[Babase] Group 99
Karl O. Pinc
babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Tue, 03 May 2005 23:18:02 +0000
On 05/03/2005 04:46:13 PM, Susan Alberts wrote:
>> 9 is 'unknown'
>> 10 is 'alone'
>>
>> 99 was used (almost?) exclusively before BABASE, when individual
>> males were getting their own personal number for a while when they
>> were alone. In the groups table, 99 is indicated 'individual
>> males'. It would seem that eventually, 99's would go to 10 after we
>> confirmed that this was appropriate. The other numbers for
>> individual males must have been converted to 10 when BABASE was
>> created as no current entries in census or members has numbers
>> between 13 and 99 (catherine just checked).
>>
>
> I agree that we should abandon 99. I just re-checked all my original
> males files and confirmed that I never used 99, only 9, and I always
> assigned a male zero for alone - in my database, there was only a
> single integer value allowed for wherever the male was. So if it was
> used before babase it must have come from somewhere other than my
> files. And given that none of us remembers or quite understands it,
> we should jettison it.
I probably picked 99 so that we could continue to make a distinction
between your codings and the '9' coding that we did know the meaning
of. It would have been something that happened when we first
converted to babase.
(You wouldn't want to go through the "old" census codes I made
up from your data and get rid of the duds there too?)
Karl <kop@meme.com>
Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
-- Robert A. Heinlein