[Babase] Questions re. maturity in ranker
Jun Yang
junyang at gmail.com
Fri Sep 29 16:11:37 EDT 2006
Thanks Susan. That helps a lot.
Based on this thread of discussion, I am proposing
a possible ranker design:
1. User can choose any one of the six rank types.
2. The ranking will be automatically checked against
other rank types for which ranking info already exists
in Babase. Such checks prevent user from producing
a ranking that is not consistent (in terms of relative
order of individuals) with existing rank types.
For example, suppose we already have ALF and ADM
and are working on ALL. The ranker will automatically
warn about inconsistency with ALF and ADM rankings,
and disallow an inconsistent ALL ranking to be saved
in Babase.
This design gives some flexibility to the users
in choosing which type of rank to work on first.
For example, one can still work on ADF first, and then
work on ALF, which will be constrained by ADF.
Optionally, we can also implement an automatic
procedure for producing rankings that are
subsumed by bigger ones. For example, when
an ALL ranking is entered, then all other types
of rankings will be automatically populated.
The consistency checking makes implementation
a bit more messy, but it looks like the right thing
to do. How does this sound?
--- Jun Y.
On 9/29/06, Susan Alberts <alberts at duke.edu> wrote:
> >A more general question along the same line:
> >There are currently 6 types of rankings:
> >
> >ADF Adult Females
> >ALL All group members
> >ADM Adult Males
> >ALF All Females
> >ALM All Males
> >FYM All females and males < 7
> >
> >Besides enforcing the consistency between ADF and ALF
> >as you described above, should we also enforce the consistency,
> >say, between ADM and ALM, and, in general,
> >ALL with everything else?
>
> Yes; males and females represent a similar situation in that ADM
> should be extractable from ALM in the same way that ADF should be
> extractable from ALF
...
> in practice we would not need to disentangle the ranks
> of young males from those of adults.
...
> why don't we just create one ranking -- the ALL ranking -- that
> includes all the members in the group, and then just have a rule that
> allows us to extract each of the other rnktypes from this ALL. We
> don't do this because it is actually quite complicated to rank all
> group members together,
...
> In addition, the biological evidence suggests that within-sex
> rankings are likely to be the relevant rankings from the animal's
> perspective, rather than whole-group rankings. So, although we have
> all group rankings for some periods of time,, we don't create these
> routinely.
>
> In general, age-sex classes rank as follows from highest to lowest:
> Adult males, subadult males, adult females, juvenile males, juvenile
> females. However, as I mentioned above, animals mature in a
> non-systematic fashion and as they grow and climb ranks, brief
> circularities result.
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