belief in the lofty positions and excellences of the shi’īte imams (a.s.) and having faith in their miraculous acts and dominion over the world affairs underlies the authentic doctrine of unconditional guardianship (wilāya al-takwīnī). when the imams’ devotees try to maintain a demigod status for the imams in line with this – possibly loving and devotional – belief beyond the conventional limit...

Most of the work on opinion dynamics models focuses on the case of two or three opinion types. We consider the case of an arbitrary number of opinions in the mean field case of the naming game model in which it is assumed the population is infinite and all individuals are neighbors. A particular challenge of the naming game model is that the number of variables, which corresponds to the number ...

We study the voter model with a finite density of zealots—voters that never change opinion. For equal numbers of zealots of each species, the distribution of magnetization (opinions) is Gaussian in the mean-field limit, as well as in one and two dimensions, with a width that is proportional to 1/ √ Z, where Z is the number of zealots, independent of the total number of voters. Thus just a few z...

During the 20th century, conventional breeding produced a vast number of varieties and hybrids that contributed immensely to higher grain yield, stability of harvests, and farm income. Despite the successes of the Green Revolution, the battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions miserably poor people is far from won. Mushrooming populations, changing demographics, and inadequate pov...

Should Americans eat less salt? “Yes” has been the advice from several professional organizations. But are such sweeping public health recommendatations based on good science or are they based on an overzealous extrapolation of limited data? Currently, the average consumption of sodium (Na) in the United States is about 3.5 g/day. Some guidelines recommend reducing the Na consumption of the ent...

We study the dynamics of the out-of-equilibrium nonlinear q-voter model with two types of susceptible voters and zealots, introduced in Mellor et al. [Europhys. Lett. 113, 48001 (2016)EULEEJ0295-507510.1209/0295-5075/113/48001]. In this model, each individual supports one of two parties and is either a susceptible voter of type q_{1} or q_{2}, or is an inflexible zealot. At each time step, a q_...