[Babase] new sexskin error_death while ppa
Karl O. Pinc
kop at meme.com
Wed May 14 16:50:34 EDT 2008
On 05/14/2008 02:57:21 PM, kfenn wrote:
> Karl O. Pinc wrote:
>> Death during ppa means that there is no sexual cycle after the
>> conception cycle. Our new rule says that any sexkins
>> measurements after birth belong to the next cycle. When there is
>> no next cycle then there's just no cycle, so the sexskins
>> measurements can't go in.
>>
>> How about this? We change the rule about assignment to a sexual
>> cycle for sexskins so that any sexskins measurements > 0 on or
>> after birth belong to the next cycle, but if it's a 0 measurement
>> then it belongs to the conception cycle.
>>
> / /I don't really feel good about that but it's up to Jeanne. She is
> the cycle guru. To me, Cycling is cycling. Pregnancy is pregnancy.
> Ppa is Ppa. It doesn't seem like we should lump ppa into cycling. I
> think Laurence had gripes about how that turns out in REPSTATS and
> CYCSTATS when the 'cycles' go on forever. But I don't know those
> tables well enough.
It's all about "what is a cycle". Babase has no concept of
"there is no cycle here kind of cycle", so we're left attaching
things to existing cycles.
>
> Is it possible to set a condition that says a sexskin row doesn't
> have to be associated with a row in CYCLES if it falls after a birth
> and is 0....or does it violate basic relational database rules to
> have data in a table that doesn't actually relate to anything?
Well, you could allow such rows, but then they'd be just sexskin
measurements and dates and would not be related to
cycles and hence not related to baboons. This would be
counter-productive. :)
We could make another table for ppa + death sexskin measurements,
but that does not sound very useful either.
We could give up on attaching sexskin measurements to cycles
and just attach them to baboons, but then you'd be left
using CYCSTATS and REPSTATS to attach the measurements to
particular cycles and that would probably do exactly what
I've proposed anyhow. (Although it might make the system
simpler.)
>
>> I suppose we could not record the observations.
>> I guess that depends on the field protocols and when they
>> write down a 0 and when they don't bother.
>>
> As far as I can tell, they always record a sexskin value for every
> female on every census day...unless they can't find the female.
>> I also wonder what was done during the conversion. Did we
>> throw out data in a data-cleanup fit? (pause) No. We
>> didn't have the pregnancy test in the sexual cycle assignment
>> code so all ppa sexskin measurements were assigned to the
>> conception cycle. Right?
>>
> Don't know. This is the first time I'm delving into the sexskin
> tables at all in Babase 2.0. It's a bigger pickle than I would have
> thought for such a small table.
It's always been the red-headed stepchild.
Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
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