[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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