Gaining Strength by Taking Power Away from Sacramento

From mental power to muscle power--gaining strength by using the mind.

The purposes of this project were to determine mental training-induced strength gains (without performing physical exercises) in the little finger abductor as well as in the elbow flexor muscles, which are frequently used during daily living, and to quantify cortical signals that mediate maximal voluntary contractions (MVCs) of the two muscle groups. Thirty young, healthy volunteers participate...

Taking risk away from risk taking: decision insurance in organizations

We present a new mechanism for encouraging risk taking within organizations that relies on the provision of decision insurance to managers. Since insurance increases the likelihood of free riding, we also introduce a technique that mitigates this moral hazard by automatically identifying the social network around the manager and using it as a monitoring group. We show that three possible regime...

Gaining strength and focus from hardship.

Three members of my family have been diagnosed with cancer in the past five years. During the fall of my freshman year of high school, my older brother was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. His health began to deteriorate in August 2006. My mother would take him to the hospital weekly, insisting that the doctors run every test on her ill-ridden son. Chris's diagnosis in November 2006 a...

More than just taking the keys away ….

Fibonacci Numbers at Most One Away from a Perfect Power

The famous problem of determining all perfect powers in the Fibonacci sequence and the Lucas sequence has recently been resolved by three of the present authors. We sketch the proof of this result, and we apply it to show that the only Fibonacci numbers Fn such that Fn ± 1 is a perfect power are 0, 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8. The proof of the Fibonacci Perfect Powers Theorem involves very deep mathematic...