Science Tools Working Group
We have not met for several weeks now, owing to the GSSC visit to SLAC, the ISOC workshop, and sharing the time slot with the Catalog group. We'll have a Science Tools meeting next week.
The current version of ScienceTools is v8r0p4. Here are the differences from v8r0p3. Among the updates, it looks like Jim made some changes to facilitate builds on Windows and Mac OS-X. The Pulsar and astro packages were updated to address the time-out-of-range problem that has been extensively discussed.
Data products: No news. Tony inquired the other day about whether I knew that the event IDs would be 64-bit quantities.
Databases and related utilities
No news. You might want to look at Tony's presentation and demos from last week's ISOC workshop.
Likelihood analysis
No news. Work is still continuing on understanding the differences in results (parameter values and TS values) between binned and unbinned likelihood analyses. The topic was extensively discussed at the Catalog VRVS meeting yesterday.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From James: "James and Masa continued work on refactoring the application-level code for gtpsearch and gtpspec. Specifically, they finished designing an approach to classes to help consolidate the functionality of these tools, (and potentially gtpphase as well). The new code relies on a common infrastructure to determine the time representation based on the contents of the FT1 file."
Mara reports that after this refactoring, they will start working on barycentering-on-the-fly.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From James: "James worked on changes to Ape in preparation for its inclusion in the Science Tools. He developed a configure script that handles building Ape with and without readline in a rational way. Also, in response to a complaint from a HEASARC user, he improved the load speed of the parameter file, improving performance for large parameter files.
Source Catalog
Met this week; see above.