There are a number of SAS-related jobs in the SAS Jobs Listing this month in the UK and US, and the links are open to all site visitors:
UK: Pharmaceutical permanent positions from SQN Recruitment.
US: Analytics contract-to-hire positions from Pinnacle Solutions.
Please use the links in the SAS Jobs Listing to apply for these positions.
Recruiters
I’m always looking for new recruiters to post SAS-related jobs on this site covering India, UK, the Americas, Europe and the Rest of the World. In particular, I would like to include jobs in India and Europe, where nearly half of the registered blog members are located, but currently there are no active recruiters for them.
If you have a regular supply of jobs, then there is a free trial which is open to all recruiters, but with 2 simple rules:
The free trial will be extended by an additional calendar month only when a job is posted, and will expire automatically if no job has been posted in a calendar month.
The posted jobs must be SAS-related.
The current regional breakdown of registered blog members is as follows, but note that the SAS Jobs Listing is open to all site visitors:
I’ve been using the LeftSide theme on this blog site for some time now, but it hasn’t been working as well on phones and tablets recently, so I’ve decided to update the theme to Rebalance. This new theme was designed to adapt more appropriately to desktop, phone and tablet screens, so it should give everyone a better view of my blog.
There are a number of SAS-related jobs in the SAS Jobs Listing this month in the UK and US, and the links are open to all site visitors:
UK: Pharmaceutical permanent positions from SQN Recruitment.
US: Analytics contract-to-hire positions from Pinnacle Solutions.
Please use the links in the SAS Jobs Listing to apply for these positions.
Recruiters
I’m always looking for new recruiters to post SAS-related jobs on this site covering India, UK, the Americas, Europe and the Rest of the World. In particular, I would like to include jobs in India and Europe, where nearly half of the registered blog members are located, but currently there are no active recruiters for them.
If you have a regular supply of jobs, then there is a free trial which is open to all recruiters, but with 2 simple rules:
The free trial will be extended by an additional calendar month only when a job is posted, and will expire automatically if no job has been posted in a calendar month.
The posted jobs must be SAS-related.
The current regional breakdown of registered blog members is as follows, but note that the SAS Jobs Listing is open to all site visitors:
This is a project to read the daily Johns Hopkins COVID-19 data and visualise the national infection and fatality trends using Base SAS and SAS/STAT:
Download the GitHub Desktop software from https://desktop.github.com/ and install it on your computer where you will be running SAS Studio or SAS University Edition. For instructions on how to install SAS University Edition on your own computer please read my blog post “Are you learning about SAS?”.
Clone the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 data at https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19, and then Pull the latest data, using the GitHub Desktop. This will reduce the time need to download all of the latest data each time you run the SAS Studio project, as a simple and quick Pull request in GitHub Desktop is all that is required each time.
Open the CPF project file in SAS Studio (requires Base SAS and SAS/STAT) or SAS University Edition (making certain you have created a Shared Folder(s) first that are pointing to where your GitHub files and CPF project file are stored).
Update the “run first” program to include your GitHub file folder in the &_dir macro variable assignment. The CSV files we will be using can be found in the /csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_daily_reports folder.
Submit each program in order given below (or submit all of the programs in the project’s flow together):
(1) “run first” assigns the location of the data to the &_dir macro variable.
(2) “Read CSV files” creates the SAS data sets in WORK by reading all of the CSV files in the csse_covid_19_daily_reports folder. Summarise the records by Country_Region to remove finer detail in the csse_covid_19_daily_reports.
(3) “Calculate regression lines” generates the regression lines for confirmed cases between 100 and 10,000, and deaths between 10 and 1,000, to include on the graphs. The regression lines appear to be straight in the semi-log plots, but are actually exponential to match the initial growth of confirmed cases, so that “flattening” of the curves can be identified more easily.
(4) “Semi-log plots of confirmed vs deaths” generates the graphs for countries where COVID-19 has had more than 1,000 confirmed cases or more than 100 deaths.
Some questions for you to answer:
(a) Where could my “Read CSV files” program be improved?
(b) Why is the US graph split at around 20Mar2020? Is this a problem with the data or my program?
(c) Are all of cases being included?
This project is open to SAS programmers and to researchers. Follow the above instructions yourself, and then see if you can improve my SAS code by answering the questions.
Please send your saved SAS Studio flow containing your improved versions of the SAS programs to phil@hollandnumerics.org.uk. Anyone providing improvements that can be incorporated will be added to the credits for this project.
My wife is the keen gardener, and I usually refer to myself as the “destructive gardener”, because my main garden activities are mowing the lawn, picking apples, pruning our trees and shrubs, and then shredding the branches to make mulch for the rest of the garden.
Even though I’m staying at home, for work and leisure, I still feel I’m lucky to have a garden to view and walk around. In fact I make use of my small garden pond to help relax in between working by standing quietly for a few minutes each day and looking for wildlife, like frogs, newts and insects, that live there. My colleagues call it “pond time”!
Many parts of the world have already come to end of their own “cherry blossom time”, but in the UK it has only just started, so I took a few photos this week for everyone to enjoy it with me. If you wish you can also imagine me standing next to our small pond, which can be seen on the right-hand side of the bend in the path.
The connection between nature and good mental health is well documented, so I have included a link to a mental health charity web site where its effects are discussed in more detail.
Please remember to pause every day and relax with nature, even if it is only to open a books of nature photos. You’ll be surprised how much better you’ll feel!
Kaggle are running a competition to develop a Python or R application to filter the vast collection of medical research papers that are being published every day.
The CORD-19 dataset represents the most extensive machine-readable coronavirus literature collection available for data mining to date. This allows the worldwide AI research community the opportunity to apply text and data mining approaches to find answers to questions within, and connect insights across, this content in support of the ongoing COVID-19 response efforts worldwide. There is a growing urgency for these approaches because of the rapid increase in coronavirus literature, making it difficult for the medical community to keep up.
Many of these questions are suitable for text mining, and they are encouraging researchers to develop text mining tools to provide insights on these questions.
This dataset was created by the Allen Institute for AI in partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Microsoft Research, and the National Library of Medicine – National Institutes of Health, in coordination with The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
I am not a Python or R programmer, but a SAS programmer, so I decided to make use of the freely available dataset and try to develop a simple data mining application in SAS instead, which I would like to publish to the benefit of the fight against COVID-19. I have now created a basic framework, which I am opening up to the SAS-programming community to test, improve and enhance as a saved SAS Studio flow (*.cpf), which can be imported into a Single-User SAS Studio installation, or into a SAS University Edition installed on a PC (see my blog post “Are you learning about SAS?” for details about how to install this version of SAS), as these installations can directly access files on your own computer.
The SAS programs in the SAS Studio flow are as follows:
run first:
Assigns the location of the downloaded Kaggle dataset into &_dir.
This macro variable will need to be edited to match the location of the folder where you have downloaded and extracted the CORD-19 dataset. SAS University Edition users will also need to assign a shared folder pointing to this location.
Includes %create_json_extract_script used in the Read json xxx programs below to read the JSON files containing the selected research papers into SAS, and then print out the contents of the paper.
If more non-printable characters are present that are not catered for in this macro, then additional TRANWRD() statements will need to be added here.
If anyone can devise a more elegant solution than using multiple TRANWRD() statements to convert unicode (\u9999) strings to printable 8-bit ASCII values, then I will welcome tested suggestions.
Read metadata:
Reads the CSV file containing the metadata about the research papers, including the abstract, which can be searched, and the location(s) of the related paper(s). SAS data set created = work.metadata.
Filter metadata 31Dec19:
Filters the extracted metadata to only include papers published in or after December 2019. SAS data set created = work.Since_31Dec19.
Filter metadata xxx:
Filters the SAS data set (work.Since_31Dec19) created by Filter metadata 31Dec19 to select paper abstracts containing specific particular keywords. SAS data set created = work.Since_31Dec19_xxx:
xxx=infect: WHERE INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘infect‘) AND INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘rate’) AND INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘age’) AND (INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘hcov’) OR INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘-cov’) OR INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘covid’));
xxx=cured: WHERE INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘cured‘) AND INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘rate’) AND INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘age’) AND (INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘hcov’) OR INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘-cov’) OR INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘covid’));
xxx=fatal: WHERE INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘fatal‘) AND INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘rate’) AND INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘age’) AND (INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘hcov’) OR INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘-cov’) OR INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘covid’));
xxx=recover: WHERE INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘recover‘) AND INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘rate’) AND INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘age’) AND (INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘hcov’) OR INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘-cov’) OR INDEX(lowcase(abstract), ‘covid’));
Read json xxx:
Prints all of the papers in the filtered abstracts to HTML using the metadata in the SAS data set (work.Since_31Dec19_xxx) created by Filter metadata xxx.
This project is open both to SAS programmers and to researchers. Please download the CORD-19 dataset and my SAS Studio flow. Try it out yourself, and then see if you can improve the performance, usability, flexibility or maintenance of my SAS code.
Please send your saved SAS Studio flow containing your improved versions of the SAS programs to phil@hollandnumerics.org.uk. Anyone providing improvements that can be incorporated will be added to the credits for this project.
There are a number of SAS-related jobs in the SAS Jobs Listing this month in the UK and US, and the links are open to all site visitors:
UK: Pharmaceutical permanent positions from SQN Recruitment.
US: Healthcare permanent positions from Pinnacle Solutions.
Please use the links in the job listings to apply for these positions.
Recruiters
I’m always looking for new recruiters to post SAS-related jobs on this site covering India, UK, the Americas, Europe and the Rest of the World. In particular, I would like to include jobs in Europe and India, where nearly half of the registered blog members are located, but currently there are no active recruiters for them.
If you have a regular supply of jobs, then there is a free trial which is open to all recruiters, but with 2 simple rules:
The free trial will be extended by an additional calendar month only when a job is posted, and will expire automatically if no job has been posted in a calendar month.
The posted jobs must be SAS-related.
The current regional breakdown of registered blog members is as follows, but note that the SAS Jobs Listing is open to all site visitors:
I’m saying this to save others, not because I’m a diabetic asthmatic and I am at greater risk from coronavirus, but I have been self-isolating since March 17:
Watching the news over the weekend, and seeing parks, markets and beaches packed with selfish visitors disregarding government instructions to distance themselves from others, I have to speak out for those who are at enormous risk during this pandemic. Many of you are likely to get minimal or no symptoms, but selfishly spread the infection because you believe you have not got it. The consequences, even for you, are extreme:
Not distancing from others will infect some more, and they will infect yet more.
Some of the infected people will be health workers, so those in greatest need will not have enough workers to care for them.
You may have minimal or no symptoms, but you could still have a need in the future for urgent healthcare, but there won’t be enough health workers to care for you either.
So what do you think will happen?…..
The UK government is still insisting everyone should wash their hands, but do you know how to do it thoroughly enough? I found this YouTube video in a LinkedIn post, and it is the clearest demonstration I’ve seen so far.
Please watch it and follow the advice it gives! I also ask you to keep your distance from everyone!
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