I’m about halfway through my term as editor of TIP, and prompted by President Oswald’s thankfulness-oriented column in this issue, I too took some time to reflect on how things have gone so far and what I’d like to see improve in the second half.

My goals upon taking the helm were to make TIP both more readable, from a technological perspective, and more widely read, from a content perspective. The technological progress has been mixed; we’re adding new features on a continual basis to make TIP more usable but we still have more to do. Your requests and suggestions on that front are most welcome. In contrast, it has been an easy task to share high-quality articles with readers, thanks to the efforts of a large and diverse set of contributors and reviewers. 

This message is being written just after the US Thanksgiving—and we should thank the incredible talent that SIOP is fortunate to possess as we work together to move our society and profession forward. If my vision of Team SIOP is anything, it is you—individually and collectively influencing our impact and our identity as a profession. Let me elaborate on that as I update you on a few things; and then I’d like to use this message to speak to a couple of larger issues (among many) facing SIOP that are both exciting and challenging.

“The Bridge: Connecting Science and Practice” is a TIP column that seeks to help facilitate additional learning and knowledge transfer in order to encourage sound, evidence-based practice. It can provide academics with an opportunity to discuss the potential and/or realized practical implications of their research as well as learn about cutting edge practice issues or questions that could inform new research programs or studies. For practitioners, it provides opportunities to learn about the latest research findings that could prompt new techniques, solutions, or services that would benefit the external client community. It also provides practitioners with an opportunity to highlight key practice issues, challenges, trends, and so forth that may benefit from additional research. In this issue, we explore the HEXACO model of personality!

Recent developments in the effort to revise federal regulations that define which employees are “exempt” from the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) protection are worth noting for the I-O community.  On August 31, 2017, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Texas granted summary judgment to plaintiffs who challenged the legality of the Department of Labor (DOL) final rule to amend the FLSA regulations that define who is exempt.  This ruling effectively ends a long-running effort to implement these revisions.

The real power of technology for I-O becomes most apparent when you combine skillsets. This issue, we’ll be drawing connections between the ideas in my “Crash Course on the Internet” and my “Crash Course on R” to understand web applications, also known as “apps.” By the end of this Crash Course, you’ll be able to build a simple data visualization app and deploy it to the Internet for other people to see and play with.

 So to start, what exactly is a web application? Remember from my Internet crash course that all interactions between your web browser and the Internet can described as a series of data exchanges. Your web browser sends a request to a server, that server sends you something in return that is hopefully what you asked for, and your web browser interprets what it receives and displays it to you. But now we’re talking about apps! Wait a second, you ask yourself – if that’s true, how can I use something like Google Docs, which seems to record what I’m writing as I write it?