[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