[Babase] Re: Agnonisim and grooming errors

Susan Alberts alberts at duke.edu
Thu Mar 15 09:59:26 EDT 2007


I think I am a little lost in this discussion regarding what we need 
to accomplish. Please correct me on the below points or clarify as 
needed. Sorry that I didn't retain the earlier text but I kept 
getting confused about where to snip and what to keep.

Karl provided the tables showing the distribution of ags and 
groomings before 1995. The distribution is very odd, with most 
entries occurring on 1st of the month. Question is, why is this?

Part of the answer,  we definitely know, is that during some periods 
of time, all agonism and grooming data were entered only on first of 
month, regardless of when they actually were recorded.

What we DON'T know is when this rule was and wasn't followed for both 
types of data. So, we can't check to see whether the odd distribution 
of days for G and A data correspond to our actual rules for when we 
used first of month only versus exact date.

What Karl's concern is (I think) is that the data are accurately 
transferred from foxpro to postgresql. The weird distribution of 
dates makes him concerned that there is a data transfer error that is 
being obscured by our weird data entry patterns. karls, is this 
correct?

I doubt that we can accurately reconstruct from our memory the years 
during which different types of data entry (with respect to which 
dates were used in A and G records) were done, unless the records at 
Princeton on this are very good. Tabby and Jeanne, what do you think?

One brute force way to resolve the question is to do the query that 
Karl, in Foxpro, did but break it down year by year and see if we can 
identify years where different rules were followed. A even more brute 
force way would be to just query on all "A" acts and order by date, 
in Foxpro, and then do the same in postgresql. I just did this in 
postgresql and found it instructive going through a couple years but 
that will be very tedious. It does seem to be the case, from a VERY 
quick glance, that whatever rules we implemented were not 
consistently followed all the time.

In order to decide how to proceed we need to decide how important it 
is to reconstruct the rules of data entry over the years. It would 
obviously be good to have this record. On the other hand, what is at 
stake if we don't do this? I need to understand this.

Susan


-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Susan Alberts, Department of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338, 
Durham NC 27708
919-660-7272 (phone), 919-660-7293 (FAX)


More information about the Babase mailing list