[Babase] conference call summary 14 July 2004

Jeanne Altmann babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Wed, 14 Jul 2004 17:39:08 -0400


thanks Steph for another summary that is both entertaining and informative;

I will be at 304 924 5852 (Grace & Tom's) at the magic hour of 1300 
EDT.  Steph, remember that you will need to call Daphne & me SEPARATELY 
next week, and you might as well use her office number, not mine to avoid 
any confusion on her part.

jeanne


At 05:12 PM 7/14/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>Hi Babasers,
>
>  Today we celebrated our mid-July conference call.  The fun involved 
> steph hanging up on everyone at least twice and cursing the conference 
> call gods for their difficulty.  And this is trying WITH directions...can 
> you imagine without directions???  a truly terrifying thought.
>
>OK - the "meat" of our conference call (yes, we did eventually end up 
>conferenced together).
>
>1.  Karl has been working on the speed-ups, and predicts that he will have 
>them done by the end of the day.  Woohoo!!! I don't know about the rest of 
>you, but I, your faithful secretary, am VERY excited to see how much 
>faster the program will go.
>
>2.  Sequence orders and cycles:  Karl understands this problem, and has 
>fixed most of the issues, we believe.  He just needs to update the latest 
>version of the program so that I can run all of the fancy new things.
>
>3. Ignore Alex for now.
>
>4. Blank births for immigrant males:  to be discussed with Susan.  It's 
>likely that males who didn't get age estimates will be assigned an average 
>age.  So, the birth date blanks won't be permanent.
>
>5.  Repstats is part of the tables that have been "converted." We reminded 
>ourselves that repstats has issues.  Both cycstats and repstats are 
>created from cycles.  The rules and codings that are created from cycles 
>need to be tweaked (see previous episodes, i mean emails, of our 
>conference call summaries).  Karl is aware of this, but hasn't fixed it yet.
>
>6.  SO, Karl's order of attack: speedups (today), fix repstats/cycles 
>issues, begin the conversion of census info (census, demog and members). 
>Now hopefully those last few tables won't slow the program down 
>again...just when I was getting excited about less than 24 hour turnaround.
>
>7.  At the time of the conference call, duke's login.biology server was 
>down.  Steph alerted the computer gurus upstairs, and the problem seems to 
>be fixed now.
>
>8. Other:  Preliminary discussion of issues involved in integrating and 
>converting the hormone data (similar issues are likely to arise when the 
>genetic data are converted also).  Issue highlights include blanks, the 
>amount of data manipulation that occurs in excel before it would hit 
>foxpro, and how much of the "raw" stuff would go into the database. 
>Jeanne, Daphne and hormone team will discuss more.  This issue will be 
>revisited at a later date.
>
>9.  Just so we're all up to speed: the new database has a "MATURED" table. 
>It will only include mature animals (i.e. no one gets to have their name 
>entered/updated into there until they are mature).
>
>That's all for now.  We are really stream-lining our calls once I actually 
>manage to get everyone linked up.
>
>'til next week (JEANNE - GIVE ME THE FARM NUMBER TO CONTACT YOU!!)
>-steph
>
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