Science Tools Working Group
We did not meet this week.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v8r0p4. See what is different in current LATEST1.1878 build.
Data products: No news.
Databases and related utilities
No news. For SC2 we'll have the FT1 data available from both the GSSC data server (Tom S.) and the Astro Data Server at SLAC (Tony).
Likelihood analysis
Jim has implemented a more accurate quick calculation of Likelihood Test Statistic values for binned likelihood in PyLikelihood; the former version overestimated binned TS values by perhaps ~10% (depending on source strength). This brings the binned and unbinned TS values somewhat closer together but a gap still exists.
Unbinned vs. binned TS and fit results have continued to be studied intensively and several presentations on the subject were given at the Catalog VRVS meeting yesterday. In 25 words or less, the binned TS values are systematically larger than unbinned; the binned fits also appear to be somewhat more accurate, except possibly for the faintest sources. Bonus words: The unbinned fluxes are systematically lower than binned for long observations (~1 yr) but not for shorter intervals (few months or less). A few ideas remain not yet explored for characterizing the behavior, basically involving simplifying the system (response functions, scanning, etc.) further.
GRB tools
No news. Jim has the irfInterface package now catching the dgaus8Exception reported last week "to handle cases where the integrator reports insufficently accurate results." The exception, which was being thrown for parts of convolutions in gtrspgen that didn't matter much for the results, was causing gtrspgen to terminate in some circumstances.
Pulsar tools
From James: "James Peachey and Masa Hirayama continued work to rationalize the pulsation search tools gtpsearch and gtpspec. This week they completed the first set of necessary modifications of the TimeRep class family and began altering the applications to use the modifications. The resulting simplifications will make adding barycentering on the fly straightforward and compact by allowing the application classes to share
a common method to perform the operations."
Observation simulation
Not much news. According to the release notes, Richard has modified the microQuasar source to reduce text output.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From James: "James Peachey created a new test installation for the Science Tools in which he experimented with an interim installation script. This script is not intended for long term use, rather to ease installation and testing of the Science Tools in the GSSC development environment. The script is very simple; it searches through the directory structure to find built binaries and installs them in a top-level bin/ directory, then creates an initialization script and a wrapper which together allow the tools to be run without the user modifying his/her environment significantly. The wrappers behave much the same as those used by the usual Science Tools binary installation, but with the advantage that they do not rely on CMT or on the Release Manager database."
Source Catalog
Met this week; see above.