Madhav Godbole's statement has caused a political stir. He said, "Rajiv Gandhi went to the extent of opening locks of Babri Masjid." This statement is in his book which has talked about Ram Mandir and Babri Masjid dispute in a detailed manner.<br />In today's Seedha Sawal, we raise the

The Supreme Court came down hard on Centre and states over the issue of pollution in the national capital. Citing examples of developed nations, the Court questioned why Delhi is choking every year. "Delhi is choking every year and we are not able to do anything.Every year this is

The latest promos of the ongoing Bigg Boss 13 show reveal that Rashami Desai's alleged boyfriend Arhaan Khan who entered as wild card contestant along with Hindustani Bhau(Vikas Fhatak), Khesari Lal Yadav, Shefali Jariwala, Himanshi Khurana and Tehseen Poonawalla, has already challenged the thick jodi of BB 13, Sidharth Shukla

<strong>New Delhi:</strong> The air quality in Delhi and adjusting areas on Monday remained under severe category despite some parts of the city receiving rain on Sunday morning. Amid deteriorating air quality in the Delhi-NCR, a survey shows that over 40 per cent residents want to move to another city.

<strong>New Delhi:</strong> At least one civilian was killed while 20 people were injured on Monday in a grenade attack in Kashmir’s main city of Srinagar. The grenade attack took place in a market on Maulana Azad road of the city. People who have sustained injuries have been admitted to

Umar Akmal was banned from all forms of cricket for three years by the PCB after pleading guilty to failing to report corrupt approaches.

Analysts across the board have been certain about the heavy economic toll that the pandemic will take on the country.

The May 5-7 poll median of more than 40 economists predicted India's annual consumer price inflation fell to 5.68% in April from March's 5.91%.

A second instalment of the government-run Sovereign Gold Bond (SGB) scheme will open for subscription from Monday, May 11. The Sovereign Gold Bonds - issued by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on...

UP style matar ka nimona has matar mixed with a variety of spices. Here, we are adding vadi to instil some nutty flavour of vadi and also some density to the curry.

The Bisi Bele Bath is one dish that deserves this spotlight. 'Bele' refers to lentil and this flavourful dish combines rice, lentils and a medley of fragrant spices that is usually drenched in ghee.

The Bombay toasty is a special sandwich sold on the streets of Bombay which is made with lots of fresh vegetables, mint chutney and butter.

If you are finding those toasts, butter and half fried eggs a tad too monotonous, you can think of adding this delicious smoothie to the fare.

"Thank you, parents, for being the best kind of role models. We are because of you," posted Sonam

"The first season was one of the top 3 most-watched Amazon Original Series from India in 2019," said Aparna Purohit, Head of Amazon Originals

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

"Love it," commented Karisma Kapoor

"She is a new mom and a very fine one too," wrote Arjun Rampal

"What mothers really want for mother's day but can't tell their kids," wrote Twinkle

President Donald Trump evoked the coronavirus crisis ahead of a wreath-laying ceremony Friday at the World War II memorial in Washington to mark the 75th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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...

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

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

Home Minister Amit Shah today tweeted to say he is healthy and not suffering from any disease, dismissing recent speculations on social media about his health.

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 […]

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.

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.

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.

Flaminio Squazzoni, J. Gareth Polhill, Bruce Edmonds, Petra Ahrweiler, Patrycja Antosz, Geeske Scholz, Émile Chappin, Melania Borit, Harko Verhagen, Francesca Giardini and Nigel Gilbert: The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a dramatic loss of lives worldwide, challenging the sustainability of our health care systems, threatening economic meltdown, and putting pressure on the mental health of individuals (due to social distancing and lock-down measures). The pandemic is also posing severe challenges to the scientific community, with scholars under pressure to respond to policymakers’ demands for advice despite the absence of adequate, trusted data. Understanding the pandemic requires fine-grained data representing specific local conditions and the social reactions of individuals. While experts have built simulation models to estimate disease trajectories that may be enough to guide decision-makers to formulate policy measures to limit the epidemic, they do not cover the full behavioural and social complexity of societies under pandemic crisis. Modelling that has such a large potential impact upon people’s lives is a great responsibility. This paper calls on the scientific community to improve the transparency, access, and rigour of their models. It also calls on stakeholders to improve the rapidity with which data from trusted sources are released to the community (in a fully responsible manner). Responding to the pandemic is a stress test of our collaborative capacity and the social/economic value of research.

All State of Delaware offices closed on Monday, October 29.

Governor Markell has ordered the American and Delaware flags at state buildings and facilities be flown at half-staff on Peace Officers Memorial Day, Thursday, May 15.

In recognition of National Fallen Firefighters Memorial Weekend, Governor Markell has ordered the American and Delaware flags at state buildings and facilities to be lowered to half-staff.

American and Delaware flags at state buildings and facilities are to remain lowered to half-staff until Monday, December 8, to recognize Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.

Governor Markell has ordered the American and Delaware flags at state buildings and facilities be flown at half-staff on Peace Officers Memorial Day, Friday, May 15.

State of Delaware offices in all three counties will open at 10 a.m. on Monday, January 25, 2016. Non-essential employees do not report until 10 a.m. Essential employees are to report as scheduled.

Dover – Today, the State of Delaware announced that it appears as No. 56 on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) National Top 100 list of the largest green power users from the Green Power Partnership. Delaware is using nearly 122 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of green power annually, which represents 40 percent of its total […]

Everyday across Delaware, thousands of firefighters serve their communities and protect the public by responding to not only fires but almost any emergency situation. In honor of the men and women who have died while protecting Delawareans, in recognition of the National Fallen Firefighters Memorial Service (to be held on Sunday, October 9) and in […]

On Peace Officers Memorial Day, Monday May 15 we pay tribute to the local, state, and Federal peace officers who have died, or who have been disabled, in the line of duty.  In accordance with federal law (36 U.S.C. 175), Governor Carney requests that the Delaware and United States flags be lowered to half-staff the morning […]