A landslide inventory is a detailed register of the spatial distribution, geometry, and attributes of landslides and is essential for landslide hazard analysis, risk management, regional planning, and land use management and development, especially in landslide-prone regions. However, the development of a national landslide inventory is time-consuming and costly. Accordingly, most developing countries, including Sri Lanka, have basic landslide databases, which identify the location, date, and time of occurrence on a point map. This study, therefore, aimed to introduce a new (...) method to report landslide information via a mobile application based on a participatory approach with information recorded in a web portal called the participatory landslide inventory. Twenty-one landslide site locations and their attributes were captured on the PLI web portal using the PLI mobile app. The system administrator then demarcated the landslide boundaries and performed geometrical calculations for each landslide to complete the inventory. Finally, the landslide information was published through the PLI web portal. The PLI is an effective and efficient tool for developing a landslide inventory economically. (shrink)

According to the received opinion there is a theoretical incompatibility between Herbert Hart's The Concept of Law and Alf Ross's On Law and Justice, and, according to the received opinion, it stems above all from Hart's emphasis on the internal point of view. The present paper argues that this reading is mistaken. The Concept of Law does not go beyond On Law and Justice in so far as both present arguments to the effect that law is based on a shared (...) understanding between participants in a project perceived by every participant to be a project in common. The paper demonstrates that there are substantive parallels between Hart's combination of “acceptance” or “acknowledgement” and a “critical reflective attitude” and Ross's combination of “motivation” or “feeling” and a “coherent whole of meaning and motivation.” The main conclusion is that the views of norms and normativity put forward in The Concept of Law and On Law and Justice are very close in essential respects, and, more specifically, that the two works are at root identical in their representation of the basis of normativity in reality. (shrink)

Edelman suggests that any shape is encoded by an excitation vector with components corresponding to excitations of corresponding neuronal modules. This results in discrimination of stimuli in a shape space of low dimensionality. Similar vector encoding is present in color vision. Red-green, blue-yellow, bright and dark neurons are modules that represent a number of different color stimuli in color space of low dimensionality. Vector encoding allows effective computation of color differences and color similarities. Such a neuronal vector-encoding approach has also (...) been applied to the perception of visual movement, line orientation, and stereopsis. (shrink)

Multidimensional scaling of subjective color differences has shown that color stimuli are located on a hypersphere in four-dimensional space. The semantic space of color names is isomorphic with perceptual color space. A spherical four-dimensional space revealed in monkeys and fish suggests the primacy of common neuronal basis.

Cognitive science has much to contribute to the general scientific body of knowledge, but it is also a field rife with possibilities for providing background research that can be leveraged by artificial intelligence (AI) developers. In this introduction, we briefly explore the history of AI. We particularly focus on the relationship between AI and cognitive science and introduce this special issue that promotes the method of inspiring AI development with the results of cognitive science research.

A formal neuron has been studied mathematically. The spiking behaviour of a single neuron has been considered and the influence of the other neurons has been replaced by an average activity level. Four different kinds of spiking behaviour are predicted by the model: B (bursts), C (continuous), P (periodic) and S (silent) neurons and several real neurons can be classified within these four categories. Some properties of the spiking neuron are calculated: 1) the time between spikes, 2) the spike train (...) length and 3) the silent time. Because these magnitudes can be measured in the laboratory, an experimental validation of the model is proposed. (shrink)