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The current version of the Science Tools is v7r4, incremented last week at the end of build cycle 19. Here is what the release manager reports as the changes in release notes since the previous version, and the ScienceTools release.notes summarize the changes. Jim reports that a further update to v7r4p1 is likely within the week to take into account further updates to the definition of FT1 - see below.
Data products: Last week, I was hasty in predicting that cleaning up the format of FT1 (LS-002) was complete. Several other tweaks and one fairly major change have been pointed out as missing from FT1. These are now being tracked in JIRA. The most important change has to do with adjusting MJDREF very slightly to account for its formally being in TT but the origin of MET (January 1, 2001, midnight) being in UTC. The shift is so small that MJDREF has to be broken into 2 keywords, MJDREFI and MJDREFF for the 'integer' and 'floating point' portions. Having makeFT1 do this is straightforward, but it will break many science tools until they also know gtpsearch until it knows to look for the 2-part MJDREF.
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Jim reports no development news. He forwarded a bug report from Jean Ballet for gtsrcmaps; tip appears to complain about the GTI extension misidentifies an image extension as not being an imageone.
From James: "James and Analia completed a likelihood bad-fit warning. The approach suggested by Dave Thompson, in which the Poisson probability for observing N photons given that M were actually present, turned out not to be feasible for computational reasons. The formula includes raising N to the Mth power, which for even moderate sizes of M and N quickly exceeds the range of a double precision value. Instead they implemented a modified version of the scheme, in which the fractional deviation is computed and ranges are reported in which the deviation exceeds some threshold. This is clearly a work in progress because the threshold computation does not involve the predicted error, and in any case the value for the threshold needs to be tuned to real-life data. This code so far was not delivered due to the lack of repository access."
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