifying because if there were a God His anger must rise at such vast injustice. More pitiful even than her lot was theirs, and because of them mighty should be the world's reckoning.
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Radclyffe Hall (The Well of Loneliness)
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Loomis was not any easier a father than he was a husband. He set the bar very high when it came to his three sons. After he cashed out of Bonbright, he awarded each of the three boys a substantial share of their inheritance - roughly $1 million - on the theory that it was never too early to begin charting one's own course. The youngest, Henry, was only fourteen when he was given complete financial independence.
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Jennet Conant (Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II)
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If the market repeatedly tests a trend line many times in a relatively small number of bars and the market cannot drift far from that trend line, then either of two things will likely happen. Most of the time, the market will break through the trend line and attempt to reverse the trend. However, sometimes the market does the opposite and moves quickly away from the trend line as traders give up trying to break through it. The trend then accelerates rather than reverses.
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Al Brooks (Trading Price Action Trends: Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader (Wiley Trading Book 540))
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When trading countertrend against a strong trend, it is imperative to wait for the signal bar to close before placing your order, and then only enter on a stop at one tick beyond the bar in the direction of your trade (if you are buying, buy at one tick above the high of the prior bar on a stop).
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Al Brooks (Trading Price Action Trends: Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader (Wiley Trading Book 540))
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Along the bottom of each chart, the x-axis, the doctors plotted the number of ACEs that patients had experienced. Along the y-axis, they indicated the prevalence of a specific undesirable outcome: obesity, depression, early sexual activity, history of smoking, and so on. On each chart, the bars rose steadily and consistently from left (0 ACEs) to right (more than 7 ACEs). Compared to people with no history of ACEs, people with ACE scores of 4 or higher were twice as likely to smoke, seven times more likely to be alcoholics, and seven times more likely to have had sex before age fifteen. They were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with cancer, twice as likely to have heart disease, twice as likely to have liver disease, four times as likely to suffer from emphysema or chronic bronchitis.
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Paul Tough (How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character)
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The Path of the 99% Purely, statistically speaking (and nothing personal intended), it is almost certain you won’t make an investment in a franchise either. You will probably complain about the way things are, dream about what could be, take a brief stand for yourself by declaring, “I am tired placing my future in the hands of others. Now it’s my turn!” Then you’ll Google franchise opportunities, visit franchisor homepages, gather stacks of franchisor brochures, research companies, talk to people and professionals you trust, and have conversations with franchisors. You’ll feel proactive. You’ll tell your friends you’re considering buying a business. Chances are they thought about it, too. Some will be happy for you, some will be jealous, some will be afraid for you. Virtually everyone will share their strong opinions with you. You’ll dream about what it would be like to be your own boss. You’ll think about your customers and employees. You’ll make clever little charts such as the T Bar, where you neatly list all the pros on the left side of the page, balanced by the cons on the right side. Then the time will come to make a decision. Fear, doubt, and negative self-chatter (yours, your spouse’s, your kids’, your parents,’ your friends’, and your hired professionals’) will kick into high gear. Eventually, you probably will make a fear-based “no” decision, backed by the logic of your neatly listed cons. “The business has fatal flaws,” you think, “Employee turnover is too high. Competition is too fierce. The business is too risky. Sure, it may work in some areas, but everyone knows our town is different.” And with everything going on in your life, the timing couldn’t be worse. Yes, you are being completely responsible with your resources. You didn’t work this hard and long and sacrifice this much to lose what you’ve earned and saved. Moving forward with a franchise would put your family in danger. If you leave your company, you will lose your insurance benefits and 401(k). What if someone in your family had to go to hospital? How would you survive without insurance? Plus, your industry is changing so fast, in a few years your expertise would be obsolete and it would be impossible for you to regain entry if your business didn’t make it. Certainly almost every reasonable person armed with the same research and faced with the same personal challenges you have would naturally come to the same conclusion. And you are right. 99 percent do.
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Joe Mathews (Street Smart Franchising)
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In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker calculates the average homicide rate among eight primitive societies, arriving at an alarming 14 per cent. This figure appeared in respected journals like Science and was endlessly regurgitated by newspapers and on TV. When other scientists took a look at his source material, however, they discovered that Pinker mixed up some things. This may get a little technical, but we need to understand where he went wrong. The question we want to answer is: which peoples still hunting and gathering today are representative of how humans lived 50,000 years ago? After all, we were nomads for 95 per cent of human history, roving the world in small, relatively egalitarian groups. Pinker chose to focus almost exclusively on hybrid cultures. These are people who hunt and gather, but who also ride horses or live together in settlements or engage in farming on the side. Now these activities are all relatively recent. Humans didn’t start farming until 10,000 years ago and horses weren’t domesticated until 5,000 years ago. If you want to figure out how our distant ancestors lived 50,000 years ago, it doesn’t make sense to extrapolate from people who keep horses and tend vegetable plots. But even if we get on board with Pinker’s methods, the data is problematic. According to the psychologist, 30 per cent of deaths among the Aché in Paraguay (tribe 1 on his list) and 21 per cent of deaths among the Hiwi in Venezuela and Colombia (tribe 3) are attributable to warfare. These people are out for blood, it would seem. The anthropologist Douglas Fry was sceptical, however. Reviewing the original sources, he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorised as Aché ‘war mortality’ actually concerned a tribe member listed as ‘shot by Paraguayan’. The Aché were in fact not killing each other, but being ‘relentlessly pursued by slave traders and attacked by Paraguayan frontiersmen’, reads the original source, whereas they themselves ‘desire a peaceful relationship with their more powerful neighbors’. It was the same with the Hiwi. All the men, women and children enumerated by Pinker as war deaths were murdered in 1968 by local cattle ranchers.40 There go the iron-clad homicide rates. Far from habitually slaughtering one another, these nomadic foragers were the victims of ‘civilised’ farmers wielding advanced weaponry. ‘Bar charts and numeric tables depicting percentages […] convey an air of scientific objectivity,’ Fry writes. ‘But in this case it is all an illusion.
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Rutger Bregman (Humankind: A Hopeful History)
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Pier House Resort, a magnificent place that likes to advertise its address as “the corner of Duval Street and the Gulf of Mexico.” On Saturday evening we went into the legendary Chart Room Bar for cocktails
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Bill Mason (Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief)
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The best representation of automation test execution scheduling is possible through Bar Charts when multiple Automation Testers are involved in the test project.
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Narayanan Palani (Software Automation Testing Secrets Revealed: Revised Edition - Part 1)
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Trends create a sense of certainty and urgency, and trading ranges leave traders feeling confused about where the market will go next.
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Al Brooks (Trading Price Action Trends: Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader (Wiley Trading Book 540))
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you cannot make a living as a trader unless you are willing to take losses. Remember, a major league baseball hitter who fails 70 percent of the time is considered to be a superstar and makes millions off that other 30 percent.
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Al Brooks (Trading Price Action Trading Ranges: Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader)
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It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led...
Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined.
For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth."
He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag...
His conditioning was clearly off the charts, and I'm not talking about the physical aspect alone. Being a physical specimen is one thing, but it takes so much more energy to stay mentally prepared enough to arrive every day at a place like Air Assault School on a mission to dominate. The fact that he was able to do that told me it couldn't possibly have been a one-time thing. It had to be the result of countless lonely hours in the gym, on the trails, and in the books. Most of his work was hidden, but it is within that unseen work that self-leaders are made. I suspect the reason he was capable of exceeding any and all standards consistently was because he was dedicated at a level most people cannot fathom in order to stay ready for any and all opportunities. p237
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David Goggins (Never Finished)
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As a trader, I see everything in shades of gray and am constantly thinking in terms of probabilities. If a pattern is setting up and it is not perfect but it is reasonably similar to a reliable setup, it will likely behave similarly as well. Close is usually close enough.
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Al Brooks (Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar: The Technical Analysis of Price Action for the Serious Trader)
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Price action is far more important than any
other information, and if you sacrifice some of what it is telling you to gain
information from something else, you are likely making a bad decision.
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Al Brooks (Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar: The Technical Analysis of Price Action for the Serious Trader)
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Price action is far more important than any other information, and if you sacrifice some of what it is telling you to gain information from something else, you are likely making a bad decision.
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Al Brooks (Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar: The Technical Analysis of Price Action for the Serious Trader)
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A further subtlety of a histogram which distinguishes it from the bar chart is that the widths of its bars (which correspond to the class intervals) need not all be the same.
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Alan Graham (Statistics: A complete introduction: Teach Yourself)
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CHOCOLATE OVERLOAD COOKIE BARS Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. FOR THE CRUST: 1½ cups flour ¼ cup cocoa powder ¾ cup sugar ¾ cup softened butter (1½ sticks) Mix the dry ingredients together and then cut in the softened butter. (You can also do this in a food processor with a steel blade, using chilled butter that’s been cut into chunks.) Spread the mixture out in the bottom of a greased 9-inch by 13-inch cake pan and press it down with a spatula. Bake at 350 degrees F. for 15 minutes. (Don’t shut off the oven—you’ll need it for the second step.) FOR THE FILLING: 2 eight-ounce packages softened cream cheese (the block type, not the whipped type) 1 cup mayonnaise 1 cup sugar 4 eggs 2 cups melted chocolate chips (12-ounce bag) 2 teaspoons vanilla You can do this by hand, but it’s a lot easier with an electric mixer. Soften the cream cheese and beat it with the mayonnaise until it’s smooth. Gradually add the sugar. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition. Melt the chocolate chips in a microwave-safe bowl for 3 minutes. (Chocolate chips may retain their shape, so stir them to see if they’re melted.) Let them cool for a minute or two, and then gradually add the chocolate, mixing thoroughly. Then mix in the vanilla. Pour the finished mixture on top of the crust you just baked. Bake at 350 degrees F. for 35 minutes. Let it cool to room temperature and then chill for at least 4 hours. Cut into brownie-size bars. Garnish the bars with strawberries, whipped cream, or powdered sugar if desired. Baking Conversion Chart These conversions are approximate, but they’ll work just fine for Hannah Swensen’s recipes.
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Joanne Fluke (Peach Cobbler Murder (Hannah Swensen, #7))
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Model visual #5: horizontal stacked bars Figure 6.5 shows the results of survey questions on relative priorities in a developing nation. This is a great deal of information, but due to strategic emphasizing and de-emphasizing of components, it does not become visually overwhelming. Figure 6.5 Horizontal stacked bars Stacked bars make sense here given the nature of what is being graphed: top priority (in first position in the darkest shade), 2nd priority (in second position and a slightly lighter shade of the same color), and 3rd priority (in third position and an even lighter shade of the same color). Orienting the chart horizontally means the category names along the left are easy to read in horizontal text.
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Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic (Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals)
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Creating Lenses with Excel If you wish to use Excel radar diagrams to simulate lenses, follow these steps: Open a new Excel spreadsheet. Type the word Headers in cell A1 Type the word Score in cell B1 Type your chosen header from cell A2 downwards. Use as many headers as you like. Usually 6 or 8 headers are sufficient. Fill the corresponding B cells with zeros Select cells A1 through B… (as far as you went) Click the Chart Wizard button (the one that has a tiny bar chart on it), or use the menu - Chart – Chart Type Select the radar type from among the options in the left side of the action box. Click on the Filled Radar chart sub-type on the upper right part of the box. Click Next Make sure that the series choice is Columns. Ignore the way the chart may look in the example. It often looks too small there, but it comes out all right. Click next Add the chart title, if you want. And clear the "show legend" box in the legend tab. Click finish. Click OK to put the chart on the same sheet. When you are with your client, you can type in his chosen scores against each header in the list (replacing the zeros). Excel will automatically update the chart. If needed, you can print the charts using the file-print
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Shmaya David (15 Minutes Coaching: A "Quick & Dirty" Method for Coaches and Managers to Get Clarity About Any Problem (Tools for Success))
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Horizontal bar chart If I had to pick a single go-to graph for categorical data, it would be the horizontal bar chart, which flips the vertical version on its side. Why? Because it is extremely easy to read. The horizontal bar chart is especially useful if your category names are long, as the text is written from left to right, as most audiences read, making your graph legible for your audience.
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Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic (Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals)
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Sometimes bar charts are avoided because they are common. This is a mistake. Rather, bar charts should be leveraged because they are common, as this means less of a learning curve for your audience.
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Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic (Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals)
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Doctors experience death more than any other professionals do—more than firefighters, policemen, or soldiers—yet we always think about death as a very concrete construct. It’s a box on a checklist, a red bar on a chart, or an outcome in a clinical trial. Death is secular, sterile, and singular—and, unlike many other things in medicine, incredibly binary. So it was interesting to think of death more as a concept and a process than as a fact and an endpoint.
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Haider Warraich (Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life)
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Let’s call it the theory of receptivity. It’s the idea, often cited by young people in their case against the relevance of even marginally older people, that one’s taste—in music or film, literature or fine cuisine—petrifies during life’s peak of happiness or nadir of misery. Or maybe it’s not that simple. Maybe a subtler spike on the charts—upward, downward, anomalous points in between—might qualify, so long as it’s formative. Let’s say that receptivity, anyway, can be tied to the moments when, for whatever reason, a person opens herself to the things we can all agree make life worth living in a new and definitive way, whether curiosity has her chasing down the world’s pleasures, or the world has torn a strip from her, exposing raw surface area to the winds. During these moments—sleepaway camp right before your bar mitzvah; the year you were captain of the hockey team and the baseball team; the time after you got your license and before you totaled the Volvo—you are closely attuned to your culture, reaching out and in to consume it in vast quantities. When this period ends, your senses seal off what they have absorbed and build a sensibility that becomes, for better or worse, definitive: This is the stuff I like. These films/books/artists tell the story of who I am. There is no better-suited hairstyle. This is as good/bad as it gets for me. The theory suggests that we only get a couple of these moments in life, a couple of sound tracks, and that timing is paramount. If you came of age in the early eighties, for instance, you may hold a relatively shitty cultural moment to be the last time anything was any good simply because that was the last time you were open and engaged with what was happening around you, the last time you felt anything really—appallingly—deeply. I worry about this theory. I worry because it suggests that receptivity is tied closely to youth, and firsts, and also because as with many otherwise highly rejectable theories—Reaganomics and communism come to mind—there is that insolent nub of truth in it.
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Michelle Orange (This Is Running for Your Life: Essays)