Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week. We'll meet next week, and Richard will be invited to tell us about his microQuasar source.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v7r6p1.
Data products: No news
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
From Jim: "I have implemented the hierarchical summing scheme inspired by Andy's comments in Likelihood. For relatively small numbers of events, e.g., as in the unit tests that are run with each build, the results are consistent with the old implementation. Runs on larger datasets do show some differences as compared with using previous versions, but I have not studied the changes very carefully yet. I have also fixed a bug in gtfindsrc reported by Jean's group at Saclay."
GRB tools
No news.
Pulsar tools
From James: "James and Masa continued work on the blind pulsar search tool. Specifically, they compared the output of the tool being developed, gtpspec, to Xronos's powspec tool. In the low frequency regime, the periodicity of the spacecraft motion and gaps in the data both give rise to large peaks in the FFT (much larger than even a strong pulsation). These spurious effects are clearly visible in the output of gtspec, but not in the output from powspec. James and Masa isolated and understood the origins of these effects, and are considering several approaches to eliminate them, all of which involve correcting for the exposure in the light curve."
Regarding gtpspec, Masa adds: "we are improving its output, such as plotting and ASCII dumping, for more clarity and more control by users. Also, the improvement will benefit gtpsearch, we hope, since they share classes for those functionality."
Observation simulation
Max has tagged the new version of PulsarSpectrum (now v2r2p2); it includes a simple model for timing noise. He reports that the problem with running the SC1 pulsars on recent versions of PulsarSpectrum seems to have gone away with HEAD1.516 of Science Tools. I don't know why, and have not confirmed this yet. According to the release notes, HEAD1.516 does include a modification to observationSim that has a workaround for how astro::GPS does or doesn't pay attention to start and stop times in the pointing history file. I have not gotten around to asking Jim whether this change could be the explanation for the apparent fix.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Going APE, from James: "James delivered Ape 2.0 to the HEASARC. He plans to add this version to the Science Tools external packages in the near future."
As probably has already been mentioned, last week Marco Frailis (Udine, DataMind), described a concept for a GUI for ScienceTools that he has support from Italian GLAST people to work on. The concept includes managing ways that tools could be sequenced into analysis 'pipelines' - powerful but perhaps ambitious. On Tuesday afternoon, Chris circulated a detailed response with issues that should be considered regarding the proposed GUI. Dave Davis has posted it as the top item in Design issues for Science Tools.
Source Catalog
Met this week. Jean demonstrated that the spurious sources found in DC2 along the track of the moon were not present in the SC1 source catalog; for the SC1 data set the moon source was implemented with orbital parallax, which smeared out the emission on short time scales. For DC2 no parallax was included. Jean reported that binned likelihood now runs alright in their system: "We solved the environment problem by installing cmt on our local farm. The gtpython script that Jim mentioned is indeed well advertised in the documentation, but it does not exist in the ordinary software deliveries (it was added specially to the DC2 release). Navid apparently plans to include it (together with a number of other things) but this is not available yet."
Science Tools Working Group
Met this week. We'll meet again in 2 weeks.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v7r6p1.
Data products: The 3 LAT science data products that are being removed from the ICD (by agreement with the GSSC) are: LS-003, LS-006, and LS-007. There, now you know. See the Science Tools meeting page for a link to details. Livetime cubes are being added as a data product, meaning something that will be delivered by the ISOC to the GSSC. What to do about codifying the formats of the various products anticipated from Automated Science Processing in the ISOC remains to be determined.
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
Jim is implementing a hierarchical summing scheme for adding together the (mostly very small and numerous) terms of the likelihood function. As Andy Strong has demonstrated, being careful about the additions can prevent accumulation of tiny round-off biases and make enough of a difference to the log(likelihood) to worthwhile.
GRB tools
No news about LAT tools. David mentioned that the GBM team is behind where they had hoped to be at this point in terms of having a tool to generate accurate response matrices for GBM data analysis. The tool in the works will include effects from scattering off the LAT and off the upper atmosphere. They'll have this worked out before launch, for sure.
Pulsar tools
Masa and James are continuing to work on the blind search tool (gtpspec, which lives in the periodSearch package). It has been run on simple test data sets so far.
Observation simulation
From Max R.: "I have made a new tag (v2r2) of PulsarSpectrum which contains the binary demodulations. Now there is a flag for wiritng out the binary demodulation and barycentric corrections for every pulsar, but for the runs i can switch this option off. The pulsar for test is called PSRMUROB.
I will prepare another tag with the inclusion of Timing noise, since I would like to do after binaries are ok. I will begin to send some new pulsars for the runs once this second upgrade is finished."
He has been able to reproduce the problem we have had running the SC1 sky model that used to work and expects to be able to track it down shortly.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
James described what should be different from the Science Tool user's perspective when APE is substituted for PIL behind HOOPs. Basically, the annoying aspects of PIL, some of which are captured in JIRA issues, should go away and some new functionality will be available, e.g., related to variable substitution. He may (somehow) make a transition version of HOOPs that has a switch to select APE or PIL.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week.
Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week. We'll meet next week. This report is mostly based on what I have gleaned on my own - I spent much of Wednesday believing that it was Tuesday and did not get around to soliciting inputs until late in the day.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v7r6p1.
Data products: Several of us (Chris Shrader, David Band, Tom Stephens, Rob Cameron, Eduardo do Couto e Silva, Richard Dubois, and me) met informally last week during the Symposium. Some specific decisions were made regarding some of the science data products - the ones whose definitions have remained incomplete. Chris took notes and I may have a summary soon to update this section. I recall that we left open the question of how to deliver the 'full event' data, and what exactly full event means.
Databases and related utilities
Richard's core of a proposal for how the data should be organized for access remains posted.
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
"Fixed a bug in binned likelihood for point sources very close the edge of the map.
Refactored the Gaussian quadrature integration used by the IRF (and other) packages to handle error conditions more gracefully."
Analia and I spoke briefly last week about her offer to implement upper limit calculations in gtlikelihood. I think that the sensible methods that she proposed all depend on knowing the distribution of TS in the null hypothesis, and so I don't think that we can calculate meaningful upper limits yet.
GRB tools
No news.
Pulsar tools
James reports that he and Masa have continued to work on the blind search tool and that this week they "broke ground on the actual application, called provisionally gtpspec. They determined a first cut at the parameters, which are similar to the parameters used by gtpsearch."
Observation simulation
Max R. has checked in (or is just about to check in) an updated version of PulsarSpectrum that can simulate binary pulsar systems. Timing noise may also be an option now. Last Friday at SLAC I was able to show him the problem with running the SC1 sky model with the current version of PulsarSpectrum. For some reason the simulator starts looking for spacecraft location information for times a few days before the start of the simulation. The only updates to PulsarSpectrum since the SC1 sky model was run had related to changes in the astro package. Max expects to be able to track down the problem shortly.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From James:
"Refactored hoops to use the HEASARC's newer Ape library instead of PIL for hoops's underlying parameter access. This work is mostly complete, and he anticipates being able to deliver Ape and the new hoops for inclusion in ScienceTools in the near future."
"Corrected behavior of exposure_map to address a problem reported by Jean Ballet, in which the energy bins were not correctly determined in the case where the user does not supply a count map. The exposure_map application was changed to respect the bincalc parameter in this case, allowing the user to choose whether to use the centers or edges of energy bins. This means the bincalc parameter behaves the same way for cases both with and without an input count map."
Source Catalog
Met this week. Jean presented results from an investigation of the bright sources that were missed in the SC1 catalog pipeline analysis and described work on getting the 'bands' and 'time' pipelines going to calculate fluxes for several bands and time histories of fluxes for the SC1 sources. We had an interesting discussion about error matricies reported by Minuit which transitioned to discussion of the shape of the likelihood function near minimum.
Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week. Our next meeting will be on a to-be-determined date after the GLAST Symposium. This report is based on what I have gleaned on my own - so may not be complete.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v7r6p1.
Data products: No news
Databases and related utilities
Not much news. Richard has posted the core of a proposal for how the data should be organized for access; this is open for comment, but none of us has made any comments yet.
Likelihood analysis
No news; Jim has implemented a new interface to the DC1A response functions in the likelihood test program, but I have not asked why. I think that the interface to the IRFs in general has changed.
Analia has asked about implementing upper limit calculations in gtlikelihood, something she has extensive experience with in HEASARC fitting tools. We may try to discuss this in more detail next week at the Symposium; upper limits relate to the still-open question of understanding the distribution of TS.
GRB tools
No news.
Pulsar tools
James reports that he and Masa "completed refactoring to calculate accurately the chance probability in the periodSearch package. They are now poised to implement the A4 blind search tool. All that remains for that is to write the actual application; all the underlying algorithms have been successfully implemented and tested."
Observation simulation
No news from Max R. yet on whether he has been able to reproduce the apparent bug mentioned last week. He probably will be in town next week.
User interface and infrastructure
No news
Source Catalog
Met this week. Juergen introduced a 'white paper' on proposed strategies for counterpart assignments for LAT sources. Jean presented results from the just completed SC1 source catalog; actually the catalog is only partially complete - light curves have not been evaluated yet, for example. How many sources did the catalog pipeline detect in the SC1 data set? You'll have to go to the link above.