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'.

Sania Mirza, much like other sportspersons across the country, is spending time at home amid the coronavirus lockdown.

"Rest in peace my dear friend," Deepika had written earlier

The picture also features Alia Bhatt, Abhishek Bachchan, Neetu Kapoor and others

Mi 10 5G has been officially launched in India. The new Mi smartphone by Xiaomi is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SoC and is available with up to 256GB of onboard storage.

MS Dhoni, who has rarely been sighted in recent times, was seen sporting a bearded look that sent social media into a tizzy.

All the state universities in West Bengal will implement the academic calendar in their respective institutions within a month after the lockdown is lifted, Education Minister Partha Chatterjee said...

The Delhi High Court has asked the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to ensure that dispensation of medicines from its pharmacy, which was functioning in limited capacity due to the...

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...

Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram today welcomed the Centre's decision to borrow additional 4.2 lakh crore and said it should be used to provide relief to the poor and re-start the economy.

The first Air India flight from the UK, scheduled as part of the Vande Bharat Mission to repatriate Indians stranded overseas due to the coronavirus lockdown, took off from London's Heathrow Airport...

An Air India flight carrying 129 Indian nationals from Dhaka, Bangladesh, landed at Delhi airport today as part of Vande Bharat Mission to bring back stranded Indians from different countries.

While nearly eight lakh migrant workers stranded in Haryana have registered themselves on a government portal to return to their native states, over 1.5 lakh of them have applied on the same portal...

Former Uttar Pradesh chief minister and Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav was discharged from a Lucknow hospital where he was admitted after he complained of stomach and urine-related...

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.

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

Punjab cabinet ministers today walked out of a meeting with bureaucrats to decide a new excise policy, sources said. Finance Minister Manpreet Badal had an argument with Chief Secretary Karan Avatar...

प्रशासनाच्या या निर्णयामुळं मद्य शौकीनांची मात्र निराशा झाली आहे.

The Delaware Division of Libraries and Delaware Department of Labor (DOL) rolled out the partnership in February 2019 to be able to reach out to more residents who may be in need of services but can’t travel to Department of Labor locations. With the many computers available at libraries, a staff member can offer residents […]

WILMINGTON – Gov. John Carney signed a bill Tuesday that will clarify and enforce workplace fraud rules and create a new registry to oversee contractor activity in the First State. Senate Substitute 1 for Senate Bill 95 passed the Delaware General Assembly earlier this year with nearly unanimous support and incorporates recommendations from a 2018 […]

Delaware One Stop is a convenient, centralized transactional platform created to help business owners work through the necessary steps to begin operation in Delaware.

WILMINGTON, DE – The Delaware Department of Labor will be celebrating the Fifth Annual National Apprenticeship Week (NAW) with three open house events, one in each county throughout the state from 6 – 7 pm to showcase the value of apprenticeship in the community. Secretary Cerron Cade from The Delaware Department of Labor will be […]

Review of: Modelling Transitions: Virtues, Vices, Visions of the Future by Moallemi, Enayat A. and de Haan, Fjalar J. (Eds.), reviewed by Cesar Garcia-Diaz

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

Review of: Inventing Future Cities by Michael Batty, reviewed by Andreas Koch

Review of: How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions by Centola, Damon, reviewed by Srebrenka Letina

Victorien Barbet, Juliette Rouchier, Noé Guiraud and Vincent Laperrière: We present a model showing the evolution of an organization of agents who discuss democratically about good practices. This model feeds on a field study we did for about twelve years in France where we followed NPOs, called AMAP, and observed their construction through time at the regional and national level. Most of the hypothesis we make are here either based on the literature on opinion diffusion or on the results of our field study. By defining dynamics where agents influence each other, make collective decision at the group level, and decide to stay in or leave their respective groups, we analyse the effect of different forms of vertical communication that is meant to spread good practices within the organization. Our main indicators of the good functioning of the democratic dynamics are stability and representativeness. We show that if communication about norms is well designed, it has a positive impact on both stability and representativeness. Interestingly the effect of communication increases with the number of dimensions discussed in the groups. Communication about norms is thus a valuable tool to use in groups that wish to improve their democratic practices without jeopardizing stability.

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.

Katarzyna Growiec, Jakub Growiec and Bogumił Kamiński: We study the impact of endogenous creation and destruction of social ties in an artificial society on aggregate outcomes such as generalized trust, willingness to cooperate, social utility and economic performance. To this end we put forward a computational multi-agent model where agents of overlapping generations interact in a dynamically evolving social network. In the model, four distinct dimensions of individuals’ social capital: degree, centrality, heterophilous and homophilous interactions, determine their generalized trust and willingness to cooperate, altogether helping them achieve certain levels of social utility (i.e., utility from social contacts) and economic performance. We find that the stationary state of the simulated social network exhibits realistic small-world topology. We also observe that societies whose social networks are relatively frequently reconfigured, display relatively higher generalized trust, willingness to cooperate, and economic performance – at the cost of lower social utility. Similar outcomes are found for societies where social tie dissolution is relatively weakly linked to family closeness.

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.

Over 300 State leaders, including Cabinet secretaries, state agency heads, division directors and human resources professionals participated in the Equal Employment Opportunity Summit which was hosted by the Governor’s Council on Equal Employment Opportunity.

Governor Markell orders flags to be lowered in honor of Neil Armstrong and longtime Delaware Representative Philip Corrozi through September 5, 2012.

OMB accepting public input on agency regulations through December 1.

Governor Markell orders flags to be lowered as a mark of respect for Connecticut shooting victims.

An eight member team from the Department of Technology and Information was chosen by Governor Jack Markell as the 2012 recipient of the Governor’s Team Excellence Award.

Governor Jack Markell unveiled a balanced budget proposal that invests in jobs, education and the safety and well-being of our children. His budget keeps the focus on core commitments such as healthcare and public safety and ensures continued fiscal responsibility.

Governor Markell orders flags to be lowered as a mark of respect for the passing of former Lieutenant Governor Gene Bookhammer.

Governor Markell ordered flags to be lowered between March 7 and 11 as a mark of respect for the passing of former Delaware Judge and civil rights leader Leonard Williams.

Governor Markell ordered flags to be lowered between April 16 and 22 as a mark of respect for the victims of the April 15 bombings in Boston, Massachusetts.

The State of Delaware was one of just five states recognized by the U.S. Department of Energy for its leadership in the first year of the Better Buildings Challenge.

Flags to be lowered in remembrance of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack.

US and Delaware flags have been ordered lowered to half-staff until sunset on Friday, September 20, 2013, as a mark of respect for the victims of the Navy Yard shootings.

U.S. and Delaware flags have been ordered lowered to half-staff until the start of business on Monday, October 7, 2013, to honor firefighters who have died protecting Delawareans and in recognition of the National Fallen Firefighters Memorial Service.

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.