Science Tools Working Group
Met this week. We probably will meet next on Nov. 15. At this week's meeting we briefly discussed Science tool development directions over the next year; this topic will come up again, and the page is open for comments.
The version of ScienceTools remains v7r5. Navid has made DC2-like distribution packages of v7r5 for all of the platforms, for the GUC test. My understanding is that the MacOS and Windows versions may have troubles traceable to the external libraries; problems with Python in the MacOS version have been resolved as of the version that Navid uploaded today.
Data products: No news.
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
Jim reports that he is working on adding the ad hoc energy correction as described at the IRF working group meeting on October 27. As Jim described in his presentation, the problem is this: "The energy reconstruction from Gleam does not produce measured energy distributions whose average (or mode) values correspond to the input (MC) energy values". Thus, using measured energies to look up response functions (as we generally do with likelihood analysis) results in a bias. To a good approximation the effect can be corrected for; the ultimate solution may be to adjust the energy dispersion functions to return the correct value on average. Jim says that the bias observed in some DC2 spectral fits may also be partially due to errors in the effective areas in the DC2 response functions.
Analia gave a presentation on her Python likelihood script that makes TS contour maps. It is not yet in the CVS repository. It works, and quickly if the model has only 2 parameters (which are therefore both constrained when evaluating the TS grid). It is much, much slower if multiple parameters are fit. Jean and Toby asked about the comparison with the error matrices reported by Minuit. Analia may look into this. The script is not in the CVS repository at SLAC. Dave Davis indicated that the GSSC intends to evolve this into a tool for users.
GRB tools
No news.
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he and James are still working on the blind search tool (A4). He is also working on the user-level documentation for the pulsar tools in advance of the GUC test. In particular he is making the examples include use of the pulsar ephemeris database.
Observation simulation
No news. Max presented pulsar simulations with phase-dependent light curves at a Pulsar/SNR/Plerion WG VRVS meeting, VRVS Meeting Oct. 31, 2006, this week.
User interface and infrastructure
No news.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week and will not meet until Nov. 8.