[These notes are unedited and freely paraphrase the discussion; corrections are welcome. SD]
J McEnery, P Nolan, T Stephens, T Burnett, A Cillis, J Carson, R Sambruna, S Digel
[This was to be a recap of the outcome of the GUC beta test plus further
discussion of future directions for science tools development. We had a
30-minute time slot sandwiched between other VRVS meetings. No science
tools development news was volunteered; the proximity to the GUC test and the
short holiday week may have been contributing factors. Owing to technical
difficulties, Chris was unable to attend this VRVS meeting and we did not have a
recap of the GUC outcome.]
SD - SSC coming to SC workshop?
JM - Agreement was that it would be useful to have SSC presence at the workshop
but beta test pressure made that drop off the table
SD - VRVS
JM - Do we have plans to make the likelihood tool produce upper limits? E.g.,
for every burst we are going to want to say what the upper limits are.
JCar - Likelihood does report parameters of the model for each component
regardless of how high the test statistic is. So we do still have an estimated
flux that might be considered an upper limit - maybe good enough for quicklook
purposes
JM - I think that we need a strict upper limit - likelihood best fit probably
does not err on the top side of the range
SD - What did GUC beta test users do for visualization?
JM - Counts maps, running likelihood, using gtbin to look at light curves;
several people did pulsar analysis. One person fiddled around with seeing
whether SNR were extended sources, some looked at bursts.
JM - Overall people were left with a good impression
SD - Other comments?
JM - Something that did come up was the desire to get a set of independent
components - each energy range independently fit like in catalog analysis - one
can get that from existing tools but it is work.
JM - Comment on the accumulated livetime in FT1 file - essential for GRB
analysis - but not necessarily since start of mission but wrt some reference
time - otherwise not correct properly for deadtime for very bright transients.
Alternative would be to extract finely graded ft2 file for specific time
intervals
SD - Will not meet next week owing to SC workshop. Whether we meet the following week depends on coordination with the catalog group.