[Babase] Proofing CYCLES

Catherine Markham amarkham at princeton.edu
Fri May 26 16:34:36 EDT 2006


Hi Karl,

Ok, finally got back into the proofing of the CYCLES/CYCPOINTS data and 
will be continuing with that as first priority into next week.  As 
promised, though, I wanted to give you a sense of what kind of 
discrepancies I'm seeing:

TYPE 1:
2 examples...
+ 4690 ABB 18 2005-12-24
+ 4691 BUN 6 1985-11-26

The new system has added an automatic mdate based on a female's last 
entered ddate BUT, because it is based of the last ddate, we don't have 
complete cycle information entered.  Out of these two examples, we will 
likely get more data for ABB but never for BUN.  In the past, we only 
entered complete cycles (never left a dangling mdate unless it was an 
unusual case where the female died, monitoring stopped, etc.). 
Personally, I don't like the idea of adding this last mdate although I 
guess it isn't a big problem so long as users are aware of edge effects 
and there are good notes on how it was generated (I'll reread the Babase 
documentation shortly to check).  Sorry if all this was discussed 
earlier - maybe I'm just forgetting the conclusions we reached on this a 
while back.


ERROR 2:
Can you double check the conceptive ddates you entered?  I've noticed 
several errors so far in the day portion of the date.  For example

In the file I emailed you,
ALT has a conceptive ddate on 19 February 1970 (NOT 1 February 1970)
BUN has a conceptive ddate on 10 November 1984 (NOT 1 November 1984)
DAD has a conceptive ddate on 21 June 1984 (NOT 2 June 1984)

The pattern SEEMS to be (I'm not 100% on this) that if the day portion 
of the date is the first through the ninth of the month, the dates in 
the new system are correct.  However, if the day portion of the date was 
the tenth or after, only the first digit of the day was entered (for 
example, "1" entered instead of "14" and "2" entered instead of "22").

Other than those two error types (which seem to continue as far in the 
checking as I've gotten - in other words, not something specific to just 
the first few alphabetized females), the only other discrepancy I'm 
seeing occurs when the auto mdates have been added.  As we said a while 
back, for now I'm simply checking that the records are mismatched 
because an mdate has been added - after I go through all the current 
discrepancy checking, I'll do some queries on the logic and accuracy of 
the specific mdate that was generated.

Whew.  Hope that helps as a start.  I'll be checking email over the 
weekend if there's anything that needs more clarification.

Thanks,
Catherine

P.S.  Nearly forgot - how difficult would it be to create a table in the 
new system from CYCPOINTS that looks like the old CYCLES?  Would be 
quite helpful, but no problem if it is troublesome to do.



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