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.