Once again time has moved rapidly by, and I find myself preparing the last of my presidential TIP columns.  A lot has happened over the last few months, and I can’t begin to discuss all of it, but here are a few of the exciting things going on with SIOP.

This issue, we’ll be exploring another concept core to data science called natural language processing (NLP).  Many people assume that NLP is a particular analysis, as if you open up a dataset and “apply NLP” to it.  But NLP is in reality an entire field of study attempting to explore and understand how humans interpret language and, in turn, how computers can mimic that interpretation.  Once a computer “understands” language, you can run a lot of targeted analyses on that language to address your research questions—or in the language of data science, you can apply a variety of different algorithms to develop insights. 

Meetings are important in your life. They take up a bunch of time, some are great and others are agonizing, but you need to have them to get work done. Search your feelings; you know it to be true.¹ Both the popular press (see for a discussion Kello, 2015) and peer-reviewed outlets have a great deal of helpful meeting-optimization advice (discussed briefly below), with some caveats for cross-cultural differences (Gerpott & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2015; Köhler & Gölz, 2015; see also van Erde & Buengeler, 2015). To the best of our knowledge, however, these recommendations are silent on the topic of using videos—not synchronous video conferencing but prerecorded videos—in the context of meetings. Silent—no pros, no cons, no evidence, no research questions. Let’s take a look at some of the existing recommendations and see how we can slot this technology into them, shall we?

Not only have Joyce and Robert Hogan independently advanced the science and practice of workplace personality, but the Hogan’s joint contributions to the field are, to say the least, quite impressive. As such, the Hogan Personality Award was established in honor of the Hogans’ collective body of work and, more specifically, to recognize research advancing the understanding of personality as it relates to work performance.

The most daunting part about starting a tenure-track position was building a research pipeline that would sustain me through tenure. This shouldn’t be surprising; most new faculty talk about the “publish or perish” mentality that comes with academia, and I certainly found myself in that category. Honestly, if you ask most of the people I collaborate with, they will still say that I am fairly vocal about my fears surrounding publishing. Personally, I think half of the battle is finding the people you “click” with—who are interested in similar ideas, who will challenge you in a productive manner, and who make you want to be a better researcher. The second half of the battle, however, is trying to figure out what to be researching in the first place.