[Babase] Males data -- somewhat urgent update

Lacey Maryott lacey.maryott at duke.edu
Thu Mar 6 14:41:19 EST 2008


No one needs to worry any longer, because Karl saved the day, Lacey 
understood what Karl was saying and the query is done!!! :)  Susan (I 
hope) I have exactly what you were asking for, and I will be sending it 
off to you right now!

Karl thanks so much for putting up with my steel case of a skull the 
past few days!!! I am definitely going to be documenting this procedure 
for future use!!!!!

Cheers for work well done!
Lacey

Karl O. Pinc wrote:
>
> On 03/06/2008 12:05:44 PM, Susan Alberts wrote:
>> Hi Jeanne, Karl, Lacey, Tabby,
>>
>> I am writing this from Nairobi, as an update on a query that karl, 
>> Lacey and I have been working on for several days.
>>
>> When I created the original database of males, I had a file that had 
>> the following columns:
>>
>> Sname  Grp  Datein  Dateout
>>
>> In other words, one row for every period of time that a male was in a 
>> group. If he was in Alto's 3 separate times, there were 3 rows for 
>> him in Grp 1. If he was in an unknown group for one or more stretches 
>> of time, there was one row each of these strecthes in group 9.
>>
>> I have needed the data in this form from time to time, it is a very 
>> useful way, for instance, of figuring out how long he spent in each 
>> group and in how many different time periods.
>>
>> When babase was created, it seemed clear that converting the data 
>> from this form to the members form (one row of location data for each 
>> animals for each day) made sense, because it should be easy to 
>> reconstruct the original version. We all agreed on this.
>>
>> however, it turns out not to be easy for some reason none of us gets. 
>> I've tried from time to time and given up each time. Lacey found 
>> records of when I tried it with Karen and Karl helped, and we didn't 
>> manage to do it, and I know I've tried a couple of other times. It 
>> WOULD be easy if each male had only one period of residency in each 
>> group. But, we have not yet managed to recreate this original table 
>> format in all these yeas. This is obviously troubling.
>
> It's actually not so bad.  My head was clear today and I just
> had a conversation with Lacey and I think we worked it out.
>
> Her problem was with endpoints, the group at the rankdate and
> the group at the statdate.  The rankdate problem is taken care
> of by restricting the date range later in the process.  (The
> technique is to look for transitions from one group to the
> next.  You need to "see" the transition, which generally
> occurs before the rankdate, into the group at time of rankdate.)
> The statdate endpoint is different.  The "easy" thing to do
> when making the table of transitions, is to fake it at the
> statdate and create an artificial transition (a new row)
> that records the individual leaving his last group on the
> statdate and going into the "death group" on the day after
> the statdate.  This results in a complete set of transitions.
>
> (You'd have to do something similar for birthdate if you
> wanted to go all the way back to birth.)
>
> Another query is required to change the transitions into
> a simple date-in/date-out for each group.  If your transitions
> are not "complete" then at the "endpoints" you've got no
> row to join with and so your first and last row go away.
>
> We did go over this trick the other day, but everybody was
> tired and in a hurry to solve the problem.
> I think the problem was that Lacey had difficulty visualizing
> the process.  I gave her some mental images of what the
> queries are doing that should make it easier to think
> about this process.
>
> Karl <kop at meme.com>
> Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
>                  -- Robert A. Heinlein
>
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-- 
Lacey Maryott
Alberts Lab
Department of Biology
Duke University
ph: 919-660-7306
fax: 919-660-7293
Lacey.Maryott at duke.edu 



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