US President Donald Trump on Friday said that he will soon make an announcement on the World Health Organisation, which he alleged has become a puppet of China.

Several American lawmakers have introduced a legislation in Congress to give unused green cards or permanent legal residency status to thousands of foreign nurses and doctors to meet the urgent needs...

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.

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.

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.

Canadian singer Grimes and Tesla founder Elon Musk seem to disagree on how to pronounce the name of their newborn son, X AE A-12.

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

Spain's daily death count from the coronavirus fell to 179 on Saturday, down from 229 on the previous day, the health ministry reported.

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...

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

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

Amid a spurt in coronavirus cases in the national capital, the Delhi government has roped in three more private hospitals with a total of 150 beds to treat COVID-19 patients.

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...

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.

The testing capacity for COVID-19 has been scaled up to around 95,000 tests per day and a total of 15,25,631 tests have been conducted so far across 332 government and 121 private laboratories, Union...

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

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

The coronavirus outbreak exposed "shortcomings" in China's public healthcare system, a top health official admitted Saturday, saying that reforms are underway to improve the country's disease...

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.

Former Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Ajit Jogi has been admitted to a hospital in Raipurafter he suffered a cardiac arrest at his home this afternoon. His condition is said to be "serious" and is on...

Tamil Nadu has announced major relaxations in coronavirus lockdown guidelines starting Monday, including re-opening of standalone and neighbourhood shops and private companies.

दोन दिवसांत दहा नवे रुग्ण; बाजार सुरूच राहणार

नवी मुंबई शहरात पाच दिवसांपासून करोनाबाधितांच्या संख्येत वाढ होत असून गुरुवारी २४ रुग्ण वाढले.

आतापर्यंत ७० रुग्ण; दाट लोकवस्ती असल्याने संसर्गाची चिंता

अवघ्या १२ दिवसांत रुग्णसंख्या शंभरवरून चारशेवर

जिल्ह्य़ात नव्याने पाच रुग्ण

मालेगाव येथे २४ तासांत ६६ नवे रुग्ण

शहरासह येवला, मालेगाव, सिन्नर आणि इतर भागात करोनाग्रस्तांची भर पडत आहे

नाशिकची जबाबदारी महापालिका आयुक्तांकडे

An experimental drug has proved effective against the new coronavirus in a major study, shortening the time it takes for patients to recover by four days on average, U.

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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

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

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.

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.