Scaling the state: Egypt in the third millennium BC

Discussions of the early Egyptian state suffer from a weak consideration of scale. Egyptian archaeologists derive their arguments primarily from evidence of court cemeteries, elite tombs, and monuments of royal display. The material informs the analysis of kingship, early writing, and administration but it remains obscure how the core of the early Pharaonic state was embedded in the territory it claimed to administer. This paper suggests that the relationship between centre and hinterland is key for scaling the Egyptian state of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2,700-2,200 BC). Initially, central administration imagines Egypt using models at variance with provincial practice. The end of the Old Kingdom demarcates not the collapse, but the beginning of a large-scale state characterized by the coalescence of central and local models

Global Biodiversity and Phylogenetic Evaluation of Remipedia (Crustacea)

Remipedia is one of the most recently discovered classes of crustaceans, first described in 1981 from anchialine caves in the Bahamas Archipelago. The class is divided into the order Enantiopoda, represented by two fossil species, and Nectiopoda, which contains all known extant remipedes. Since their discovery, the number of nectiopodan species has increased to 24, half of which were described during the last decade. Nectiopoda exhibit a disjunct global distribution pattern, with the highest abundance and diversity in the Caribbean region, and isolated species in the Canary Islands and in Western Australia. Our review of Remipedia provides an overview of their ecological characteristics, including a detailed list of all anchialine marine caves, from which species have been recorded. We discuss alternative hypotheses of the phylogenetic position of Remipedia within Arthropoda, and present first results of an ongoing molecular-phylogenetic analysis that do not support the monophyly of several nectiopodan taxa. We believe that a taxonomic revision of Remipedia is absolutely essential, and that a comprehensive revision should include a reappraisal of the fossil record

Audiovisual prosody of uncertainty. An overview

The goal of this work is to give an overview of research conducted in the field of audiovisual prosody and uncertainty. We refer to previous studies investigating the relevance of prosodic cues for both the production and perception of uncertainty in natural conversation. Afterwards, we present our own experiments dealing with the role of prosodic cues of uncertainty and also of context for pragmatic focus interpretation. In a next step we discuss which role uncertainty plays for humanmachine communication. In this context we summarise our own studies on the modelling and perception of uncertainty in speech from an articulatory speech synthesizer. We assume that speech synthesis systems with highly variable speech can help to improve human-machine communication