[Babase] Weird PIDs

kfenn kfenn at princeton.edu
Tue Apr 3 16:24:00 EDT 2007


Hi Lacey,

You have to look at the parity numbers as well as the pids to make sense 
of some of these.  As I said, pids values are never changed once they 
are assigned because they impact too many other aspects of the data.  
Parities, however, can be changed and should reflect the sequence of 
births.  ()I'm pretty sure this is in the Princeton Protocols for Data 
Management Aug 2006 that I sent you.  You can take a look at it if you 
get baffled by how these Princeton data get entered.)

LOC3 has parity 4
LOC4 has parity 3

So LOC4 was 'born' before LOC3. 
If we miss entering some data in a reproductive sequence either by 
oversight or because it wasn't clear what was going on with a female 
until later, then the pids could easily be out of sync.  We have to keep 
the assigned pids but then change the parities to show the birth order 
when we have old data to enter or similar errors to correct.  For 
example, I just entered a bunch of pregnancies for some females from the 
1980s because they were skipped.  This produces weird pids like PID11 
with parity 3.

SOR5 has a parity of 4.  This was the 4th conception for Sorgham.  
Either SOR4 was accidentally skipped or perhaps there was a SOR4 
mistakely assigned to a conception that, it turns out, did not occur so 
we had to remove that pid after SOR5 was already assigned.  Its probably 
documented in our monitoring data somewhere, but as long as the parities 
make sense, I would assume a database manager already checked it.  Its 
very unusual not to notice something like that during data input because 
95% of the pids and parity numbers match.  It really catches you 
attention when they don't.....the more common error would be to 
automatically assign matching pids and parities when they should be 
different because of birth sequence.


Tabby

Lacey Maryott wrote:
> Hey Tabby,
>    I came across some more strange PID phenomena today! haha Locust 
> has 5 babies so far... but what confuses me is her 3rd baby (PID LOC3 
> that is) was born in 2004: CACAO, and her 4th baby, (PID LOC4) was a 
> fetal loss in 2003... help I'm confused :(.  Also for good measure, 
> the one I found yesterday with one skipped was Sorghum, just so I 
> officially let you know :)
> Thanks much
> cheers
> Lacey
>

-- 
Tabby Fenn
Research Assistant

Dept of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
401 Guyot Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ  08544

609 258-6898 (Ph)
609 258-2712 (Fx)



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