Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week and will skip next week in observance of the collaboration meeting.
The current version of ScienceTools is v9r1. The differences
from v9 show a number of small fixes, mostly by Jim, in several packages, in addition to the parameter name updates.Updates to the parameter names are nearly complete. v9r1, which will have the complete set of updated parameter names, may be ready by tomorrow, with correspondingly updated documentation in the User Workbook.
Data products: No news except that some issues recently raised by Isabelle regarding details of the contents of the LAT source catalog are posted for comment.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news. From the release notes it looks Jim is setting up the likelihood analysis to allow for IRFs that depend on time - meaning that if for some reason different IRFs apply to different time ranges, likelihood could handle it.
GRB tools
James completed the parameter name changes last week.
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "In the pulsar tools area, James and I are still working on the top-level code of the pulsar tools. One good news is that the work on gtpsearch is done, we think, and now we are hammering on gtophase and gtephem (i.e., trying to fit the new code to those applications). One bad news is I identified another and reported it to JIRA (PULS-38)."
Observation simulation
James imported gttakosim (orbitSim package), the orbit propagator/attitude simulator written by Giuseppe Romeo. Jim added it to the Science Tools builds, and it is in v9r1, sans documentation. Giuseppe has sent me a document describing the tool and example input and output files, and is willing to help make a Workbook tutorial and reference page. It is a few steps up from gtorbsim in terms of being able to generate realistic pointing histories. Ask me where the name comes from.
From Giuseppe: "Also, a word of warning, the code checked in has a bug which I have already fixed, and gave to James to be checked in. You should wait until that has been done before running the orbit simulator with the given init file." [This has not been done yet]
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news.
Source Catalog
Met yesterday. Jean posted (but could not present owing to audio problems with EVO) an update on the catalog analysis of the obssim2 data set. Toby and Ludovic gave presentations about source localization; Toby's pointlike is now using BACK events in addition to FRONT. Tom reviewed the current results for the comparison of source detection algorithms.
Science Tools Working Group
Met this week (attendees: N Giglietto, M Brigida, A Cillis, T Stephens, C Patterson, T Burnett, J Chiang, J Peachey, S Digel, W Focke, E Winter, D Davis, T Porter)
Nico gave a presentation about approaches that he has been developing for analyzing moving sources (in particular the sun and moon) in LAT data using to the extent possible the standard Science Tools. He described the packages that he has developed and some of the remaining analysis issues. He'll have an updated presentation during the collaboration meeting.
The current version of ScienceTools is v9. Updates to the parameter names are nearly complete. v9r1, which will have the complete set of updated parameter names, may be ready by tomorrow, with correspondingly updated documentation in the User Workbook.
Data products: No news except that configuration control of the FFD and ICD for the SDP is coming before the FOR, which is PDQ.
Databases and related utilities
Tom S. will create another instance of the data server at the GSSC for the 55-day run, when he gets the files. "It's not difficult to have different data sets, I just have to clone the server and set up a new MySQL database. It's just a matter of 5 minutes to create the data base and then starting the server programs with a different configuration file. The part that takes the most time is creating the web page to point to the servers and the data." This means that both obssim2 and 55-day (or whatever we ultimately call it) will be available from the GSSC.
As probably will be mentioned in this meeting, Tony gave an update on the SLAC Data Server at the Service Challenge Steering meeting yesterday.
Likelihood analysis
Jim has implemented the parameter name changes and updated the reference pages for the likelihood tools. As of Wednesday he was working on updating the likelihood tutorials, including removing DC2-specific references.
GRB tools
James reports that he is in the middle of renaming the parameters.
Pulsar tools
Masa reported via e-mail that he and James think that they have fixed the bug mentioned last week, (JIRA PULS-37).
Observation simulation
The only news is Jim's implementation of the parameter name changes in gtobssim. I'm inquiring with Dave D. about when we might have the replacement for gtorbsim in the repository and included in the Science Tools.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
James has ape ready to be delivered for the Science Tools, but is juggling other work - he hopes to deliver it soon.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week; will meet next week.
Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week or last; we will meet next Wednesday
The current version of ScienceTools is v9. Updates to the parameter names are in progress (and in at least one case are already in v9). v9r1, which will have the complete set of updated parameter names, should be ready by late next week, with correspondingly updated documentation in the User Workbook.
Data products: No news.
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
From Jim: "I have implemented the parameter name changes for the Likelihood tools and updated corresponding tool reference pages in the workbook on cvs. These changes are in effect as of Likelihood v13 and pyLikelihood v1."
GRB tools
No news. David posted an interesting study of the GLAST-Swift FOV Overlap.
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "In the pulsar tools area, we are still working on the top-level code of gtpsearch. The good news is that it was almost done, we thought, but the bad news is that I found a bug (JIRA PULS-37) which makes us stick to gtpsearch a little longer."
Observation simulation
From Jim: "The parameter name changes have been implemented in observationSim v7."
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From Jim: "I have updated makeFT1 to include the start and stop times of the input merit as parameters given at runtime, and I have modified the code so that an empty FT1 file is produced if no events from the merit ntuple pass the specified cuts. Both of these changes were requested by
Anders and Warren to service the L1 pipeline needs. fitsgen v3r5.
For columns to be added to the makeFT1 output, such as MC_SRC_ID, that are not part of the FT1 definition via the FT1variables file, I have added a feature that allows the user to specify the data type of the added column, e.g., "J" meaning 4-byte signed integer for MC_SRC_ID. fitsGen v3r6.
I fixed a bug in gtselect that affected the specification of time range cuts where lower limit for the time range was zero. dataSubselector v5r4p1.
Python 2.5.1 has finally been made the version used by ScienceTools in ST LATEST and HEAD."
Source Catalog
Met last week - see the agenda and minutes. Interesting discussion included applying Toby's pointLike to improve the positions of sources found by MR_filter. On Wednesday, Tom S. posted initial comparisons of several source detection algorithms that are candidates for the catalog pipeline.
Science Tools Working Group
Met this week - 9 attendees.
The current version of ScienceTools is v9. This has the fixes described in last week's report for v8r2 and also implements the tool name changes. Chuck (as probably has or will be mentioned during this meeting) has a new version of the Science Tools section of the User Workbook waiting in the wings, which with some verification should be online by early next week, at which time v9 will be advertised to subscribers to the Service Challenge mailing list. As of Wednesday evening Tom S. was ingesting the reprocessed obssim2 data into the GSSC server.
Regarding the GLAST Users Group meeting reported on two weeks ago, the GUG now plans its next 'beta test' of the Science Tools for September.
Data products: No news. Analia submitted a JIRA issue (DATAPROD-3) about problems (violations of FITS standards) found by fverify for some of the FITS data products. Jim has implemented fixes, or workarounds for an artifact that tip introduces, that fix most of the problems that she reported.
Databases and related utilities
Tony gave a great presentation on the Data Server yesterday at the Service Challenge Steering meeting.
Likelihood analysis
No news but see utilities and Catalog news below.
GRB tools
No LAT-specific news. David reports that gtbin needs a small update to handle detector-specific deadtime in calculating 'exposures' (accumulated live times) for GBM data.
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he and James are reaching the point with refactoring gtpsearch that they can start propagating the reorganization through the rest of the pulsar tools. They have proposed additional columns in the pulsar ephemeris file for handling the timing parameters of binary pulsars; the ingest system for ephemerides at the GSSC is still to be developed but is on the not-too-distant horizon.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Jim has modified gtmktime to not change TSTART/TSTOP values in FT1 files. As reported last weeek he has optimized the tool so that it is execution time does not scale as N^2 (number of time intervals) but as a much slower function of N.
See last week's report for an important note about gtselect.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week.
Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week.
The current version of ScienceTools is v8r2. This has the fix to the Likelihood bug in handling the HANDOFF response functions that was described last week. It also fixes the EVENT_CLASS numbering of the front and back HANDOFF response functions to be 0 and 1, respectively, as they are for other response functions.
This means that v8r2 cannot be used for likelihood analysis with any already-generated gtobssim data set that you have using the HANDOFF response functions. This includes the obssim2 data set. Nicola has reprocessed it - fixing the EVENT_CLASS settings and regenerating the diffuse responses. We have learned of a small bug in how the TSTART/TSTOP keywords are set in some of the daily files in the obssim2 dataset. The bug is of no consequence (that I'm aware of) for any Science Tools analysis but would at least have caused the files to fail the ingest checks at the GSSC if Tom had not already had to disable them to accept the daily files that we sent him. So we are considering what to do, and if you want to know the details I'll tell you. We'll figure out what to do soon, so we can get the reprocessed obssim2 data into the servers.
Today at Harvard, David Band is describing the analysis tools at a Getting Involved with GLAST workshop.
Regarding the GLAST Users Group meeting reported on last week, they GUG plans to have another 'beta test' of the Science Tools, sometime September-November.
Data products: No news
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
No news but see utilities and Catalog news below.
GRB tools
James reports fixing a problem with the unit test in the rspgen package
Pulsar tools
From James: "James and Masa continued refactoring gtpsearch. During this period, they concentrated on rationalizing the application code with an eventual view of handling barycentering on-the-fly. They continued breaking the
application into pieces using helper methods in the application class. These helper methods are streamlining the flow of the main gtpsearch application, and in the future will allow gtpspec and other pulsar tools to take advantage of the periodSearch application classes.
James also reports fixing build problems in the periodSearch package.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From Jim: "gtmktime [future name for gtmaketime] has been optimized and showed a factor of 50 speedup for a 10^7 s gtobssim simulation with standard orbit and rocking. gtmktime does not modify TSTART or TSTOP or other date keywords.
gtselect can now accept a list of FT1 files. Non-GTI keywords are compared for consistency, but GTIs are not examined, so one can have overlapping GTIs (and potentially multiply-included events); and the GTIs are merged without discretion. gtselect ensures that the TSTART, TSTOP, and date-related keywords are synched up to the user's
selections in all HDUs."
The above modifications mean that the GTI bounds will not necessarily correspond to the TSTART & TSTOP values.
Source Catalog
Met this week. Jean reported that a preliminary catalog for obssim2 is ready - ancillary information like light curves and fluxes in different bands will come later but the numbers of sources should not change. He has provided it to Tom for posting at the GSSC and will make an announcement in the SC Users Forum when it is ready. the catalog analysis relied on binned likelihood and so was not affected by the swap of front and back HANDOFF response functions.
Other topics included presentations on source localization (by Toby and Vincent), an update on MR_FILTER's performance on 'test patterns' (Ludovic) and some discussion about the contents of the obssim2 source list.
Science Tools Working Group
We met this week.
The current version of ScienceTools is v8r1, but it is not quite the same v8r1 as last week. Owing to work that he already had in progress to implement the Proposed Tool Name Changes, when Jim fixed the bug in how Likelihood handles the HANDOFF response functions (see below), the only workable option for making a release with that bug fix but not the tool name changes was to move a tag or two and re-release v8r1. If you had installed it before June 13, you should remove and reinstall it.
As Jim proposed and was discussed at the Service Challenge Steering meeting on Wednesday, next week he will release v8r1p1 which will fix the reversal of front and back designations (so EVENT_CLASS = 0 for front and 1 for back). This will be synchronized with a release of a reprocessed obssim2 data set. v9, with the tool name changes and probably the Proposed Parameter Name Changes would follow.
Updated Pass 4 response functions (of which HANDOFF is the current example) are anticipated around the time that the next Service Challenge data set (3-hour simulations via Gleam) will be released. The current HANDOFF response functions will not disappear from Science Tools at that time, so the obssim2 data will remain analyzable. I'd guess that the new Pass 4 response functions (name TBD) will first appear in something like v9r1.
Regarding the GLAST Users Group meeting reported on last week, they GUG plans to have another 'beta test' of the Science Tools, sometime September-November.
Data products: No news.
Databases and related utilities
No news. Tom S. reports about 80 queries for obssim2 data have been served by the GSSC so far - this exludes queries that Tom has made to test the server. Some queries failed on June 1, but it was not immediately clear why.
Likelihood analysis
Other than Jim's finding and fixing the handoff response handling bug and apparent Likelihood bias the news is that studies of likelihood analysis - TS values and parameter biases from unbinned and binned likelihood continue. Florien & Vincent have been looking at the accuracy of the likelihood calculation in the unbinned case by comparing the value of log(Likelihood) for a 360 day-long simulation (simple point source + diffuse background) with the log(Likelihood) derived by evaluating the likelihood function for 10-day subintervals of the data set and adding the results. The difference was about 1%, and this translated to measurable differences in TS. Not clear yet whether the magnitude of the differences is a concern (about 80 out of TS = 4000 for the relatively bright point source considered).
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he and James continue to work on sorting out the code of gtpsearch for barycentering-on-the-fly. He and James also checked that the proposed parameter name changes do not affect the parameters used by the pulsar tools.
Observation simulation
Max R. (who submitted his Ph.D. thesis today) has checked in a fix for the initialization problems encountered with PulsarSpectrum in the recent attempts that Tom G. has made for a SC simulation via Gleam. According to Jim the problem was an infinite loop (non-convergence) in barycenter arrival time decorrections for some time intervals.
Toby reports that he has fixed the pointed observation mode of gtorbsim, at Dave D.'s request. So now it can generate pointed observations; keep in mind that it does not perform earth avoidance slews.
The GSSC is close - really - to having a Science Tools version of the orbit/attitude simulator written by Guiseppe R. This should supercede gtorbsim
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week.
Science Tools Working Group
We did not meet this week.
The current version of ScienceTools is v8r1. Here are the differences from v8r0p4. This includes a number of mostly small updates from the previous release - some of which are mentioned below. This will be the last incremental release before v9, which as reported last week will include the Proposed Tool Name Changes and the deletion of the no-longer-needed gtcntsmap.
Ideally, v9 will also include updates to the names of parameters. Dave Davis has compiled a list of recommended changes - to a more uniform set across the tools and overall more consistent with general usage for FTOOLS for other missions in the HEASARC archive. These are bigger changes in terms of the code than the tool names. The proposed changes are now open for a (brief) comment period.
Changing names of tools and parameters will be inconvenient to existing users, and there's never a good time. Sooner is the least worst option (and we don't expect to do this again). I hope to figure out today how realistic going to v9 will be in the near term with the new parameter names incorporated. If we cannot get these changes in soon, then we'll need to hold off while the obssim2 data set (and possibly its successors) enjoys its heyday.
The GLAST Users Group (formerly GUC) met this week at Goddard; some of the presentations that they were shown are available online. Chris Shrader described the status of the GSSC, including the Science Tools. He reports that the GUG agreed that the first GSSC distribution of the science tools (to the world at large) should be at Launch + LEO + 6 months.
Data products: No news.
Databases and related utilities
No news.
Likelihood analysis
From Jim: "Responding to Jean's problems with analyzing front-only events using handoff response, I added the HANDOFF_front and HANDOFF_back combinations to those available from the IRFs loading software. To use these one would do, e.g., gtdiffrsp rspfunc=HANDOFF_front" [gtdiffrsp being the v9 name of gtdiffresp]
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he and James have done some bug fixing and continue to work on sorting out the code of gtpsearch for barycentering-on-the-fly.
Marcus Ziegler is starting to make a Science Tools version of the pulsar search with time differences algorithm. See Atwood et al. (2006).
Observation simulation
No news.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news.
Source Catalog
Met this week. The agenda included a variety of topics. Some further studies of likelihood analysis (including confidence regions reported by gtfindsrc) were presented, along with investigations of source detection in the Catalog pipeline and with the new 'test pattern' data sets.
Science Tools Working Group
We met this week.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v8r0p4. v9 should be coming in the next week, before (or as) people are gearing up for obssim2 analyses. v9 will include the Proposed Tool Name Changes and the deletion of the no-longer-needed gtcntsmap. Ideally, v9 will also include some updates to the names of parameters. Dave Davis is working on uniform set of parameter names - uniform across the tools and consistent with common usage among FTOOLS. The parameter name changes would not change the functionality of the tools, of course. Chuck is aware of the need to update the workbook for this and with everything else going on that may take a bit.
Data products: No news.
Databases and related utilities
No news. For SC2 the FT1 data are available from both the GSSC data server (Tom S.) and the Astro Data Server at SLAC (Tony).
Likelihood analysis
No news other than Jim's fix for the calculation of Test Statistic values for binned likelihood analyses, which was in last week's report.
GRB tools
From David Band: "I will be working with James on adding the livetime correction in gtbin when accumulating GBM spectra from their TTE files. Also, we have been talking with Keith Arnaud about PHAII and RSPII files, and how the
PHAII spectra can be linked to RSP matrices and background files."
Pulsar tools
James reports that he and Masa "continue to refactor the application classes for the periodSearch binaries. They consolidated the code that creates the objects used to represent time values, resulting in streamlining of the code in gtpsearch."
Observation simulation
Not much news. Jim explained that the unit test of microQuasar is failing in the RM builds because it needs to be run (with gtobssim) using an FT2 file that I guess is not available. The source itself is apparently working.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week.
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.
Science Tools Working Group
We met this week and expect to return to an every-other-week schedule for the foreseeable future.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v8r0p4. This should be considered the 'Service Challenge 2' release unless we come up with another name for Service Challenge 2 (like obssim2 or The Empire Strikes Back).
Data products: Jim has implemented the 2 changes to the FT2 FITS specification that came out of the Pointing and live time history discussion.
Databases and related utilities
No news. It looks like 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). For ASP testing, it also will be ingested (most likely as orbit-sized 'runs') into the Data Catalog at SLAC (also Tony).
Likelihood analysis
Jim reports that he has made gtfindsrc more robust against the rare circumstance that the likelihood surface near maximum has a jump in it that otherwise stalls the amoeba search algorithm.
Work is still continuing on understanding the differences in results (parameter values and TS values) between binned and unbinned likelihood analyses. Contributors include Jim, Vincent Le Biez, Florian Kraft, Benoit, Jean, Ludovic, Toby, and Vincent Lonjou. Space does not permit an adequate summary here. The likelihood Test Statistic values for unbinned analysis are coming out significantly less than for binned analysis, a factor of ~1.4, increasing (or possibly not) with decrease source flux. There's some prejudice to believing the binned TS values, possibly because they are larger. The fluxes reported by unbinned likelihood may (or might not) be slightly biased on the low side. I'm trying to give the impression here that we are getting somewhere but still getting there.
GRB tools
Jim reported a problem with the gtrspgen - actually from Nicola and Nukri - that has to do with getting an exception from the integrator (dgauss8) for the energy dispersion. This is in a part of the code that is checking accuracy and seems to get hung up way out in the tails (e.g., at ~16 GeV when the central energy for a convolution was 160 MeV). Jim thinks that a workaround can be implemented via the irfs package, where the energy dispersions are looked up.
Pulsar tools
James reports that he and Masa are working on consolidating the base classes in the pulsar tools and should have this done by the end of the current build cycle (~1 week from now). This will allow the planned barycenter-on-the-fly feature to be implemented in a relatively straightforward way.
Observation simulation
James reports that Richard ran into a segmentation fault problem with the microquasar source, which was traced to it trying to query for events after the last source gave its last photon. Jim and Toby helped to sort out the resolution.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
James reports that at the GSSC they are working on the HEASARC aspects of the build system for the science tools (for when they get into the business of supporting and delivering the science tools for guest investigators. Larry Brown had made a lot of progress toward automatically getting the science tools built using the HEASARC's hmake - involving parsing CMT requirements files. If we do away with CMT, as seems fairly likely, their Perl scripts presumably will need updating, and some care will need to be taken to minimize the effect of the change from the perspective of getting the tools to build under hmake. Jim and James are going to consult about this.
James has been in communication with the developers of ds9 regarding the possibility of modifying ds9 to make proper region-of-interest selections (that could then be passed back to something like ModelEditor. It isn't an easy problem.
Dave Davis posted proposed name changes for some of the science tools that came out of the discussions at the GSSC-LAT Science Tools Meeting at SLAC, April 2007. He's requesting feedback in the next week. The new names are in general shorter and more uniform; yes, we're keeping 'gt'. For a couple of the tools, 2 possible new names are proposed.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week.
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.
Science Tools Working Group
Did not have a VRVS meeting this week, and with the ISOC workshop next week we won't meet again for 2 weeks.
The points of agreement and plan for near-term work (i.e., Action Items) that came out of GSSC-LAT Science Tools Meeting at SLAC, April 2007 have been added to that page.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v8r0p3. v8r0p4 will be on its way this afternoon, containing (at least) updates to PulsarSpectrum and gtmaketime.
Data products: No news yet this week
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news. Work is continuing on understanding the differences in results (parameter values and TS values) between binned and unbinned likelihood analyses. Jean and Jim gave presentations on this at the Catalog VRVS meeting yesterday. Florien Kraft and Vincent Le Biez are running more simulations at SLAC like those Jim has made - in fact, starting with Jim's script. In the catalog analysis of the SC1 data, Jean is finding that binned likelihood analysis produces greater TS values and less biased results for source fluxes. In the simulations of point sources on isotropic backgrounds that Jim, Florian, and Vincent have made, the TS values from binned analyses are found to depend fairly strongly on the bin size - not a big surprise. So far the latter studies are finding that the unbinned likelihood analysis (on average) gives correct results, but Jean's studies using the SC1 data (which are much more complicated - including structured diffuse emission and faint sources and soures with a variety of spectra) appaear to find that unbinned results are biased.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "In the pulsar tools area, now gtpsearch and gtpspec are capable of creating a FITS file that contains a search result. They are available in the latest tagged version."
Observation simulation
Max has found a workaround to the problem of PulsarSpectrum sometimes wanting to look outside the time range of an FT2 file. This can happen owing to the nature of the arrival time corrections needed for pulsar simulations. He had worked out a way to catch this circumstance - as described before. The new method should be more robust.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
I'll put it here: Jim has fixed a time precision problem with how gtmaketime defined starting and ending times when it operated on an FT1 file.
Source Catalog
Met this week; see above.
Science Tools Working Group
Did not have a VRVS meeting this week. Dave Davis, James Peachey, Chris Shrader, Tom Stephens, and Eric Winter are visiting SLAC from GSSC, and Toby Burnett was at SLAC on Wednesday. Discussions will continue through the day on Thursday. The discussion topics and approximate schedule are here. As of Thursday morning, we are somewhat ahead of schedule, although today we add one or two topics not on the posted agenda, like a discussion about ISOC operations tools and the coming ISOC workshop.
The current version of ScienceTools is v8r0p3. See what is different from v8r0p2. The updates from v8r0p2 include some related to the PSF normalization and the default behavior of makeFT1 that Jim described in his presentation at Monday's C&A meeting.
Data products: See the comments from David Band, Anders Borgland, Jonathan Ormes, and Tom Stephens on the issues that I had posted for the pointing and livetime history.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news. See the release notes diff linked above to read about the update to gtfindsrc in the current version of the Science Tools.
GRB tools
From James: "James P. worked with Eric Winter to check in and tag a new evtbin that contains the test data they generated previously."
Pulsar tools
From James: "James P. and Masa added the capability to the periodSearch package to write detailed search output into a FITS output file similar to that produced by the Xronos/Ftool powspec. They added this capability to gtpspec and gtpsearch as well as to the periodSearch unit test code." I haven't asked what 'detailed' means, and I'm not familiar with powspec.
Observation simulation
Max is working on a new fix to the problem of PulsarSpectrum sometimes wanting to look outside the time range of an FT2 file - owing to the nature of barycenter decorrection, PulsarSpectrum could want to look forwards (or backward) in time by up to the ~9 minute Sun-earth light travel time. His former method for trapping the error condition of trying to look outside the time range for which the FT2 file was defined broke when the format of the error string from the astro package was changed. Max needed a way to determine (in the code) the start and end times of the FT2 file, and to make it robust against the use of the start_time parameter; Jim has suggested a way to do this.
Richard has realized that his microQuasar source needs 'persistency' in the definitions of its outbursts if a simulation is divided into more than one time range, as it is for the long Service Challenge simulations. The symptom was that some of the microquasar sources did not look like they should have in the recent SC simulation.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week.
Science Tools Working Group
Did not meet this week. The next meeting will be face-to-face at SLAC on April 18-19.
The current version of ScienceTools is v8r0p2. See what is different from v8. The updates from v8 are mostly small but important. Many relate to handling simulations (in flux, genericSources, GRBtemplate, GRBobs, and microQuasar packages), but the rest are in tools (and handoff_response) that you use.
Data products: Join David B., Anders, and Tom S. and get your comments in by tomorrow on issues related to cleaning up the definition of FT2 have been posted for comment.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news. The developments related to Likelihood in v8r0p2 of the Science Tools have already been reported on.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reported (in an e-mail that I lost track of and unfortunately cannot quote directly from) that gtpspec has a bug that he and James are working on fixing. The problem arises if the cancelpdot option is used and the timing information is read from an ephemeris database file, and the particular pulsar has several entries (different parameters for different time ranges) in the ephemeris file. I am not sure I understood exactly what the problem was but I guess that it related to the changing pdot values.
Observation simulation
In case this has not been mentioned already, Jim tracked down the reason that the last 2 days of the SC2 sky simulation were not generating any gamma rays - it had to do with a miscommunication between GPS and PulsarSpectrum related to PulsarSpectrum trying to recognize when GPS was about to complain about a requested time being outside the range of the FT2 file. The trick that formerly worked stopped working when GPS was updated.
Otherwise I'm not aware of any simulation development news for this week.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news.
Source Catalog
Met this week. Jean presented further investigations of the results from the catalog analysis of the SC1 data set, including results of a light curve analysis run on monthly (instead of weekly, to save time) time intervals and comparison of results from unbinned and binned likelihood analysis. We also discussed in detail plans for making more careful and detailed comparisons of source detection algorithms - Tom S. will lead this effort.
Science Tools Working Group
Met this week. The next meeting will be face-to-face at SLAC on April 18-19.
The current version of ScienceTools remains v8.
Data products: Some issues related to cleaning up the definition of FT2 have been posted for comment. We had some discussion about TT vs. UTC and how what comes down in the LAT science data telemetry gets related to TT. Also, Anders has been thinking about questions like how versions of processing will be kept track of in the L1 pipeline and recorded with events or runs (and eventually find its way to the FT1 files). This is surprisingly subtle; most likely the CALIB_VERSION and RECON_VERSION keywords now defined for FT1 will need modification.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Jim has added the gtexposure tool to the Science Tools. Basically, it calculates exposure vs. time for a given direction on the sky. It is described in his What's New in ST since DC2? presentation last week at the collaboration meeting.
GRB tools
From James: "James worked with Eric Winter to regenerate test data for the evtbin packages using DC1 data. This was a "warm-up" project but useful to do because the previous test data was very old and out of date. Fortunately, the update uncovered no new bugs."
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that the first version of gtpspec is available and it seems to work. Significances of results for separate runs for different Pdot values can be interpreted by keeping track of the trials factors that each run reports individually.
From James: "James and Masa finished rationalizing the time corrections in gtpspec and gtpsearch. All times are now corrected for pdot cancellation and binary demodulation, thus resolving the subtle bug described [previously]. In addition, they discovered that the period search tools were using TSTART/TSTOP from the event header to set up the start and stop times of the search, but that using the GTIs (start time of first GTI to stop time of last GTI) is more correct, and results in better searches. The effect is particularly strong in gtpspec. With all these changes, they checked in and tagged the first version of the
pulsar tools to contain the gtpspec binary."
Observation simulation
Jim has fixed a bug that caused a small (1/2 pixel typically) offset between the positions of diffuse sources in simulations and corresponding DiffuseSource counterparts in likelihood models. Riccardo Rando and Luigi Tibaldo had noticed this problem.
Max has implemented a new way to simulate timing noise - one he likes much better than his previous versions - and this is in the latest version of PulsarSpectrum.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news.
Source Catalog
Did not meet this week.