Notes from Science Tools VRVS, July 12, 2006

These are unedited, not guaranteed to be accurate, and in any case should not be construed as including literal quotes of what people said.

SD, MH, TB, PN, JM, JC, PN, CP, TS, Dave Davis, DB, JCar

Databases and related utilities
TS - testing different configurations of disks and memory for planning purchase of flight data base systems

Likelihood
JC - Added output to gtlikelihood - not just counts spectra but also fluxes and no longer ASCII table but also FITS binary table.  Also added gtfindsource to the distribution - evaluates likelihood for a point source and then moves it around given the rest of the sources - like what gttsmap does but with Nelder-Mead algorithm - amoeba - which is also now available as an optimizer
SD - Optimizes other parameters of model?
JC - Yes, optionally
SD - Can give position uncertainties?
JC - Yes, as discussed - keeps track of log L values in vicinity of minimum, and on assumption of circular symmetry fits the shape and gives a good radius for error circle.  2 tolerances involved - 1 for the individual fits at each location and 1 for the tolerance of the convergence for the final position.  Number of evaluations depends on these, of course.
TB - How about whether there's a chance of getting a list or table of the results from the catalog applied to DC2?
JC - Yes, I could try that - have been using it for GRB position optimization

TB - I'm going to Banff conference on statistics in high-energy physics - anyone to talk to?
http://www.pims.math.ca/birs/birspages.php?task=displayevent&event_id=06w5054

GRBs

DB - no news

Pulsars
MH - No news - still working on conversion -
SD - Binary demodulation?
MH - Yes, can handle ephemerides and has been tested at some level.

Infrastructure

Workbook - CP - gtbackfile was last update and as far as I know is current
Cicerone - DB - Few comments received - need more than comments but also contributions of text - details, like in pulsars and observation simulation.  Have made some changes and corrections and additions since the first version was circulated 3-4 weeks ago.  Those are posted.  I've recently added the functions that can be fit to LAT data that Jim provided.
SD - Overlap with Workbook in that regard?
DB - Not necessarily - the functions are not currently in the workbook.  The Cicerone is supposed to be like the Xspec manual and ABC guides for different missions, which are fairly comprehensive
DB - Current version:  http://glast.gsfc.nasa.gov/ssc/dev/Analysis_Tools_Documentation/

Science Tools checkout 4?
SD - Maybe yes and maybe no
DB - Could be through gtobssim
SD - Yes
JM - For science group perspective - have a sequence of moderately sized gtobssim and Gleam runs before the end of the year.  The first of these could be relatively soon.  Two goals in all of this - science groups exploring simulations - and for testing of science tools.  Whatever we come up with want to satisfy as many goals as possible with these simulations.
DB - GUC is scheduled to beta test the tools in November - could provide them with DC2 data - they will spend only 2.5 days on it -
SD - All together
DB - Plan is that 2 weeks before hand we provide them with access to data, tools, and documentation and they are supposed to start preparing.  They will be here for 3 days - Thur-Sat and 2 of those days are supposed to be sitting in room working on analyses.
Nov. 16-18.

Last items
TB - I have a student working on tool for point source sensitivity calculations along the lines of my memo.  Wanted to ask about user interface
DB - We have a tool, question is how to put the guts in.  We built something - I can find it and send a link.  Maybe we can mesh them together
JM - Were talking about something that sits as part of the science tools distribution, right?
TB - A set of classes that makes the calculation.  What a tool would do is the question - lots of options.  Given characteristics of a source and background what is the predicted TS.
JM - Is it checked into the CVS at SLAC?
TB - My student's code is not yet
DB - No, this is a Web tool that is attached or will be attached to our Web site for use of proposers to work on proposals - and had not been thinking of checking it in.
JM - I would find it very useful to have some kind of tool to run in some way on a command line - to input sources that our defined like we have for simulations
SD - May be not at that level of detail
JM - Could still be useful
TB - What Julie says is what we are working on - assumes a point source and uniform background right now but does not have to end up that way in general.
DB - In your memo, I thought that the methodology was worked out for uniform background and point source.  This tool that we have constructed but has everything but the guts, you'd specify a point on the sky and a source spectrum and and find out what the TS for a given observing time.  Not need to be a complicated analysis underneath.
TB - This particular code will be ready in 2-3 weeks, given that I won't be around for next week.
DB - Perhaps we could use a variant of it for our tool.