Indians make up one in 10 of all foreign-born doctors in the UK's National Health Service (NHS) and therefore face a greater risk from the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report published on...

Poor diet is a major cause behind the COVID-19 deaths and the Indians must urgently cut down on ultra-processed food to build resilience against the deadly virus, a leading Indian-origin cardiologist...

Three more Indians based in the UAE have either been fired or suspended from their jobs over controversial posts on social media, days after the Indian ambassador to the Gulf nation warned the...

Over 1,50,000 Indians in the UAE, who wish to return home amid the coronavirus lockdown, have applied through the online registration process to the Indian missions in Dubai, according to media...

A 62-year-old Indian businessman has died in Abu Dhabi after contracting the novel coronavirus, according to a media report.

Nearly 4,800 Indian nationals, most of whom are living in dormitories for foreign workers, have been tested positive with the novel coronavirus in Singapore till the end of April, the Indian High...

US President Donald Trump on Monday nominated an Indian-American attorney to a federal court in New York.

An Indian-origin man has been sentenced to 52 weeks' imprisonment after pleading guilty to writing offensive graffiti at a number of locations across Leicester in central England, some of which was...

US President Donald Trump has nominated senior Indian-American diplomat Manisha Singh as his envoy to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

An Indian-origin man in Singapore was on Wednesday sentenced to seven months in prison for verbally abusing police and safe-distancing enforcement officers who were urging compliance with the COVID-19...

A pair of Indian identical twins, stranded at the Dubai airport for nearly 50 days due to the COVID-19-induced international travel lockdown, breathed a huge sigh of relief when they came to know that...

Four top Republican senators have urged US President Donald Trump to suspend all new guest worker visas for 60 days and some of its categories, including the H-1B visa, for at least the next year or...

An Indian-American father and daughter, both doctors in New Jersey, have died due to the COVID-19, with Governor Phil Murphy describing their demise as "particularly tough" and hailed them for...

An Indian teenager in Dubai has recorded songs in over 20 languages, including Arabic, to spread awareness on the coronavirus, saying music has always been her choice for effective communication,...

More than 31,000 people who have tested positive for coronavirus have now died in Britain, new health ministry figures showed on Friday.

The US is working to temporarily ban the issuance of some work-based visas like H-1B, popular among highly-skilled Indian IT professionals, as well as students visas and work authorisation that...

The US vice president's spokeswoman became the second White House staffer this week to test positive for coronavirus, officials said Friday, even as President Donald Trump continued to go mask-free at...

Researchers in Hong Kong have found that patients suffering milder illness caused by the new coronavirus recover more quickly if they are treated with a three-drug antiviral cocktail soon after...

The United States recorded 1,635 coronavirus deaths in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 77,178, according to the latest real-time tally Friday reported by Johns Hopkins University.

Democratic Party's presumptive presidential nominee and former US vice president Joe Biden alleged on Friday that President Donald Trump utterly failed to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic and said...

Alphabet Inc's Google said on Friday it has asked employees to take a day off on May 22, to address work-from-home-related burnout during the coronavirus pandemic.

Ivanka Trump's personal assistant has tested positive for the deadly coronavirus, making her the third White House staff member to be infected from COVID-19, a media report said on Saturday.

Britain is to introduce a 14-day quarantine period for almost everyone arriving into the country to avoid a second peak of the coronavirus pandemic, The Times newspaper reported on Saturday.

Bihar Water Minister Sanjay Kumar Jha hitout at the Delhi government after it claimed reimbursement over train fares paid for return of migrants stranded in the national capital amid the coronavirus...

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

They had started their journey on foot from Maharashtra hoping to reach Madhya Pradesh, but it was their bodies that reached their home districts of Shahdol and Umaria by special trains on Saturday...

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 Congress on Saturday said there was "confusion" within the central government in its fight against the novel coronavirus and wondered how the country will tackle the pandemic if officials...

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

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.

The West Bengal government on Saturday refuted the allegations of non-cooperation by Union Home Minister Amit Shah and said that it has facilitated the return of around 6,000 migrants stranded outside...

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...

Over 1 lakh migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh stranded in different parts of the country following the coronavirus-induced lockdown will return to the state by Saturday night on 114 trains, a senior...

A 25-year-old man was attacked outside a chemist store in Aligarh on suspicions that he was a "coronavirus carrier", police said.

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...

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

As the government says India has been able to prevent community transmission of the coronavirus, there are concerns about at least three different clusters of cases in Delhi, in which the primary...

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

A company whose owners fled the country with over Rs 400 crore in unpaid loans borrowed from the State Bank of India (SBI) and other banks has emerged as the latest example of a mega defaulter...

The West Bengal government has agreed to allow eight trains to bring migrants home from four states, the Railway Ministry tweeted today. It said Bengal had until now allowed only two "Shramik"...

Today from 3pm - 6pm: Free, family-oriented career fair to expose middle school students, adults to careers in construction industry

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

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

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.

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.

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.