[Babase] Re: Agnonisim and grooming errors
Karl O. Pinc
kop at meme.com
Thu Mar 15 10:40:08 EDT 2007
On 03/15/2007 09:02:24 AM, Leah Gerber wrote:
> Susan,
>
> I think Karl is mostly concerned about how to document this for people
> who
> will be using grooming and agonism data. Is it safe to say that prior
> to
> 2007 we will have to assume that grooms are NOT on the true dates? For
>
> agonisms I think we can have an earlier data from which the dates are
> correct.
My concern is that the data be usable. If, for whatever data/
whatever time period, sometimes the date was forced to the
first of the month and sometimes it wasn't then the person
looking at that data _should_ ignore the day information.
To get a reasonable answer they should force all the dates
to the first of the month and analyze things that way.
In which case we may as well force the data to the first
of the month ourselves because the user is surely going
to forget to do it and struggle (somewhat) when they
must do it.
That's pretty much the situation right now. The rules
say that the agonisim (Act = 'A') and grooming
(Act = 'G') data before 1996 must be dated the first
of the month. As a result we get lots of rejected agonism
and grooming data.
If I knew when dates were forced to the first of the
month and when not I could adjust the rules, and
document. I could also forget about the whole thing
and leave the onus on the user, but it seems to me
that we're going to have to give the user some
guidance so that the data's actually usable.
Once we know what we're going to say it's easy to put
rules in the database to ensure we don't inadvertently
break things.
(Leah, FYI when looking at the conversion
errors. The rules as of the last conversion,
v10, make no exceptions for psion data. I've fixed this.)
>
> Susan Alberts <alberts at duke.edu>
> Sent by: babase-bounces at eeblistserv.princeton.edu
> 03/15/2007 09:59 AM
> Please respond to
> The Baboon Database Project <babase at eeblistserv.princeton.edu>
>
>
> To
> The Baboon Database Project <babase at eeblistserv.princeton.edu>
> cc
>
> Subject
> [Babase] Re: Agnonisim and grooming errors
>
>
>
>
>
>
> I think I am a little lost in this discussion regarding what we need
> to accomplish. Please correct me on the below points or clarify as
> needed. Sorry that I didn't retain the earlier text but I kept
> getting confused about where to snip and what to keep.
>
> Karl provided the tables showing the distribution of ags and
> groomings before 1995. The distribution is very odd, with most
> entries occurring on 1st of the month. Question is, why is this?
>
> Part of the answer, we definitely know, is that during some periods
> of time, all agonism and grooming data were entered only on first of
> month, regardless of when they actually were recorded.
>
> What we DON'T know is when this rule was and wasn't followed for both
> types of data. So, we can't check to see whether the odd distribution
> of days for G and A data correspond to our actual rules for when we
> used first of month only versus exact date.
>
> What Karl's concern is (I think) is that the data are accurately
> transferred from foxpro to postgresql. The weird distribution of
> dates makes him concerned that there is a data transfer error that is
> being obscured by our weird data entry patterns. karls, is this
> correct?
>
> I doubt that we can accurately reconstruct from our memory the years
> during which different types of data entry (with respect to which
> dates were used in A and G records) were done, unless the records at
> Princeton on this are very good. Tabby and Jeanne, what do you think?
>
> One brute force way to resolve the question is to do the query that
> Karl, in Foxpro, did but break it down year by year and see if we can
> identify years where different rules were followed. A even more brute
> force way would be to just query on all "A" acts and order by date,
> in Foxpro, and then do the same in postgresql. I just did this in
> postgresql and found it instructive going through a couple years but
> that will be very tedious. It does seem to be the case, from a VERY
> quick glance, that whatever rules we implemented were not
> consistently followed all the time.
>
> In order to decide how to proceed we need to decide how important it
> is to reconstruct the rules of data entry over the years. It would
> obviously be good to have this record. On the other hand, what is at
> stake if we don't do this? I need to understand this.
>
> Susan
>
>
> --
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Susan Alberts, Department of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338,
> Durham NC 27708
> 919-660-7272 (phone), 919-660-7293 (FAX)
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Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
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