[Babase] adult female ranks in 1970's - TO DO LIST (not urgent)

Susan Alberts alberts at duke.edu
Sat May 12 15:21:53 EDT 2007


Dear Lacey and Tabby,

As Jeanne and Lacey know I have spent some time in the past week  
reconstructing adult female ranks in Hook's group in the 1970's, and  
also going back over the Alto's rankings for 1971-1980 that Jeanne  
did and Stephanie tabulated.

None of this is urgent but I don't want it to fall off our to do  
list, so I've made notes here about what needs to be done. I have  
already talked to Lacey about this and my main concern at this point  
is that it stays on our radar screens and to do lists long enough to  
make sure it happens.

1. Alto's ranks 1971-1980. Jeanne agreed that these ranks should be  
entered into babase, in the same way that the 1981-1982 files should  
that I forwarded to Tabby and Lacey this week (that JA and Catherine  
originally compiled). There are a few minor errors in these that  
Lacey is going to fix and then they will be ready to enter into an  
excel file for upload to babase, except for one question ....

2. We need to find out from Jeanne how to interpret gaps in the  
tabulated sheets -- does a gap in dates mean no change in rank, or no  
data? For instance, there are rankings for Jan - May 1975 and then  
for Jun - Dec 1976. Are there no data, or did nothing change from May  
1975 to June 1976? (This is plausible based on relative ranks but we  
want to double check that these are meant to reflect continuous  
periods of time).

3. The ranks data for Hook's in the 1970's is more spotty. Jeanne and  
I decided that probably we will NOT try to do month-by-month rankings  
for females in Hook's prior to January 1981 because the data are too  
sparse. However, we think that we CAN extract from these data birth  
and/or conception ranks for most or all of the PIDs that occurred in  
these years. We thought that it would be good to make a new babase  
table that contains only birth or conception ranks (or both) for the  
affected kids. We should talk to Karl about the design issues here.

4. Lacey will photocopy and send to Princeton the tabulated rankings  
that I did for Hook's Group 1976-1980. These are based largely on  
previous compilations by JA and other documents in the Hook's early  
notebooks. We should preserve these but not interpret them as monthly  
rankings.

5. The file that Catherine compiled from JA's instructions, which  
covers both groups 1 and 2 for Jan 1981 through Nov 1982, needs to be  
uploaded into babase, as I indicated in an email earlier this week.  
However, I think there might be ranks errors for female ETA in Hook's  
group in this period. I have asked Lacey to check Eta's relative rank  
in 1981 through 1983, and I have asked Jeanne to send me matrices for  
that time period, which will allow us to correct Eta's position (I  
think). The uploading of these files should not take place until  
after the ranks are corrected.

By separate email (not to babase) I will send e-copies of the excel  
sheets that I just compiled for Scott and for Marie providing birth  
ranks (for Scott) and conception ranks (for Marie) for some of these  
animals.

Thanks,
Susan

-----------------------------------------------
Susan Alberts, Dept. Biology, Duke University, Durham NC 27708. Phone  
919-660-7272, Fax 919-660-7293. alberts at duke.edu



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