[Babase] Psion Miscoding Issue - JEANNE PLEASE READ
Jeanne Altmann
babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Tue, 12 Apr 2005 15:57:34 -0400
agreed,
j
At 04:30 PM 4/12/2005, you wrote:
>Thanks very much Catherine.
>
>A few observations:
>
>A. Regarding age of juvs that get sampled, I dont think we want a lower
>age limit. In the list of "errors" catherine sent (samples that took place
>before 6 months of age), it looks as though most or all cases involve
>animals being started a few weeks or a month or two early. My hope is that
>the field team are using their judgement in deciding when to start an
>infant -- the point of these samples has always been that infants and juvs
>need to get focal sampled once they start being off their mothers a lot so
>that we don't lose their IDs.It looks to me that this is what is happening
>-- some animals are consistently appearing in the sample list early (WUA
>for instance). I think we should just ask the field team about this and if
>they sometimes start a kid a bit early, we should let it happen. I can put
>this on my list of things to talk to them about this summer.
>
>B. Regarding upper limits, I am also not sure that we want to be very
>strict about this. For instance, looking at Catherine's list of "adults in
>jpsamps", they fall into 3 categories:
>1. Snames belong to adult females who are 3 or more years into adulthood.
>These are clearly errors and need to be tossed, but are a minority in this
>list (roughly 1/4).
>2. Snames belong to young males who were sampled as juveniles for a few
>months after their official TE dates (ie they were sampled as subadults).
>Because enlargement is difficult to see and we only assess it once a
>month, this is a conservative error. These constitute most of the "errors"
>in this category and we don't want to toss these.
>3. Snames that belong to young females (MBE, WRA, VEX, VIG, KIW) who were
>sampled as juveniles for several months after menarche. Again, I am not
>sure this is a big problem.
>
>Here is ia possible rule of thumb: if the animal is sampled as a juv
>within one year of attaining Testicular enlargement or menarche, we just
>accept the sample. Otherwise toss it.
>
>C. In response to Catherine's question about whether we still want to
>discard samples in the three categories she lists below, I would say YES
>for the first two types but NO for the third type for 75% of them. Toss
>only thoses where the sample occurred more than a year after maturity.
>
>D. Clearly the error problem is not as great as it seemed once we accept
>some post-maturity animals being sampled as juvs for a while.
>
>E. Regarding dates that the errors occurred. Of the ones that we clearly
>need to consider errors there is not a clear pattern that these happened
>in the early days. It looks ongoing. I think we need to compile a summary
>and I talk about it with the team. Especially non-adult females sampled as
>adult females and males sampled as adult females. We need to get some
>insight into how to prevent this.
>
>Susan
>
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I wanted to follow-up with the Psion miscoding issues Daphne mentioned at
>>the BaBase meeting last Friday. Three types of errors were discussed:
>>(1) male samples in the fpsamps table (8 out of 15,269 samples)
>>(2) non-adult female samples in the fpsamps table (56 out of 15,269 samples)
>>(3) adults in the jpsamps table (96 out of 8,100 samples)
>>
>>It occurred to me this afternoon that a fourth possible error would be
>>young baboons (less than 6 months) in the the jpsamps table. A total of
>>81 out of 8,100 samples had this problem. Note that this count does not
>>include cases where observation date < (birth + 180 days) if the
>>individual turned 180 days at some point during the observation month.
>>
>>Attached are two documents. The Word document provides the queries that
>>I did following Daphne's notes/instructions to determine the error
>>counts. The Excel worksheet lists the errors themselves (it contains
>>four worksheets, one for each error type). The observation date for each
>>record is listed if Susan and Jeanne are still interested in seeing when
>>these mistakes were made (if I remember right, you wanted to double check
>>these dates before we moved forward with the clean-up).
>>
>>Regarding the first three error types, we had decided to remove these
>>records from BaBase. Does that still sound like a good plan to
>>everyone? As for the fourth error type (youngsters less than 6 months in
>>jpsamps), Jeanne pointed out that this is a different sort of error and
>>not necessarily another case where the records should be deleted. Any
>>suggestions of how to handle or do you simply want to leave these records
>>in the database?
>>
>>Thanks, everyone.
>>
>>Catherine
>>
>>P.S. I know the attachments won't be archived on the listserv, but
>>couldn't think of a way to get around it this time with the Excel
>>spreadsheets. At least we'll have the email exchange well documented and
>>I'll eventually include details of any changed/deleted records in the
>>BaBase correction log.
>>
>>
>>Attachment converted: cisticola:Psion Miscoding Issues.xls (XLS4/«IC»)
>>(0007ADFF)
>>Attachment converted: cisticola:Psion Miscoding Issues.doc (WDBN/«IC»)
>>(0007AE00)
>
>
>--
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>Susan Alberts, Associate Professor Department of Biology, Duke University,
>Box 90338, Durham NC 27708 phone 919-660-7272 fax 919-660-7293
>
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