[Babase] Re: agonism/grooming 'investigation'
Susan Alberts
alberts at duke.edu
Sun Mar 25 15:06:04 EDT 2007
Sorry to be slow getting back to you but i wasn't completely sure I
understood your message this morning and didn't have time to think it
through.
I have copied this reply to the babase mailing, so that the
discussion will be in the archive.
Responses below.
> I wanted to know if you think I should go in and look
>at the years where it looks like they WERE pushed to the first to see how much
>so each month, etc...
No I don't think this is very important. That is, in years where
there is clearly not an even distribution of events across days
(where it was usually pushed to 1st of month) we don't need to know
much more about those years -- we can't recover the "real" dates
anyway (not very easily). So the years where it is clear that most
were pushed to the first are not the issue. I think the issue is, do
we have a clear sense of which year the date of the entry actually
starts meaning the real date. In other words, if we leave the dates
as they are for a given year, can we be sure that they really
represent the real dates, or were some pushed to the first of the
month. To think about this, I think that you should pick the first
reasonably "even" year for each of grooming and agonism and then plot
the events-by-day on a bar graph so we can see the distribution. You
can ignore the years where things were mostly pushed to the first.
Hope this helps.
Susan
>or if you think that my time could be better used
>elsewhere, and that we just really wanted to see what years it was and wasnt
>used? I have no problem doing it today, I just didn't want to devote a couple
>hours time to something that we dont necessarily see as worthwhile. If you
>want me to take a look at it, I'll just run the same query going
>month by month
>in each year where it appears data were pushed to the first, but I
>expect to see
>the same trend month to month that we saw year to year in the years where they
>were pushed... a few lingering on the later days of the month. Are those
>points later in the month all from point samples and that type of collection,
>or have point samples only started slightly before psion collection of point
>samples?
>
>Sorry for the long email,
>
>Lacey
--
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Susan Alberts, Department of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338,
Durham NC 27708
919-660-7272 (phone), 919-660-7293 (FAX)
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