Online Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions are a popular means of engaging students with the world of cybersecurity. This paper reports on the use of a virtual machine (VM) framework that has been developed as part of cybersecurity courses offered to both second-year undergraduate and master’s degree students in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham; the framework featu...

The American flag is a frequently displayed national symbol in the United States. Given its high visibility and importance, the present research examines the consequences of exposure to the flag on Americans’ sense of national attachment. We hypothesized that the flag would increase patriotism, defined as love and commitment to one’s country, and nationalism, defined as a sense of superiority o...

Horn recursion is a term used to describe when non-vanishing products of Schubert classes in the cohomology of complex flag varieties are characterized by inequalities parameterized by similar non-vanishing products in the cohomology of “smaller” flag varieties. We consider the type A partial flag variety and find that its cohomology exhibits a Horn recursion on a certain deformation of the cup...

Have you ever considered preparing for an exam by doing physical exercise? Would it not be great to go outside and play capture the flag or double Dutch with your friends instead of doing math? Of course, you already know that this is wishful thinking. Everyone has to prepare carefully and learn attentively if they want to do better on their exams. However, it is also true that physical activit...

Cybersecurity competitions are getting more attention as a prominent approach of computer security education in the past years. It is vital to look into better ways to engage beginners in the competitions to improve computer security education. This work collected and analyzed the solutions of about 3600 Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges from 160 security competitions in the past three years. T...

The flag curvature is a natural extension of the sectional curvature in Riemannian geometry, and the S-curvature is a non-Riemannian quantity which vanishes for Riemannian metrics. There are (incomplete) nonRiemannian Finsler metrics on an open subset in Rn with negative flag curvature and constant S-curvature. In this paper, we are going to show a global rigidity theorem that every Finsler met...

The objective of this work is to develop an automatic method for estimating glottal opening instants (GOIs) using Hilbert envelope (HE). The GOIs are secondary major excitations after glottal closure instants (GCIs) during the production of voiced speech. The HE is defined as the magnitude of complex time function (CTF) of a given signal. The unipolar property of HE is exploited for picking the...

For many ligands of the TNF family, trimer stability and oligomerization status are crucial determinants of receptor activation. However, for the immunostimulatory ligands CD27L, CD40L, 41BBL, and glucocorticoid-induced TNF receptor ligand (GITRL) detailed information regarding these requirements is lacking. Here, we comprehensively evaluated the effect of trimer stability and oligomerization o...

We have developed a rapid, sensitive, and quantitative 96-well microplate-based nonradioactive immunoprecipitation/kinase assay to evaluate mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) activity. Three quantitative nonradioactive imunoprecipitation/kinase assays of MAPK were demonstrated on a 96-well microplate coated with ANTI-FLAG M2 antibody (ANTI-FLAG M2 plate): (i) the capture of phosphorylated ...