[Babase] Psion Miscoding Issue - JEANNE PLEASE READ

Catherine Markham babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Wed, 13 Apr 2005 11:30:59 -0400


Thanks for the explanation, particularly about the juv samps - that 
makes a lot of sense.  I'll try and get started with the clean-up this 
afternoon.

Catherine

Catherine

Susan Alberts wrote:

> Thanks very much Catherine.
>
> A few observations:
>
> A. Regarding age of juvs that get sampled, I dont think we want a 
> lower age limit. In the list of "errors" catherine sent (samples that 
> took place before 6 months of age), it looks as though most or all 
> cases involve animals being started a few weeks or a month or two 
> early. My hope is that the field team are using their judgement in 
> deciding when to start an infant -- the point of these samples has 
> always been that infants and juvs need to get focal sampled once they 
> start being off their mothers a lot so that we don't lose their IDs.It 
> looks to me that this is what is happening -- some animals are 
> consistently appearing in the sample list early (WUA for instance). I 
> think we should just ask the field team about this and if they 
> sometimes start a kid a bit early, we should let it happen. I can put 
> this on my list of things to talk to them about this summer.
>
> B. Regarding upper limits, I am also not sure that we want to be very 
> strict about this. For instance, looking at Catherine's list of 
> "adults in jpsamps", they fall into 3 categories:
> 1. Snames belong to adult females who are 3 or more years into 
> adulthood. These are clearly errors and need to be tossed, but are a 
> minority in this list (roughly 1/4).
> 2. Snames belong to young males who were sampled as juveniles for a 
> few months after their official TE dates (ie they were sampled as 
> subadults). Because enlargement is difficult to see and we only assess 
> it once a month, this is a conservative error. These constitute most 
> of the "errors" in this category and  we don't want to toss these.
> 3. Snames that belong to young females (MBE, WRA, VEX, VIG, KIW) who 
> were sampled as juveniles for several months after menarche. Again, I 
> am not sure this is a big problem.
>
> Here is ia possible rule of thumb: if the animal is sampled as a juv 
> within one year of attaining Testicular enlargement or menarche, we 
> just accept the sample. Otherwise toss it.
>
> C. In response to Catherine's question about whether we still want to 
> discard samples in the three categories she lists below, I would say 
> YES for the first two types but NO for the third type for 75% of them. 
> Toss only thoses where the sample occurred more than a year after 
> maturity.
>
> D. Clearly the error problem is not as great as it seemed once we 
> accept some post-maturity animals being sampled as juvs for a while.
>
> E. Regarding dates that the errors occurred. Of the ones that we 
> clearly need to consider errors there is not a clear pattern that 
> these happened in the early days. It looks ongoing. I think we need to 
> compile a summary and I talk about it with the team. Especially 
> non-adult females sampled as adult females and males sampled as adult 
> females. We need to get some insight into how to prevent this.
>
> Susan
>
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I wanted to follow-up with the Psion miscoding issues Daphne 
>> mentioned at the BaBase meeting last Friday.  Three types of errors 
>> were discussed:
>> (1) male samples in the fpsamps table (8 out of 15,269 samples)
>> (2) non-adult female samples in the fpsamps table (56 out of 15,269 
>> samples)
>> (3) adults in the jpsamps table (96 out of 8,100 samples)
>>
>> It occurred to me this afternoon that a fourth possible error would 
>> be young baboons (less than 6 months) in the the jpsamps table.  A 
>> total of 81 out of 8,100 samples had this problem.  Note that this 
>> count does not include cases where observation date < (birth + 180 
>> days) if the individual turned 180 days at some point during the 
>> observation month.
>>
>> Attached are two documents.  The Word document provides the queries 
>> that I did following Daphne's notes/instructions to determine the 
>> error counts.  The Excel worksheet lists the errors themselves (it 
>> contains four worksheets, one for each error type).  The observation 
>> date for each record is listed if Susan and Jeanne are still 
>> interested in seeing when these mistakes were made (if I remember 
>> right, you wanted to double check these dates before we moved forward 
>> with the clean-up).
>>
>> Regarding the first three error types, we had decided to remove these 
>> records from BaBase. Does that still sound like a good plan to 
>> everyone?  As for the fourth error type (youngsters less than 6 
>> months in jpsamps), Jeanne pointed out that this is a different sort 
>> of error and not necessarily another case where the records should be 
>> deleted.  Any suggestions of how to handle or do you simply want to 
>> leave these records in the database?
>>
>> Thanks, everyone.
>>
>> Catherine
>>
>> P.S.  I know the attachments won't be archived on the listserv, but 
>> couldn't think of a way to get around it this time with the Excel 
>> spreadsheets.  At least we'll have the email exchange well documented 
>> and I'll eventually include details of any changed/deleted records in 
>> the BaBase correction log.
>>
>>
>> Attachment converted: cisticola:Psion Miscoding Issues.xls 
>> (XLS4/«IC») (0007ADFF)
>> Attachment converted: cisticola:Psion Miscoding Issues.doc 
>> (WDBN/«IC») (0007AE00)
>
>
>


-- 
Catherine Markham
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Princeton University
Phone: (609) 258-6898 
Fax: (609) 258-2712