Taking the Archaeological Record Seriously: New Thoughts Concerning the Statue Arrangement in the Burial of Khnumnakht and Nakhtankh at Deir Rifeh

This paper discusses the burial of Khnumnakht and Nakhtankh at Deir Rifeh and their statue arrangement. In the coffin of Khnumnakht, who died first, was a wooden statue of Nakhtankh. In the coffin of Nakhtankh, a second wooden statue of him was found together with a wooden statue of Khnumnakht. All three wooden statues are inscribed with the names of the deceased. Previously, this unusual statue arrangement was interpreted as a mistake, however it seems more likely that the wooden statues were intentionally placed within the other men’s coffins. This paper will not only reflect the relationship of these men and discuss the content of the burial, but also propose that the functions of the statues changed. It will be argued that a statue’s function or role within the funerary rituals is as dynamic as the ritual itself and its entanglements with humans and other things.The Archaeology of Ritual. International workshop Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 7th - 8th February 202

Context-Dependent Acoustic Modeling without Explicit Phone Clustering

Phoneme-based acoustic modeling of large vocabulary automatic speech recognition takes advantage of phoneme context. The large number of context-dependent (CD) phonemes and their highly varying statistics require tying or smoothing to enable robust training. Usually, Classification and Regression Trees are used for phonetic clustering, which is standard in Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based systems. However, this solution introduces a secondary training objective and does not allow for end-to-end training. In this work, we address a direct phonetic context modeling for the hybrid Deep Neural Network (DNN)/HMM, that does not build on any phone clustering algorithm for the determination of the HMM state inventory. By performing different decompositions of the joint probability of the center phoneme state and its left and right contexts, we obtain a factorized network consisting of different components, trained jointly. Moreover, the representation of the phonetic context for the network relies on phoneme embeddings. The recognition accuracy of our proposed models on the Switchboard task is comparable and outperforms slightly the hybrid model using the standard state-tying decision trees.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 202

Growth and survival of exponential and stationary phase Salmonella during sausage fermentation

When raw meat is contaminated with enteropathogens, the growth state may appear in a mixture of phases. Survival for exponential and stationary phase cells differs, with stationary phase cells being generally more resistant. Our aim of this study was to investigate the survival of exponential and stationary phase Salmonella during freezing and to follow the survival/growth of these cells during subsequent sausage fermentation. Minced meat was inoculated with exponential and stationary phase Salmonella Thyphimurium, respectively, and frozen at -20ºC for up to 35 days. The meat was thawed overnight at 5ºC prior to sausage production

Acrodermatitis continua of Hallopeau: clinical perspectives.

Acrodermatitis continua of Hallopeau (ACH) is a rare, sterile pustular eruption of one or more digits. The condition presents with tender pustules and underlying erythema on the tip of a digit, more frequently arising on a finger than a toe. As far as classification, ACH is considered a localized form of pustular psoriasis. The eruption typically occurs after local trauma or infection, but such a history is not always present and various other etiologies have been described including infectious, neural, inflammatory, and genetic causes. The natural progression of ACH is chronic and progressive, often resulting in irreversible complications such as onychodystrophy that can result in anonychia, as well as osteitis that can result in osteolysis of the distal phalanges. Because of the rarity of ACH, there have been no randomized controlled studies to evaluate therapies, resulting in an absence of standardized treatment guidelines. In clinical practice, a wide variety of treatments have been attempted, with outcomes ranging from recalcitrance to complete resolution. In recent years, the introduction of biologics has provided a new class of therapy that has revolutionized the treatment of ACH. Specifically, rapid and sustained responses have been reported with the use of anti-tumor necrosis factor agents like infliximab, adalimumab, and etanercept; IL-17 inhibitors like secukinumab; IL-12/23 inhibitors like ustekinumab; and IL-1 inhibitors like anakinra. Nevertheless, there remains a considerable need for more research into treatment for the benefit of individual patients with ACH as well as for the clinical knowledge gained by such efforts. The purpose of this review is to provide a comprehensive overview of the key features of ACH as well as a discussion of clinical management strategies for this unique and debilitating condition