[Babase] Questions re. maturity in ranker

Susan Alberts alberts at duke.edu
Thu Sep 28 15:45:32 EDT 2006


See below for replies.

On Sep 28, 2006, at 2:47 PM, Jun Yang wrote:

> 1. The current definition of "adult famales" (for ranking) in the  
> rnktypes table
> compares a matured (date) column with the ranking period to see if the
> famale is an adult. Here is the SQL query in rnktypes.query:
>
> SELECT DISTINCT biograph.sname FROM biograph, members WHERE
> biograph.sname = members.sname AND members.date >= %s AND members.date
> <= %f AND members.grp = %g AND biograph.sex = "F" AND
> NOT(EMPTY(matured)) AND matured <= %f
>
> However, this matured date information now resides in a different  
> table,
> correct? So we should go ahead and revise the query?

You are correct, the matured date information now resides in MATUREDATES

>
> 2. The ranker code (probably based on the old schema too) also reads
> out a matured
> column in biograph table. However, it seems that this information is
> not used anywhere
> in the code. Instead, there are rules for assigning default ranks to
> famales depending on
> whether they are older than 3 or not. Should we (1) just ignore
> matured (just in code,
> not in the SQL query in rnktypes), or (2) use matured instead of the
> 3-year-old threshold
> to in the rules for assigning default ranks to females?

We no longer need default ranks to be assigned. The assignment of  
default ranks can be dropped.

What we may not have told you is that there is a feature that we want  
to be incorporated into the new ranker that was not part of the old  
ranker.

Currently we rank all females, whether adult or not, in a linear  
fashion according to the conflicts they win and lose. Often, when  
females are maturing, they rank among adult females even when they  
are still juvenile. We want to be able to generate adult female ranks  
by extracting all females that are past maturity and retaining the  
same relative ranking among them once the juvs are removed, but  
renumbering the ranks so that there are no gaps in the numbering.

I know that this interfaces with the rnktypes but I don't recall how  
just at the moment. Do we need a quick conference call to clarify?

Susan

-----------------------------------------------
Susan Alberts, Dept. Biology, Duke University, Durham NC 27708. Phone  
919-660-7272, Fax 919-660-7293. alberts at duke.edu





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