China will reform its disease prevention and control system to address weaknesses exposed by the coronavirus outbreak, a senior health official said on Saturday.

India reported 3,320 new coronavirus patients and 95 deaths linked to the highly contagious illness in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 59,662 cases, the Union Health Ministry said this...

Former Australia opener Matthew Hayden recalled that MS Dhoni was not too keen on him using the 'mongoose bat'.

Gas leak was detected on a goods train transporting LPG on Saturday at Bhopal railway station in Madhya Pradesh, a Railways official said.

After being on the run for nearly a year, the National Investigation Agency on Saturday arrested Ranjit Singh, a "notorious narco-terrorist", from Sirsa as he was acting as a conduit of Pakistan-based...

The Telangana Police will soon rollout an Artificial Intelligence (AI)- based system through CCTVs to check face mask norm violations.

The number of active cases of coronavirus in Uttar Pradesh went up to 1,800 on Saturday, while nearly 1,400 people have been discharged so far, a senior official said.

Coronavirus India Live Updates:Over 3,000 people tested positive for novel coronavirus or COVID-19 in India in 24 hours, taking the total to 59,662 cases, the Union Health Ministry said this morning....

With India exiting its lockdown, where does it stand in its efforts to check coronavirus? In a global townhall with some of the world's biggest experts, NDTV's Dr Prannoy Roy talks to Economist...

The post-COVID era of movie-going will require collective efforts from audiences, production houses, cinema owners and the central and state governments; the revival of the movie-going experience to...

Border Roads Organisation has completed the construction of road from Dharchula to Lipulekh on China Border.

BJP leader Pankaja Munde has said that she was not upset over not being nominated by the party for the upcoming Legislative Council election.

The Union health Ministry will send central teams to 10 states with surging coronavirus cases, the ministry said in a statement.

[Wilmington, DE, August 16, 2019] — The plaza in front of the Leonard L. Williams Justice Center was the site for the Second Annual Community Resource Center Fair. The event was open to the community and marked the formal opening of the Community Resource Center on the second floor of the courthouse and the launch […]

DOVER (January 3, 2020): As part of a systems-wide upgrade to State of Delaware banking processes, the Office of State Treasurer Colleen C. Davis and the Department of Labor have announced improvements to unemployment benefit payment distribution. By the end of this month, the state will move unemployment debit cards to the U.S. Bank ReliaCard®, […]

Review of: Multi-Agent-Based Simulation XIX. 19th International Workshop, MABS 2018, Stockholm, Sweden, July 14, 2018, Revised Selected Papers by Davidsson, Paul, Verhagen, Harko (Eds.), reviewed by Patrycja Antosz

J Jumadi, Nick Malleson, Steve Carver and Duncan Quincey: Managing disasters caused by natural events, especially volcanic crises, requires a range of approaches, including risk modelling and analysis. Risk modelling is commonly conducted at the community/regional scale using GIS. However, people and objects move in response to a crisis, so static approaches cannot capture the dynamics of the risk properly, as they do not accommodate objects’ movements within time and space. The emergence of Agent-Based Modelling makes it possible to model the risk at an individual level as it evolves over space and time. We propose a new approach of Spatio-Temporal Dynamics Model of Risk (STDMR) by integrating multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) within a georeferenced agent-based model, using Mt. Merapi, Indonesia, as a case study. The model makes it possible to simulate the spatio-temporal dynamics of those at risk during a volcanic crisis. Importantly, individual vulnerability is heterogeneous and depends on the characteristics of the individuals concerned. The risk for the individuals is dynamic and changes along with the hazard and their location. The model is able to highlight a small number of high-risk spatio-temporal positions where, due to the behaviour of individuals who are evacuating the volcano and the dynamics of the hazard itself, the overall risk in those times and places is extremely high. These outcomes are extremely relevant for the stakeholders, and the work of coupling an ABM, MCE, and dynamic volcanic hazard is both novel and contextually relevant.

Qing Xu, Sylvie Huet, Eric Perret and Guillaume Deffuant: The drivers of conversion to organic farming, which is still a residual choice in agriculture, are poorly understood. Many scholars argue that farm characteristics can determine this choice but do not exclude the role of social dynamics. To study this issue, we developed an agent-based model in which agents' decisions to shift to organic farming are based on a comparison between satisfaction with the current situation and potential satisfaction with an alternative farming strategy. A farmer agent’s satisfaction is modelled using the Theory of Reasoned Action. This makes it necessary to compare an agent's productions over time with those of other agents to whom the former attributes considerable credibility (“important others”). Moreover, farmers make technical changes that affect their productions by imitating other credible farmers. While we first used this model to examine simple and abstract farm populations, here we also adapted it for use with data from an Agricultural Census concerning the farm characteristics of dairy farming in 27 French “cantons”. Based on domain expertise, data and previous research, we propose certain laws for modelling the impact of conversion on the farm production of milk and the environment. The simulations with “real” populations of farms confirm the important impact of farm characteristics. However, our results also suggest a complex impact of social dynamics that can favour or impede the diffusion of organic farming through dynamic implicit networks of similarity and credibility. We confirm the great importance of demographic changes in farm characteristics.

Alireza Mansouri and Fattaneh Taghiyareh: Human interactions and opinion exchanges lead to social opinion dynamics, which is well described by opinion formation models. In these models, a random parameter is usually considered as the system noise, indicating the individual's inexplicable opinion changes. This noise could be an indicator of any other influential factors, such as public media, affects, and emotions. We study phase transitions, changes from one social phase to another, for various noise levels in a discrete opinion formation model based on the social impact theory with a scale-free random network as its interaction network topology. We also generate another similar model using the concept of social power based on the agents' node degrees in the interaction network as an estimation for their persuasiveness and supportiveness strengths and compare both models from phase transition viewpoint. We show by agent-based simulation and analytical considerations how opinion phases, including majority and non-majority, are formed in terms of the initial population of agents in opinion groups and noise levels. Two factors affect the system phase in equilibrium when the noise level increases: breaking up more segregated groups and dominance of stochastic behavior of the agents on their deterministic behavior. In the high enough noise levels, the system reaches a non-majority phase in equilibrium, regardless of the initial combination of opinion groups. In relatively low noise levels, the original model and the model whose agents' strengths are proportional to their centrality have different behaviors. The presence of a few high-connected influential leaders in the latter model consequences a different behavior in reaching equilibrium phase and different thresholds of noise levels for phase transitions.

Bruno Pietzsch, Sebastian Fiedler, Kai G. Mertens, Markus Richter, Cédric Scherer, Kirana Widyastuti, Marie-Christin Wimmler, Liubov Zakharova and Uta Berger: The recent advancement of agent-based modeling is characterized by higher demands on the parameterization, evaluation and documentation of these computationally expensive models. Accordingly, there is also a growing request for "easy to go" applications just mimicking the input-output behavior of such models. Metamodels are being increasingly used for these tasks. In this paper, we provide an overview of common metamodel types and the purposes of their usage in an agent-based modeling context. To guide modelers in the selection and application of metamodels for their own needs, we further assessed their implementation effort and performance. We performed a literature research in January 2019 using four different databases. Five different terms paraphrasing metamodels (approximation, emulator, meta-model, metamodel and surrogate) were used to capture the whole range of relevant literature in all disciplines. All metamodel applications found were then categorized into specific metamodel types and rated by different junior and senior researches from varying disciplines (including forest sciences, landscape ecology, or economics) regarding the implementation effort and performance. Specifically, we captured the metamodel performance according to (i) the consideration of uncertainties, (ii) the suitability assessment provided by the authors for the particular purpose, and (iii) the number of valuation criteria provided for suitability assessment. We selected 40 distinct metamodel applications from studies published in peer-reviewed journals from 2005 to 2019. These were used for the sensitivity analysis, calibration and upscaling of agent-based models, as well to mimic their prediction for different scenarios. This review provides information about the most applicable metamodel types for each purpose and forms a first guidance for the implementation and validation of metamodels for agent-based models.

Szymon Talaga and Andrzej Nowak: Real-world social networks often exhibit high levels of clustering, positive degree assortativity, short average path lengths (small-world property) and right-skewed but rarely power law degree distributions. On the other hand homophily, defined as the propensity of similar agents to connect to each other, is one of the most fundamental social processes observed in many human and animal societies. In this paper we examine the extent to which homophily is sufficient to produce the typical structural properties of social networks. To do so, we conduct a simulation study based on the Social Distance Attachment (SDA) model, a particular kind of Random Geometric Graph (RGG), in which nodes are embedded in a social space and connection probabilities depend functionally on distances between nodes. We derive the form of the model from first principles based on existing analytical results and argue that the mathematical construction of RGGs corresponds directly to the homophily principle, so they provide a good model for it. We find that homophily, especially when combined with a random edge rewiring, is sufficient to reproduce many of the characteristic features of social networks. Additionally, we devise a hybrid model combining SDA with the configuration model that allows generating homophilic networks with arbitrary degree sequences and we use it to study interactions of homophily with processes imposing constraints on degree distributions. We show that the effects of homophily on clustering are robust with respect to distribution constraints, while degree assortativity can be highly dependent on the particular kind of enforced degree sequence.

Volker Grimm, Steven F. Railsback, Christian E. Vincenot, Uta Berger, Cara Gallagher, Donald L. DeAngelis, Bruce Edmonds, Jiaqi Ge, Jarl Giske, Jürgen Groeneveld, Alice S.A. Johnston, Alexander Milles, Jacob Nabe-Nielsen, J. Gareth Polhill, Viktoriia Radchuk, Marie-Sophie Rohwäder, Richard A. Stillman, Jan C. Thiele and Daniel Ayllón: The Overview, Design concepts and Details (ODD) protocol for describing Individual- and Agent-Based Models (ABMs) is now widely accepted and used to document such models in journal articles. As a standardized document for providing a consistent, logical and readable account of the structure and dynamics of ABMs, some research groups also find it useful as a workflow for model design. Even so, there are still limitations to ODD that obstruct its more widespread adoption. Such limitations are discussed and addressed in this paper: the limited availability of guidance on how to use ODD; the length of ODD documents; limitations of ODD for highly complex models; lack of sufficient details of many ODDs to enable reimplementation without access to the model code; and the lack of provision for sections in the document structure covering model design rationale, the model’s underlying narrative, and the means by which the model’s fitness for purpose is evaluated. We document the steps we have taken to provide better guidance on: structuring complex ODDs and an ODD summary for inclusion in a journal article (with full details in supplementary material; Table 1); using ODD to point readers to relevant sections of the model code; update the document structure to include sections on model rationale and evaluation. We also further advocate the need for standard descriptions of simulation experiments and argue that ODD can in principle be used for any type of simulation model. Thereby ODD would provide a lingua franca for simulation modelling.

Governor Jack Markell has ordered the U.S. and Delaware flags at all state buildings and facilities lowered on Friday, November 1, to mark the passing of two former Delaware leaders.

State of Delaware offices in Kent and Sussex counties are closed during regular business hours 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Non-essential employees who live or work in Kent or Sussex County are not to report to work for this period. Essential employees are to report as scheduled. State of Delaware offices in New Castle County will open at 10 a.m. Non-essential employees who live or work in New Castle County do not report until 10 a.m. Essential employees are to report as scheduled.

All State of Delaware employees will be able to access a new online class, Focus on Ability. This class will provide information about hiring and retaining employees with disabilities, including responding to and requesting accommodations, understanding invisible disabilities, and interacting comfortably and respectfully with people who have disabilities.

State of Delaware offices in New Castle County and Kent County will open at 10 a.m. Non-essential employees who live or work in New Castle County or Kent County do not report until 10 a.m. Essential employees are to report as scheduled. More Information

The Delaware Office of State Planning Coordination announces the release of the draft 2015 Strategies for State Policies and Spending Update.

Governor Jack Markell has ordered state and federal flags lowered to honor the life and passing of former Delaware Supreme Court Justice William T. Quillen. Quillen served on the Supreme Court from 1978 to 1983. He also was Delaware Secretary of State from 1993 to 1994 under the administration of Governor Tom Carper. During his […]

With the passing of former State Representative V. George Carey on September 11, 2016 Governor Markell has ordered the American and Delaware flags at state buildings and facilities be flown at half-staff beginning Tuesday morning, September 13th as a mark of respect for Representative Carey and his service to Delaware. Representative Carey faithfully served the […]

Dover, DE – The Office of Management and Budget today released a report commissioned by Governor Jack Markell earlier this year in an ongoing effort to build a welcoming work environment across State government that fully embraces diversity and equal opportunity for all employees. “I have been clear that my administration is committed to ensuring […]

With the passing of David P. Buckson on Tuesday, January 17 Governor Carney has ordered the United States and Delaware flags at state buildings and facilities be flown at half-staff beginning Friday, January 20 as a mark of respect for Mr. Buckson and his service to Delaware. Mr. Buckson served on the bench of the […]

Policy will allow state to consistently address discrimination in the workplace WILMINGTON, Del. – Governor Carney on Monday released a uniform, anti-discrimination policy that will allow state agencies to consistently respond to reports of discrimination, harassment and retaliation in the workplace – and clearly outlines a consistent policy for state employees to report and resolve […]

Governor Carney has ordered both the U.S. and State flags to be flown at half-staff in memory of City of Dover Police Corporal Thomas Hannon. Corporal Hannon, a 12 year veteran with the Dover Police Department, passed away as a result of complications from an injury sustained while on duty. Flags are to remain at […]

This morning, President Trump ordered American flags at all U.S. government buildings and facilities to be flown at half-staff until October 6, 2017 as a mark of respect for the victims of the senseless act of violence in Las Vegas. In concurrence with the President’s order and as an expression of Delaware’s sympathy for the […]

This morning President Trump ordered American flags at all U.S. government buildings and facilities be flown at half-staff beginning immediately until sunset on Thursday, November 9, in honor of the victims of the tragedy in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Governor Carney last week ordered flags to be flown at half staff over the weekend through this […]

With the passing of Reverend Billy Graham on Wednesday, February 21 2018, President Trump has ordered American flags at all government buildings and facilities be flown at half-staff the day of his interment, this Friday March 2. In concurrence with the President’s order, Governor Carney has ordered the American and Delaware flags at state buildings […]

Governor Carney has ordered the United States and Delaware flags at state buildings and facilities be flown at half-staff beginning today, July 19 to mark the passing of former Delaware Representative Katharine Jester. Representative Jester served the residents of the Middletown area  and was elected to the House of Representatives in 1980 and served until […]

Senator John McCain proudly served his country as a Navy aviator during the Vietnam War and as a statesman representing the State of Arizona in the U.S. House and Senate for over thirty years. In remembrance of the life and service of Senator McCain, Governor Carney has ordered the U.S. and Delaware flags to half […]

Board presents recommendations across focus areas to improve efficiency and accountability in state government WILMINGTON, Del. – Governor John Carney on Thursday released the second annual report of the Government Efficiency and Accountability Review (GEAR) Board. Governor Carney established GEAR by Executive Order in February 2017 to identify ways for state government to operate more […]

Today President Trump ordered American flags at all U.S. government buildings and facilities to be flown at half-staff until sunset on August 8, 2019 as a mark of solemn respect for the victims of the terrible acts of violence perpetrated in El Paso, Texas on August 3, 2019 and in Dayton, Ohio on August 4, […]

$4.5 million investment enhances security, improves employee and visitor experience WILMINGTON, Del. – Governor John Carney, along with Lt. Governor Bethany Hall-Long, members of the General Assembly and members of his cabinet cut the ribbon on Tuesday to celebrate the completion of the first phase of renovations to the Carvel State Office Building in Wilmington. […]

Delaware releases its Annual Report on State Planning Issues. This year, a visual and interactive Executive Overview was created.  This provides an easy reading experience.  A brief overview is provided for each section of the report.  The sections are: Economy, Communities, Health, Conservation, Schools, Transportation, and Data.  Additionally, links to story maps provide more detail […]

Services for Mr. Haskell are scheduled for 10 AM on Monday January 27. As such, flags are to be lowered Monday morning January 27 and are to be returned to full-staff at the close of business on Monday, January 27.

Andhra Pradesh and Madras (Alteration of Boundaries) Act 1959

Case of Lily Thomas V Union of India

Arbitration as a Career: Webinar with Ratan K Singh, FCIArb

With hurricane season about to begin, Delaware agricultural authorities are urging farmers and pet owners to plan ahead and prepare for weather emergencies. Hurricane Preparedness Week runs from May 26 to June 1, with hurricane season beginning June 1. The Department of Agriculture’s Delaware Animal Response Program works with state emergency officials and animal welfare organizations to assist animal owners with preparation, sheltering in place and evacuation. “Preparing and acting early can save animals’ lives,” said Secretary of Agriculture Ed Kee. “The time to take action is now, before storms create disaster conditions.”

A crew of 20 wildland firefighters from the Delaware Forest Service that departed on Friday, July 5 has joined over 680 personnel working on the 65,000-acre Stuart Creek 2 fire, located 25 miles east of North Pole, Alaska. The blaze is only 5 percent contained and burning through a mix of hardwoods and black spruce. The crew is assigned to a "remote spike camp" and is making the adjustment to long hours of daylight typical of an Alaskan summer. The first operational day for the crew was Monday, July 8.

July 9, 2013: Update on the crew of 20 Delaware wildland firefighters in Alaska The crew of 20 firefighters from Delaware are now part of over 730 personnel assigned to the Stuart Creek 2 Fire – a wildfire located about 25 miles east of the town of North Pole, Alaska which has grown to 82,274 […]

A strong Delaware watermelon season is now under way, with First State melons now reaching customers in grocery stores and markets along the East Coast, from New England to Florida. This season is featuring good yields and excellent quality for Delaware watermelon growers, said Secretary of Agriculture Ed Kee. The First State produces both seeded and seedless watermelon.