[Babase] conference call summary 14 July 2004
Stephanie Combes
babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Wed, 14 Jul 2004 17:12:55 -0400
Hi Babasers,
Today we celebrated our mid-July conference call. The fun involved steph
hanging up on everyone at least twice and cursing the conference call gods
for their difficulty. And this is trying WITH directions...can you imagine
without directions??? a truly terrifying thought.
OK - the "meat" of our conference call (yes, we did eventually end up
conferenced together).
1. Karl has been working on the speed-ups, and predicts that he will have
them done by the end of the day. Woohoo!!! I don't know about the rest of
you, but I, your faithful secretary, am VERY excited to see how much faster
the program will go.
2. Sequence orders and cycles: Karl understands this problem, and has
fixed most of the issues, we believe. He just needs to update the latest
version of the program so that I can run all of the fancy new things.
3. Ignore Alex for now.
4. Blank births for immigrant males: to be discussed with Susan. It's
likely that males who didn't get age estimates will be assigned an average
age. So, the birth date blanks won't be permanent.
5. Repstats is part of the tables that have been "converted." We reminded
ourselves that repstats has issues. Both cycstats and repstats are created
from cycles. The rules and codings that are created from cycles need to be
tweaked (see previous episodes, i mean emails, of our conference call
summaries). Karl is aware of this, but hasn't fixed it yet.
6. SO, Karl's order of attack: speedups (today), fix repstats/cycles
issues, begin the conversion of census info (census, demog and members).
Now hopefully those last few tables won't slow the program down
again...just when I was getting excited about less than 24 hour turnaround.
7. At the time of the conference call, duke's login.biology server was
down. Steph alerted the computer gurus upstairs, and the problem seems to
be fixed now.
8. Other: Preliminary discussion of issues involved in integrating and
converting the hormone data (similar issues are likely to arise when the
genetic data are converted also). Issue highlights include blanks, the
amount of data manipulation that occurs in excel before it would hit
foxpro, and how much of the "raw" stuff would go into the database.
Jeanne, Daphne and hormone team will discuss more. This issue will be
revisited at a later date.
9. Just so we're all up to speed: the new database has a "MATURED" table.
It will only include mature animals (i.e. no one gets to have their name
entered/updated into there until they are mature).
That's all for now. We are really stream-lining our calls once I actually
manage to get everyone linked up.
'til next week (JEANNE - GIVE ME THE FARM NUMBER TO CONTACT YOU!!)
-steph