[Babase] Conference call summary 7 July 2004
Stephanie Combes
babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Wed, 07 Jul 2004 17:47:41 -0400
Calling all babasers! It's time for yet another summary of what we
discussed.
General: Steph not only called on time and found everyone ready and
waiting, but she also successfully conferenced everyone on the first try!
yippee! Somehow I find the whole phone-conference thing quite the
technological challenge. (But don't worry. I now stash entire bags of
kit-kat bars in my desk to get me through these difficult times).
Well, time to summarize the juicy details...make sure you're comfortable
'cause it's gonna be a long email!
1. Steph updated everyone that she has finished entering hybrid scores.
Proofing will be done very soon. Copies of proofed sets will be sent on to
Princeton as well as kept here at Duke.
2. Karl's update - Karl is working on the "speed-ups." Steph will go ahead
with running a conversion this evening (it is churning as we speak! er,
type, or read... whatever! you get my drift!). Karl is going to push to
finish the speed-up touch ups before next Thursday the 15th. [NOTE: Karl
will be standing in for someone at the Art Institute (actually Karl, this
just makes me think you'll be standing around in a knights armor or
something in some exhibit...but, as usual, I digress). Karl will be rather
busy and rather un-babasey while at the Art Institute. So, we won't count
on a lot of babase work getting done between July 15 and July 27.] Also,
even the convert dbf to txt is taking awhile now (45 minutes).
3. Karl noticed an error that popped up with Alice (oh that troublesome
kid of Alto's! Will she ever just stop being difficult???) In one of her
cycles, her ETDATE is listed as later than her TDATE. Daphne is looking
into this and will fix manually.
4. TDATE discussion: As everyone saw from earlier emails, Jeanne and
Daphne looked into the missing Tdate issue (refer back to a different
long-winded email by yours truly about Repstats and missing tdates. Also
refer to JA's email from earlier today). So what we MUST have are tdates
for a female's first cycle (puberty) and for resumes. If any of those
dates are missing, we will treat it as an error and look into fixing it.
Currently, Daphne is going to do a quick check to make sure that all the
resumes have tdates, and attempt to check the puberty cycles (by comparing
with mature date and what's listed as the first cycle in Cycles). Good
luck and report in next week!
Also, we then need to change the way repstats looks at stuff. We don't
want it to just try going from tdate to tdate, because it seems to lose
some stuff. We want it to (and I quote): "record cycling
--whenever the state is not pregnant or lactating and the female has
reached maturity, ie has had her first T
another way of thinking of this is:
--from a T until the D that starts a pregnancy, Cycling should be the state
in Repstats."
Karl - please make it so.
How does this affect cycstats? Hmm...need to think about this a bit.
Currently, cycstats is constructed from repstats. Either the tables
(repstats and cycstats) need to be constructed separately from cycles or
build from the new and improved repstats. We will think about this
particular aspect some more.
5. STATDATE: we will probably leave statdate as is - i.e. to reflect the
last census date entered. Statdate is not (always) useful as a check for
other dates. Statdate should only really be used as a reference date if
the status of the animal is dead.
6. Other: Psion Points - some concern was voiced regarding checks for the
data that are updated into babase from the psion points. Jeanne clarified
for the rest of us that those data do have little checks on the psions.
So, only certain snames are allowed to be entered and this is done on a
group by group basis. So we will carry on, and in general, update psion
data (in particular any ad lib interaction data that would go into parts
and interact) after demography updates.
6a. More other: Daphne needs to enter some cycles that were either
overlooked or incorrectly entered. She is going to try this the same way
as other cycle data are entered and keep her fingers crossed that the
upcycle program will insert the cycle correctly. Daphne will back-up the
data before she tries this experiment! Good luck Daphne!
That's about it folks. Back to the 1:00 time slot next week. All shall be
present. JA may be at the farm the following week, in which case she will
be required to supply the rest of us with fresh fruit (obviously to make up
for the effort of having to call the farm instead of Princeton!).
Think as one for babase!
steph