Hi Andreas: On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Andreas Tille wrote:
On Mon, 2 Mar 2009, Carlo Segre wrote:Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist Owner: Carlo Segre <segre@debian.org> * Package name : libxray-absorption-perl Version : 2.0.1 Upstream Author : Bruce Ravel <bravel@bnl.gov> * URL : http://cars9.uchicago.edu/svn/libperlxray * License : Artistic Programming Lang: Perl Description : x-ray absorption data for the elements This module supports access to X-ray absorption data. It is designed to be a transparent interface to absorption data from a variety of sources. Currently, the only sources of data are the 1969 McMaster tables, the 1999 Elam tables, the 1993 Henke tables, and the 1995 Chantler tables. The Brennan-Cowen implementation of the Cromer-Liberman tables is available as a drop-on-top addition to this package. More resources can be added easily.Hi Carlo, can you imagine applications where this "variety of sources" includes x-ray data from medical care? I'm wondering whether this package might be an interesting target for the Debian Med physics task. Or are the ITPed packages rather targeting at particle physics and do not really targeting at medical care? IMHO it would not harm if you would add the answer to this question as a separate paragraph to the description.
Hmm, the answer is that these modules allow the calculation of how matter absorbs xrays of different energies. The McMaster tables are the basic reference and have been extended by the Elam and Henke tables to provide additional quantities (fluorescence and total cross-section). The calculations can beused byt many different kinds of researchers, basically anyone who is interested in the interaction of x-rays with matter. I am sure that this includes medical physicists but I do not know if there are other tabulations of data specifically made for medical physics.
The calculations are probably not terribly useful to particle physicists though, more to condensed matter and materials physicists and chemists. These modules are necessary components for the horae suite of programs for analysis of x-ray absorption spectroscopy and they used to be hidden in the horae package but have been split out now.
i will certainly consider improving the long description in future releases. For now, i prefer to leave them in the incoming queue as they are.
carlo -- Carlo U. Segre -- Professor of Physics Associate Dean for Special Projects, Graduate College Illinois Institute of Technology Voice: 312.567.3498 Fax: 312.567.3494 segre@iit.edu http://www.iit.edu/~segre segre@debian.org