No use in faking it, sex study says

There’s no point faking it in bed because chances are your sexual partner will be able to tell, a University of Waterloo study has found.

“We found that, on average, both men and women have fairly accurate and unbiased perceptions of their partners’ sexual satisfaction,” says Erin Fallis, PhD candidate and lead author of the study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior. The study by Fallis and co-authors Uzma Rehman and Christine Purdon, professors in Waterloo’s Department of Psychology, identified important factors that predict accuracy in gauging a partner’s sexual satisfaction:

• sexual communication
• the ability to recognize emotions
  

“We also found that having good communication about sexual issues helped participants to understand their partners’ sexual satisfaction. However, even if sexual communication was lacking, a person could still be fairly accurate in gauging his or her partner’s sexual satisfaction if he or she was able to read emotions well.”

The study involved 84 couples that were part of a larger study on sexual functioning and satisfaction. Fallis separated the partners, asked them to each report on their levels of commitment, relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, sexual communication and measured their emotion recognition abilities.

Couples in a sexual relationship develop what psychologists call a sexual script, which forms guidelines for their sexual activity.

“Over time, a couple will develop sexual routines,” said Fallis. “We believe that having the ability to accurately gauge each other’s sexual satisfaction will help partners to develop sexual scripts that they both enjoy. Specifically, being able to tell if their partners are sexually satisfied will help people decide whether to stick with a current routine or try something new.”

As well as affirming important factors for healthy sexual relationships, the study’s findings may help to reduce a common stereotype in our culture that women and men have difficulty communicating with and understanding one another.

“The next step in this research is to look at the impacts of having more or less accurate perceptions of one’s partner’s sexual satisfaction over time in long-term relationships," said Fallis. “We expect that having a more accurate understanding of one’s partner’s sexual satisfaction will have positive impacts for both partners’ sexual satisfaction and we’re eager to test this idea.”

 

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Waterloo top Canadian team at Putnam

by Amy Aldous, Faculty of Mathematics.

The University of Waterloo team did extremely well in the 2013 Putnam Mathematical Competition, finishing 7th overall, and first among Canadian universities. The top 5 teams were MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Harvard, and Cal Tech.

Congratulations to Waterloo team members Kangning (Colin) Chen, Volodymyr Lyubinets and Hao Sun, and to coach Professor Stephen New of the Pure Mathematics Department.

Many Waterloo students performed exceptionally well in the competition, with 6 among the top 200 individuals. Kangning (Colin) Chen and Sam Eisenstat each received honourable mention and were both ranked 40th among the 4113 contestants. Volodymyr Lyubinets and Daniel Spivak both ranked in the top 100. Ariel Gershon and and Paul Musgrave both ranked in the top 200.

The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition is an annual contest for university students in the US and Canada. Waterloo has finished in the top five 18 times since 1968.

The most recent competition took place on December 7, 2013, with the results tabulated and released last week.

 

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IST advises on Heartbleed software bug

by Jason Testart, Director, Information Security Services

As you have likely heard in the media, the Heartbleed bug has affected approximately two thirds of the Internet and the University of Waterloo was not immune. Monday evening, news of the issue was being shared between campus IT staff. Since then, IT staff have been applying fixes to affected systems. The fix was applied to the majority of IST-managed servers by noon on Tuesday. IST security operations staff are continuously assessing the campus network, supporting IT staff campus wide in identifying affected systems so that fixes can be applied. Authentication for the uw-unsecured campus wifi service has been disabled until the vendor provides a fix for the Heartbleed bug.

We believe the risk to users of our systems is minimal given the timing of our response and provided that users follow best practices for password management:

• Avoid the re-use of passwords at different sites – You do not want a breach at one site to compromise your information at other sites.
• Change your passwords periodically – If a password does happen to be exposed by this issue or some other, it's not useful to attackers if you've since changed it.
• Do not share your password – The more people know your password, the more exposed it is, which increases the potential for misuse (unintended or malicious).
• Use long passwords – The longer the better. This practice does not help specifically with Heartbleed, but it does guard against other attacks.

If you are concerned about the integrity of your password, you are encouraged to change your password.

Questions/concerns? Please contact the IST Service Desk, helpdesk@uwaterloo.ca or by calling ext. 84357.

 

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Innovation summit Monday and other notes

The second annual Waterloo Innovation Summit gets underway on Monday, April 14. The two-day conference will explore the next-generation technologies on the threshold of major investment, corporate venture capitalism and how to build national technology brands with Waterloo at the centre of a global innovation hub. Keynote speakers include Susan Fonseca of Singularity University, Whitney Rockley of McRock Capital, Nagraj Kashyap, Eric Migicovsky, and Wal Van Lierop. A wide array of panellists and presenters will also be participating in the conference, representing academia, government and industry. The event will be livestreamed on the innovation summit's website. For those who would like to keep tabs on the summit on social media, the hashtag is #WINS14.

Gwen Potter, assistant to the School of Social Work at Renison, University College, is a top 25 finallist in the CBC Searchlight Music Awards. "My musical partner, singer-songwriter Peter Light, and I have been voted through to the semi finals," she writes. "We need your votes to get us through to the final 10 performers!"

Over 900 musical acts entered the contest. The studio version of one of Peter Light's entries, "Only Halfway Home", features Potter playing a viola d'amour, the Baroque version of a viola with 11 strings. A live version of the tune is available on YouTube.

If you're so inclined, vote for the song using the blue "vote here" button further down the CBC page. You can vote on multiple devices or browsers once a day, every day until the deadline on Sunday, April 13. "Every vote is appreciated," writes Potter. "Thank you very much!"

Waterloo LEARN will be down for system maintenance on Sunday, April 13, from 1:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. During this time, LEARN will not be available.

Professors Maurice Dusseault and Steve Evans of Earth and Environmental Sciences will be hosting a public lecture on Tuesday, April 22 entitled "Energy and Environment; Risk and the Future." The lecture will take place in room 347 at the School of Optometry and Vision Science from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Registration details are online.

 

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