On Being Socialized Out of the Human Sexual Response in the Later Years

We now know, with the conclusive findings of the Masters and Johnson study of sex with elderly, that maintaining the regularity of sexual expression coupled with adequate physical well being and healthy mental orientation to the aging process will combine to provide a sexually stimulative marriage [and/or relationships]. This climate will, in turn, improve sexual tension and provide a capacity for sexual performance that frequently may extend to and beyond the 80-year age level (Masters and Johnson, 1968, p. 279). This acknowledgement has ended the long silence and may well herald the beginning of the throwing off of the shackles of sex repression. The consensus that sex stops at sixty is being challenged; knowledge and attitudes of the human sexual condition in late life are being affected and modified. Sex is being seen as a natural physiological function. Aging itself is not the cause of cessation of sexual activity. There is a growing acceptance of the fact that there is no time limit drawn by the advancing years of female sexuality and for the male too there is a capacity for sexual performance that frequently may extend beyond the eighty year age level (Rubin, 1966). The potential for erotic pleasure seems to begin with birth and does not need to end till death (Kaplan, 1974, p. 104). It appears that there is no limit to the sexual capacity of aging females and that changes of the male do not reduce the need for satisfactory expression

Improving Reliable Multicast Using Active Parity Encoding Services (APES)

We propose and evaluate novel reliable multicast protocols that combine active repair service (a.k.a. local recovery) and parity encoding (a.k.a. forward error correction or FEC) techniques. We show that, compared to other repair service protocols, our protocols require less buffer inside the network, maintain the low bandwidth requirements of previously proposed repair service / FEC combination protocols, and reduce the amount of FEC processing at repair servers, moving more of this processing to the end-hosts. We also examine repair service / FEC combination protocols in an environment where loss rates differ across domains within the network. We find that repair services are more effective than FEC at reducing bandwidth utilization in such environments. Furthermore, adding FEC to a repair services protocol not only reduces buffer requirements at repair servers, but also reduces bandwidth utilization in domains with high loss, or in domains with large populations of receivers

Panda: Neighbor Discovery on a Power Harvesting Budget

Object tracking applications are gaining popularity and will soon utilize Energy Harvesting (EH) low-power nodes that will consume power mostly for Neighbor Discovery (ND) (i.e., identifying nodes within communication range). Although ND protocols were developed for sensor networks, the challenges posed by emerging EH low-power transceivers were not addressed. Therefore, we design an ND protocol tailored for the characteristics of a representative EH prototype: the TI eZ430-RF2500-SEH. We present a generalized model of ND accounting for unique prototype characteristics (i.e., energy costs for transmission/reception, and transceiver state switching times/costs). Then, we present the Power Aware Neighbor Discovery Asynchronously (Panda) protocol in which nodes transition between the sleep, receive, and transmit states. We analyze \name and select its parameters to maximize the ND rate subject to a homogeneous power budget. We also present Panda-D, designed for non-homogeneous EH nodes. We perform extensive testbed evaluations using the prototypes and study various design tradeoffs. We demonstrate a small difference (less then 2%) between experimental and analytical results, thereby confirming the modeling assumptions. Moreover, we show that Panda improves the ND rate by up to 3x compared to related protocols. Finally, we show that Panda-D operates well under non-homogeneous power harvesting

Theoretical Bounds on Control-Plane Self-Monitoring in Routing Protocols

Routing protocols rely on the cooperation of nodes in the network to both forward packets and to select the forwarding routes. There have been several instances in which an entire network's routing collapsed simply because a seemingly insignificant set of nodes reported erroneous routing information to their neighbors. It may have been possible for other nodes to trigger an automated response and prevent the problem by analyzing received routing information for inconsistencies that revealed the errors. Our theoretical study seeks to understand when nodes can detect the existence of errors in the implementation of route selection elsewhere in the network through monitoring their own routing states for inconsistencies. We start by constructing a methodology, called Strong-Detection, that helps answer the question. We then apply Strong-Detection to three classes of routing protocols: distance-vector, path-vector, and link-state. For each class, we derive low-complexity, self-monitoring algorithms that use the routing state created by these routing protocols to identify any detectable anomalies. These algorithms are then used to compare and contrast the self-monitoring power these various classes of protocols possess. We also study the trade-off between their state-information complexity and ability to identify routing anomalies

Bandwidth-Sharing Schemes for Multiple Multi-Party Sessions

A recent means for enabling multicast in the Internet involves deploying network overlays where end-systems participate in the forwarding of data to other end-systems. The use of overlays not only permits individual sessions to simultaneously structure their communication trees atop unicast-only networks, but also gives the session greater flexibility when forming the topology of the forwarding tree. Even though multiple sessions are often expected to compete for the same network overlay resources, most work to date assumes that overlay protocols operate as though each session has isolated access to the available overlay resources. We consider two algorithms that build depth-bounded overlay trees where each node's outgoing bandwidth constrains the number of nodes to which it can directly forward data. One algorithm tries to cluster a node's available bandwidth within a single tree, the other tries to disperse the available bandwidth among multiple trees. We prove analytically that when node capacities are identical and session requirements are identical that a clustering approach will increase the number of sessions that can co-exist. However, simulation results reveal that in heterogeneous networking environments or in environments where session participants vary with time, the dispersing algorithm outperforms the clustering algorithm. These results can be used to guide future development of overlay protocols that must partition resources among multiple sessions

Secure Multi-Party Computation of Boolean Circuits with Applications to Privacy in On-Line Marketplaces

Protocols for generic secure multi-party computation (MPC) come in two forms: they either represent the function being computed as a boolean circuit, or as an arithmetic circuit over a large field. Either type of protocol can be used for any function, but the choice of which type of protocol to use can have a significant impact on efficiency. The magnitude of the effect, however, has never been quantified. With this in mind, we implement the MPC protocol of Goldreich, Micali, and Wigderson, which uses a boolean representation and is secure against a semi-honest adversary corrupting any number of parties. We then consider applications of secure MPC in on-line marketplaces, where customers select resources advertised by providers and it is desired to ensure privacy to the extent possible. Problems here are more naturally formulated in terms of boolean circuits, and we study the performance of our MPC implementation relative to existing ones that use an arithmetic-circuit representation. Our protocol easily handles tens of customers/providers and thousands of resources, and outperforms existing implementations including FairplayMP, VIFF, and SEPIA