Subjective social status (SSS), a person’s sense of their or their family’s position in the socioeconomic hierarchy, is strongly related to adult health but is not a robust predictor of adolescent health. Developmental trajectories of SSS underlying this discrepancy are unknown.

Five SSS trajectories are present in adolescence/emerging adulthood. Four stably reflect objective socioeconomic status. The fifth represents a subset of socially disadvantaged youth with "rose-colored glasses" early on. Lower SSS and membership in the fifth trajectory increase health risk. (Read the full article)

Many families share genetic cancer risk information with their children, and some parents and providers believe BRCA1/2 testing should be permitted in adolescence. The psychosocial effects and impact on health and risk behaviors of this knowledge is unknown.

In our cohort of 869 mother-daughter pairs, we found no differences in general adjustment, but 10- to 13-year-old girls with breast cancer family histories reported higher breast cancer–specific distress and perceived breast cancer risk. Mother distress was associated with daughter distress. (Read the full article)

Source: www.businessinsider.com - Saturday, May 09, 2020
Dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge have reported increased use amid the coronavirus pandemic, while touting virtual dating alternatives for users instead of meeting up in person. Swaths of users are still encouraging matches to break quarantine to have sex and go on dates, despite social distancing guidelines and fines to comply with them. An illustrator on Instagram has been collecting screenshots of these situations, and told Business Insider that users will brand themselves as "badasses," dispute the effectiveness of isolating, and lash out in anger and hurl abusive language when they're rejected. Spokespeople for Grindr, Tinder and Bumble told Business Insider they've informed users to adhere to social-distancing guidelines, but did not respond to inquiries about actions they're taking against users in places where violating lockdown orders can be against the law. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories . As millions remain confined to their homes to prevent the spread of coronavirus, the desire for human contact and connection has risen dramatically and led some to search for ways to break those social distancing rules. Popular dating apps — including Tinder , Bumble , and Hinge — have reported significant increases during the outbreak of swiping activity, matches between users, and messages exchanged. It's also led to the introduction of a breed of users who are interested in shirking lockdown orders, an

Unable to host their senior capstone showcase as an on-campus celebration of their work with family and friends in attendance, graduating students in the Graphic Design undergraduate program in the Stuckeman School at Penn State are turning to Instagram to highlight their design work in a creative way to an even larger potential audience during the week of May 4-8.

Wine, fish, and excessive use of social media were a few of the topics that earned students top honors in Penn State Hazleton's first-ever virtual Undergraduate Research Fair.

I was just sitting down to write this week's column when the Red Arrows flew right over my head.

Young adults born prematurely with very low birth weight (≤1500 g) have higher blood pressure than do their counterparts born at term. We tested whether they also have higher blood pressure reactivity to psychosocial stress, which may be a more-specific predictor of long-term cardiovascular morbidity. Systolic and diastolic blood pressure levels for 44 very low birth weight adults (mean age: 23.1 years; SD: 2.3 years) and 37 control subjects (mean age: 23.6 years; SD: 2.0 years) were measured through noninvasive finger photoplethysmography during a standardized psychosocial stress challenge (Trier Social Stress Test). Baseline and task values and their difference (ie, reactivity) served as outcome variables. In comparison with the control group, the very low birth weight group had 7.9 mm Hg higher diastolic blood pressure during the task and 4.8 mm Hg higher diastolic reactivity, with adjustment for gender and age, height, and BMI at testing. A similar trend was seen for systolic blood pressure during the baseline period and the task, but the group differences were not statistically significant. Our results indicate that very low birth weight is associated with elevated blood pressure reactivity to psychosocial stress and, therefore, may increase the risk of cardiovascular morbidity.

Penn State Brandywine is offering a complimentary virtual seminar on Practical Social Media Tactics for the Busy Entrepreneur from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. May 18, through Zoom video conferencing.

People find it convenient to use Facebook or other social media accounts to sign up for most new apps and services, but they prefer to use their e-mail address or open a new account if they feel the information in the app is too sensitive, according to a team of researchers.

The Brooklyn District Attorney released data to show the disparities in arrests. The NYPD released data to show the demographics of summonses.

Today, 98% of households with 2- to 8-year-old children include a mobile device, like smartphones, tablets, and iPods or other smart-mobile devices, an increase from 75% in 2013. We are really connected, but not connecting at all.

Customer relationship management spent the last couple of years going social. Make sure your CRM strategy incorporates this important new capability in 2020.

With the spread of COVID-19, Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute has launched a new website that provides resources for researchers, policy-makers and the general public to inform and to address impacts of the pandemic — with a focus on its broader implications for individuals, families, communities, and the commonwealth.

Partnering with parents can help students of any age who have trouble with social or mental health issues. But the devil is in the details, finds an analysis of more than 100 studies.

Governor signs proclamation marking March as Social Work Month WILMINGTON, Del. – Governor John Carney on Thursday recognized the role of Delaware’s social workers as he signed a proclamation marking Social Work Month. The Governor signed the proclamation during an event at the Wilmington Public Library, one of seven libraries statewide where since January social […]

With TikTok, Dailyhunt, ShareChat and even OTT players Zee5, Amazon Prime and Hoichoi letting users post, watch and share content in the language of their choice, few are spending considerable time on Facebook.

Short-lived content is the new go-to strategy for brands to engage with consumers and turn them into content creators

A milkman has come up with a unique way to ensure that the milk he delivers is contact-free and also forces customers to maintain the necessary distance.

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...

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.

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.

Myong-Hun Chang and Joseph Harrington: The dynamics of social stigma are explored in the context of diffusion models. Our focus is on exploring the dynamic process through which the behavior of individuals and the interpersonal relationships among them influence the macro-social attitude towards the stigma. We find that a norm of tolerance is best promoted when the population comprises both those whose conduct is driven by compassion for the stigmatized and those whose focus is on conforming with others in their social networks. A second finding is that less insular social networks encourage de-stigmatization when most people are compassionate, but it is instead more insularity that promotes tolerance when society is dominated by conformity.

NEW CASTLE (Oct. 23, 2018) – Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) Secretary Dr. Kara Odom Walker, a board-certified family physician, is reassuring Delawareans that a proposed change to the public charge rule by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security does not affect current eligibility for health care and social services in Delaware, and […]

NEW CASTLE (23 de octubre de 2018) – La Secretaria del Departamento de Salud y Servicios Sociales (DHSS, por sus siglas en inglés) Dra. Kara Odom Walker, especialista acreditada en medicina de la familia, asegura a los residentes de Delaware que la propuesta de cambio a la regulación de carga pública realizada por el Departamento […]

NEW CASTLE (Dec. 3, 2019) – After months of inventory analysis, stakeholder and employee online surveys and internal and external focus group interviews, the Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) is seeking public input on draft goals and objectives as part of its ongoing strategic planning initiative. The Department has posted the foundation of […]

Wilmington --

Starting Thursday, April 2, DART will limit the number of passengers allowed on each bus at any given time, based on bus seating capacity. Passenger boardings will be through the rear door with fares waived. Riders needing boarding assistance will be allowed to continue boarding through the front door. [More]

Starting Thursday, April 2, DART will limit the number of passengers allowed on each bus at any given time, based on bus seating capacity. Passenger boardings will be through the rear door with no fare collection. Riders needing boarding assistance will be allowed to continue boarding through the front door.

In order to accommodate riders, DART will operate additional timing buses, as well as have additional operators on standby.

If you are feeling sick, please do not visit public facilities and avoid public transportation. For more information on the state's response to the Coronavirus, visit de.gov/coronavirus.

Reddy spoke of how it is very difficult to catch asymptomatics, unless individuals get themselves tested on demand, or the public health authorities organise testing in a cluster.

Social media use surges; average time spent on platforms like Facebook and Instagram up by over 60%.

WILMINGTON, Del. – Governor John Carney on Wednesday signed the ninth modification to his State of Emergency declaration, further limiting public gatherings and ordering essential businesses to take specific steps to enforce social distancing and fight the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID19). Governor Carney’s modified emergency order limits public gatherings to 10 people through […]

NEW CASTLE (May 5, 2020) – On May 1, the Division of Social Services was approved by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to operate Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT), a new program authorized by the Families First Coronavirus Response Act that provides assistance to families with children who are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals. The […]

Coronavirus, COVID 19 latest news: The revelation has been made in a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The study looked at 144 geopolitical areas. These areas include large swathes of the US, Canada, Australia, and other countries around the world.

The state's TMC government has been drawing consistent criticism from the Centre and opposition parties over the way it has tackled the pandemic, and has been accused of under-reporting data about the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths.

Singapore has taken the monitoring and enforcement of social distancing to a whole new level, opting to deploy a robot dog, backed by a fleet of drones, to make sure citizens keep their hands to themselves to combat coronavirus.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Denmark is known as such a country which plays a great emphasis on the welfare of its citizen. This time however there is a bump in the road when one of its policies seemed to backfire. The policy of the dependency of people on the government aid has…

  Break-up diva Taylor Swift has over 52 million Twitter followers – a world record – with pop icon (for lack of a better word) Justin Bieber coming in at No.2 with just over 51 million Twit...

By late evening, Internet was restored on majority mobile phones across Kashmir.

Nothing happened, and later it was discovered the panic was a result of rumours, mostly spread via messaging apps in the aftermath of the riots in north-east Delhi, which saw unprecedented hate spewed online.

Even though the work has started authorities have ensured that each and every norms of the Coronavirus COVID-19 Lockdown extension are followed at the Kashi Vishwanath Dham project site.

Since rangeomorphs could not move and are preserved where they lived, it is possible to analyse whole populations from the fossil record.

Everyone is coping with social distancing in different ways, and their position in life largely determines their response. From irreverent youngsters, insecure professionals, worried parents to the helpless aged, we gather different voices united by a common situation

Some creative hashtags on social media have come to the rescue of netizens, offering distraction as well as solace in these trying times.

On December 5th  Nova Scotia conducted a new draw in its provincial Labor Market Priorities Stream with a link to Express Entry. It targets social and community service workers under the NOC 4212. This was the first NSNP draw that targeted NOC 4212.Candidates…

Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga, who debuts as a BJP candidate for the February Delhi election, is one of the ruling party's most prominent faces on social media. On the flip-side, he has been accused by his...

A milkman's desi jugaad to deliver milk to customers while maintaining social distance has left many impressed.

The Evolution of Social Media in Banking - RBI Debuts on Twitter