[Babase] Checking dates against statdate

Susan Alberts babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Wed, 27 Oct 2004 13:32:29 +0300


Hi Karl,

I think you are still waiting on a reply on this, am I right? I think 
Daphne needs to answer the first question... unless I missed it, 
sorry.

>I know I can't check sexual cycle information against statdate
>until after the animal is dead, but can I check rankdate
>and interaction date to be sure they don't occur after the
>statdate or can I only do this after the individual is dead?
>In other words, do you always enter the census before the
>interactions and before you do the ranking?


Daphne?

>
>As you can see I'm still worried that waiting to check
>statdate until the individual is dead will miss catching
>bogus dates, like reversing month and day, etc., which
>may be 'valid' by the time the individual dies.  Regardless
>who wants to wait that long to catch errors?
>
>While we're at it, how about the point sample dates?
>I don't know how much checking I'll really do on the
>point sample stuff, because it's perfect and all that
>having already been checked by the Psion, but I'm
>curious anyhow.


Sorry, I am not really sure what the question is on the Psion dates. 
Are you asking whether they should be included in integrity checks? I 
think it is possible that someone could manually edit the point 
samples and mess up dates. However, if the likelihood of this is so 
low as to be almost nonexistent, then it is really not an issue and 
we would catch it when we used the data.

Susan


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Susan Alberts, Department of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338, 
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