[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