Science Tools Working Group
We met this week. We may meet again next week, to get out of phase again with the Catalog group; Nov. 1 is a national holiday in France, and the Service Challenge Steering committee occasionally has designs on the time slot, so nothing is definite yet regarding the next Science Tools meeting.
At the meeting this week, Jim gave a overview of the charge and current activities of the IRF working group, as he has also been asked to present in this meeting.
The version of ScienceTools is now v7r5. This release will be what the GLAST Users Committee will use at Goddard on November 16-18 to 'beta test' the science tools. According to Chris, about half of that time will be devoted to hands-on use of the tools. Navid is preparing DC2-like distribution packages of v7r5 - probably he has done it already - and GUC members will use these (downloaded from somewhere on the GSSC Web site, I think).
Data products: No news.
Databases and related utilities
No news. Dan's Data Handling report will have any relevant news from SLAC.
Likelihood analysis
Jim fixed a TS calculation bug (reported by Jean) in pyLikelihood.
Analia is continuing to work on the python script described last week to produce TS contour maps for model parameters. The current plan is to not make these parameters be coordinates of sources - owing I think to the computational overhead. Analia may have the script in SLAC CVS next week. This script will not be used in the GUC Beta test.
GRB tools
James described a quick fix that he has implemented in the now-released version of gtrspgen. Artifacts in the response matrices that it generated were traced to the energy dispersions not being normalized for the DC2 response functions, i.e., the normalization was energy and angle dependent. The calculations in gtrspgen now enforce normalization.
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that development is continuing on the tool for blind searches for periodicity (A4). This will be via discrete FFTs, possibly segmented in time to limit memory requirements at the cost of some sensitivity. Pat may offer pointers about methods for large FFTs that do not require correspondingly large memory spaces.
Observation simulation
Max described his plans for further development of PulsarSpectrum. In addition to the MJDREF time system correction (checked in and in v7r5) he has implemented a method for describing phase-dependent spectra for the use of the simulator. It uses a 2-dimensional histogram. We didn't say it at the meeting but I'm fairly sure that this is a code word for ROOT file. He is also developing detailed specifications of these histograms for the bright EGRET pulsars. Also, Max has been researching timing noise, and consulting with Alice about it. He plans to implement timing noise as an option (actually 2 different options). This will be important for realistic studies of performance of, e.g., pulsar searches. As he makes the code available Max will also update the documentation for the Workbook.
User interface and infrastructure
No news. Dave, Chris, and James have been discussing implementing GUIs for the science tools via st_graph. Development is still on the horizon; everyone is busy.
Source Catalog
The catalog group met this week. Jean presented detailed results from likelihood analysis of the 'test pattern' files. You might be intersted to see how well likelihood did at resolving closely-spaced sources (with known positions), and how well the optimal filter algorithm did in finding them in the first place. We also continued the discussion about standardizing on counterpart catalogs to be used to evaluate candidate identifications for LAT point sources.