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.