[Babase] members diffs analyzed

Lacey Maryott lacey.maryott at duke.edu
Mon Jun 11 13:50:45 EDT 2007


Hello all,
    I spent a nice portion of today looking into the differences in 
members. There weren't that many, so I thought it worth it to ensure the 
changes were all expected differences.  I copied only those rows marked 
(-) or (+) (distinct differences) into Word, which constituted 28 
pages.  I was able to narrow it all down to only 4 pages of differences 
which I thought should be discussed.  Below, I have outlined the "types" 
of issues which arose.

1. Almost 2 full pages of the 4 are interpolation issues at the end of 
1988 and beginning of 1989, placing animals in groups 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and 
1.4.  The last census in 1988 is Dec 21.  So, the question, which Karl 
posed earlier, is do we override the interp program, and Manually change 
everything through Dec 31 to group 1.00 and then anything after 12-31 to 
grp 1.* (whichever applies).  This way, we are manually telling the 
interp program how to interpret these dates.  Karl has mentioned he 
could potentially add a "Supergroup" as a column to members view, and 
thus, any of these censused under the Alto's supergroup during this time 
would appear as "in" Alto's  supergroup.

2. The second group of problems is how individuals get interpreted when 
they die. It seems animals are put in "unknown" grp 9.00 on their 
statdate.  So on the day they die, or days immediately following... they 
are marked as having "unknown" group membership.  This is the 
documentation associated with this assignment

    *

      Individuals are no longer always placed in a group, the group in
      which they were last censused, on their Statdate
      <https://papio.biology.duke.edu/babase_system.html#Biograph-Statdate>
      and this "location" no longer interpolates.

      When first written, the interpolation procedure was designed to
      work with females, who are unlikely to be absent from their group
      for more than 28 days. (Twice the 14 day interpolation limit.) By
      placing an individual in a group on their Statdate, the group in
      which they were last censused, the females were assured a row in
      MEMBERS
      <https://papio.biology.duke.edu/babase_system.html#MEMBERS> for
      every day of their lives. Further, analysis was simplified as each
      of these rows associated the females with their group (even though
      at the end of their lives they may not have been present in the
      group.)

      The new interpolation procedure does not consider the Statdate in
      its determination of the individual's group membership on that
      day, although, as always, when the Statdate is a death date it
      does stop interpolation.

-- It just seems like when a baby dies, and its mother carries it for a 
week, its location isn't unknown, or when an animal is seen being eaten, 
or half its body is found.  I just thought I would point out this issue 
that stood out, even though the documentation explains why this decision 
was made.

3. Another substantial set of the outstanding issues were Adult males 
which have demog notes stating they are seen alone, so their group will 
need to be changed to 10.00 for those days.

4. The last group popped up because of incomplete census days which need 
to be entered as demog notes.  Once that gets taken care of, those will 
clean up.

Issue Number 1 should be decided on by Jeanne and Susan.  3&4 are 
something that either I can fix, or will be fixed once we get demog 
notes in.  Number 2, I'm guessing isn't something we can do anything 
about without going back through and finding the circumstances of each 
and every observed or known death and changing those, so should I 
disregard those as "issues"  altogether?

That's what we have for now on the census data, and thus, other than 
Leah and I Working on doing 2006B in both foxpro and postgres, just to 
ensure the programs work, I think we are done with foxpro???  YAY!

everyone high-five your neighbor! :)

Cheers,
Lacey

-- 
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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