Science Tools Working Group
We met last week but we might not meet next week, owing to a GLAST science promotion event at Goddard (primarily involving local universities, I think) on the 17th.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v7r6p1.
Data products: We discussed the status of the LAT science data products (the ones that get delivered to the GSSC and hence are part of the 'interface') at the last science tools meeting. The open issues range from important details (like event numbers and diffuse response columns in FT1, or 'deadtime' in FT2) to whether a previously-planned data product like 'configuration history' can be made relevant and useful. A working group will be spawned with GSSC & LAT representation in advance of configuration control.
Databases and related utilities
No news. Tony has asked for details about how the various kinds of data that the Data Catalog/Data Server will keep track of will be accessed and how these data types will relate to each other. Richard, Julie, and I are [really just about to] draft something for comment.
Likelihood analysis
Jim corrected the calculation of the predicted number of events from diffuse sources; the error affected only plotting of results, not the optimization of the likelihood function itself. Jim has also modified the handling of names of diffuse sources so that the underscore character can now be part of the name without confusing the interpretation of diffuse response columns in FT1 files.
GRB tools
No news.
Pulsar tools
James reports that he and Masa are continuing to work on the tool for blind searches for pulsations. "We're integrating it into the periodSearch package, and we've been doing some refactoring in order to add the new code without duplicating old code."
Observation simulation
Jim has fixed (but not yet extensively tested) a problem with using log-parabola source spectra in simulations - the simulations were using a lot of memory.
Richard has a new source for simulating microquasars, which he'll describe at a forthcoming science tools meeting. Max R. has updated PulsarSpectrum recently, but I do not have any details.
User interface and infrastructure
You may have noticed Jean's JIRA issue about discovering that most of the output from gtlikelihood does not go to stdout. Jim pointed out that this was due to aspects of the implementation of st_stream. From James: 'I wrote to Jim about that and we agreed on a simple solution, which I'll check in pretty soon. There's a stream for "information" which is what Jim uses. That stream currently is redirected to the standard log stream (which is stderr). I will direct that instead to stdout and, as Jim suggests, add a new method to return a stream for logging.'
Source Catalog
Met this week. Problems with the SLAC reflector prevented me from personally participating. Of possible interest to this meeting is Jean's report on running the catalog analysis pipeline for the SC1 (1-year data). How many sources did it detect? What problems are they facing? Also Paolo or Gino presented a method for identifying regions of the sky that have variable sources.