Monday, October 22, 2007

rbnrmf bug in energy binning

I made an error in the new energy binning option - I should be averaging the response rather than summing it so the resulting responses were too large by the binning factor. Also, there was a one-off problem for responses with zero-based channels. Checked in fixes.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Preprints

Franz discusses confidence regions on ratios.

Hague et al. discuss statistical tests for deviations from the power-law for the cosmic ray energy spectrum.

Lang & Hughes investigate the ability to localize SMBH mergers from the GW signal.

Comastri & Brusa review AGN results from X-ray surveys and their multiwavelength follow-up and consider that case for 2-3 Msec XMM survey.

Rapetti & Allen consider what it would take to use X-ray observations of cluster of galaxies to determine dark energy parameters with a precision comparable to other methods.

Brunetti et al estimate hard X-ray fluxes from clusters of galaxies and relate them to prospective observations with SIMBOL-X.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

webspec

Spent some time working on webspec. Main changes are to the look : the front page is more compact so I don't have to scroll down to hit the button; the advanced page allows up to 9 components; the basic and advanced pages both read the list of missions from the same file so they won't fall out of step as in the past; the page to set exposure and parameters has been tidied up a bit; the results page now has the plot next to the set of options to change plotting parameters.

I would like to have the replot option simply change the plot on the current results page rather than opening a new page however this would involve substantial programming changes. Another nice option would be the ability to make contour plots (by running steppar) however this is a potentially huge cpu hog and I'm not sure we want to do this on the main web servers. Perhaps this would be better as part of heraspec.

UPDATE: Fixed a problem that appeared under Safari - the check box for background was not coming up checked by default because I put checked inside double quotes in the html input tag.


Monday, October 15, 2007

OpenMP

gcc 4.2 and later now includes support for the OpenMP shared-memory parallelization API. This would be a good way of adding support to xspec for multi-core machines. This can be used in C/C++ or Fortran and provides a simple way of parallelizing loops.