[Babase] Psion jpsamps and fpsamps in wrong tables
Karl O. Pinc
kop at meme.com
Fri Mar 2 16:25:45 EST 2007
On 03/02/2007 02:48:42 PM, kfenn wrote:
> Karl,
>
> I see those juv and adult data in the SAMPLES table, not
> POINTS_DATA. Am I misreading your email?
Yes and no. I was not entirely clear. In foxpro there were
two tables for point samples. (The minute by minute
data, not just SAMPLES.) The juvenile point samples
and the female point samples both had some of the same columns.
In the new system there's also two tables, but one table
has all the "common" data and the second has just the
female related "extra" data. The "common" table is
POINT_DATA.
> We still have the same problem in the new system since those juv vs
> adult stype values that show up in the SAMPLES table are just getting
> imported from the old FoxPro tables. When I query the Samples table
> for Vex, you can still see her jumping between juvenile and adult
> status between 2003-07-07 and 2004-01-08. The new table certainly
> makes it easier to pick out the jumps so Laurence could fix them in
> her own analysis, but it leaves the data mixed up and requires
> someone to query every individual to check for the 'right' stype
> through time if their analysis can be biased by this
> inconsistency..... not very practical.
I'm not fluent at the moment in the ins and outs of female
vs. juvenile point sample data collection. And I don't know
what Laurance is up to. What I'm thinking is that, so long
as the "common" columns are the only ones of interest,
the Stype is irrelevant.
Let me know if I'm still not clear.
All the suggestions for rules (including the ones we've got)
sound reasonable to me and straightforward to implement.
From the technical side it's a wash.
It seems to me that no matter what we do with the computer,
if there's different data being collected in juvenile
v.s. female sampling (neighbors comes to mind) and it's
ambiguous whether the field observer accidentally
entered a female or juvenile code and so it's ambiguous
which set of data was actually collected, then there's
a problem. The very thought of it gets me into a tizzy!
I recall Jeanne and Susan seemed pretty confident
we didn't have this particular problem. But the notion
of "different data semantics" seems relevant once you go beyond
looking at those columns common to both juvenile and
female sampling. This is why I've insisted on different
neighbor codes, because each code has a different meaning.
With luck that means that significant results can be teased
from the data.
Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
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