Drs. Harrell and O'Keefe,
Thank you for your suggestions. Regarding your comments about the content of the paper, I respectfully disagree that "categorizing continuous variables is a fundamental violation of statistical graphics," nor are you to assume that all categorizations are arbitrary. In any case, the discussion section of our paper contains text acknowledging that contour plots are a preferred option when the continuity of variables is desired to be preserved. The hexagons we proposed seem, at first glance, to be "unnecessarily complex" but they fulfill properties that none of the other considered alternatives do (Table 1 and Figure 1 in paper and Figure 6 using Trellis). It is unfortunate that the comments from Dr. O'Keefe were based on a press release and not on the manuscript itself. I apologize for the press release implying no graphical progress in the 20th century. Many of his points are addressed in the manuscript. Regarding the extension of the methods to outcomes taking negative values (e.g., changes in markers), the use of two colors is an alternative but the plotting of 0.5*[1+(outcome/max(|outcome|)] and using the option E of Figure 1 in the paper will result in negative and positive values having opposite topology (much as the contrast of negative/positive bars in the unidimensional case). I will be happy to expedite a reprint to Dr. O'Keefe. If you so desire, please email the address to which it should be sent. Although it is at odds with your beliefs, University staff working on licensing and technology transfer believe that a patent may be a vehicle to achieve a wide use. The audience of the proposed methods would be the end users who are not sophisticated programmers and, therefore, the hope is that it would be available in widely used software which is not the case of the high end software (e.g., R). The proposed graph of 2D equiponderant display of two predictors is just a display procedure, not an inferential tool. The sophisticated analyst has little or no need for the proposed method. It does overcome the pitfalls of 3D bar graphs and, therefore, has the potential of improving the way we communicate our findings. Needless to say, were the predictions of Dr. Harrell to be on target, we will change course as the staff working on the licensing have planned from the start. We will be happy to share the code we wrote to produce the figures in The American Statistician paper with individuals wanting to use the software for academic purposes. Please send request for it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] In summary, our idea is a simple one (one that I refer as needing only 8th grade geometry) and it is its simplicity which has been fun to peruse. Alvaro Muņoz ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help