Creating a colored scatter plot

Question

I'm taking this data vis class in which the professor has us basically copying and pasting code instead of teaching us anything. I'm trying to figure out how to create a scatter plot which illustrates the strike rate and civilian casualties of drone warfare.
The problem I'm having is how to use a variable from the data to dictate the color of a data point. I want to minimally use the "status" (dead/2, alive/1) to color the points. It'd be ideal if I could figure out how to color the points based upon the drone target's nationality, too, since I have data for that. Anyway, this is what I have so far. It creates the points, but not the colors. I'd like to know how to create the colors.

symbols(killVStarget$name, killVStarget$strikes, 
        circles=sqrt(killVStarget$casualties), 
        col=ifelse(killVStarget$status==2, "red", "black"), cex=0.15)

I imported the data from a .csv file. Here are the first 10 entries copied from excel:

name                   nationality  status  strikes  casualties
baitullah mehsud       pakistani    2       7        164
qari hussain           pakistani    2       6        128
abu ubaidah al masri   pakistani    2       3        120
mullah sangeen zadran  pakistani    2       3        108
ayman al-zawahiri      pakistani    1       2        105
sirajudin haqqani      pakistani    1       5        82
hakimullah mehsud      pakistani    2       5        68
sadiq noor             pakistani    2       4        57
said al-shihri         yemeni       2       4        57

reproducible example (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great--reproducible-example) — Mateusz1981, Oct 12 '15 at 06:26
I'm using an excel spreadsheet imported with row headings (target_name, strikes, casualties, nationality, status). — Smeaux, Oct 12 '15 at 13:26

Mateusz1981 · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-12T13:54:30.320

df <- data.frame(name =  c("baitullah mehsud    pakistani", "qari hussain pakistani", "abu ubaidah al masri    pakistani", "mullah sangeen zadran   pakistani",
                           "ayman al-zawahiri   pakistani", "sirajudin haqqani   pakistani", "hakimullah mehsud   pakistani", "sadiq noor  pakistani",
                           "said al-shihri  yemeni "), strikes = c(7, 6, 3, 3, 2, 5, 5, 4, 4), status = c(2, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2),
                           casualities = c(164, 128, 120, 108, 105, 82, 68, 57, 57)
                           ) 



library(ggplot2)
 ggplot(aes(x = name, y = strikes, size = casualities, color = factor(status)), data = df) + geom_point()

ggplot(aes(x = strikes, y = name, size = casualities, color = factor(status)), data = df) + geom_point()

I would swap `name` and `strikes` on the x and y-axis. This prevents the overlapping labels on the x-axis without having to rotate them (making them hard to read). — Paul Hiemstra, Oct 12 '15 at 13:49

Creating a colored scatter plot

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