Technical Affairs

Mike Aamodt, Associate Editor

I would like to use this month's column to let you know about two exciting developments in IPMAAC and to enlist your help with these projects. At the end of the column is another piece of HR humor.

Statistics Primer

IPMAAC will be publishing a short book on understanding statistics written by Mark Nagy and myself. The goal of the book is to provide the reader with the ability to understand what various statistics do and why one would use a particular statistic. The book is not intended to replace the many wonderfully exciting statistics texts currently on the market. Instead, it will provide the "big picture" that should allow the reader to understand the statistics encountered in a journal article or technical report and/or be able to convey statistical results in a manner that even a top administrator will understand!

The book will have short chapters on such topics as correlation, regression, meta-analysis, descriptive statistics (e.g., means, standard deviations), t-tests, analysis of variance, and factor analysis. At the end of each chapter, we plan to include an article from Public Personnel Management using that particular statistic so that readers can quickly apply their new knowledge. The book will be very deeply discounted to IPMA and IPMAAC members.

How can you help on this project you ask? We need two types of folks to review the short chapters. We need statistically savvy people to review the chapters for accuracy, and we need people who don't know much about statistics to give us feedback about how understandable the chapters are to people who aren't statistics wizards. If you are interested in being a reviewer, send me an email (maamodt@runet.edu) indicating if you are a statistics pro or novice and how many chapters you would like to review. The names of all reviewers will be listed in the text.

Journal

In the early 1990s, Radford University published the journal Applied HRM Research. For a variety of reasons, the journal went into hiatus (that's the term they use in Hollywood) for several years and is ready for a comeback. The journal will still be published semi-annually by Radford University but IPMAAC has agreed to house the journal on its web site so that it will be available for free to IPMAAC members as well as the general public. Our goal is to provide a professional forum to publish and read applied research information.

The journal is a very applied journal in that each article is reviewed by at least one academic and one "real world" practitioner. The job of the reviewers and the editorial board is to ensure that each article is technically sound, has results that will be useful to someone, and is easy to read. We anticipate the first issue being published in the Spring of 2000.

You can be involved in this project in two ways.

Submitting an article:

If you presented a study at the annual conference or perhaps have some data you think others will be interested in, please submit an article for potential publication. If you have some data but are not a "researcher", let me know and I will try to find a person interested in collaborating on an article with you. Likewise, if you are a good writer and researcher but have no data, let me know and I will try to match you up with a data source.

Reviewing articles:

If you are interested in reviewing articles that have been submitted for potential publication, send me an email. We need both academicians and practitioners. The names of all reviewers will be published in the journal.

HR Humor

Here is another piece of HR humor that one of our readers found on the Internet.

What a manager says	What a manager means
That's very interesting	I disagree
I don't disagree	I disagree
I don't totally disagree	You may be right, but I don't care
You have to show some flexibility	You have to do it whether you want to or not
We have an opportunity here	You have a problem
Let's sit on your concept for awhile	Where's the recycling bin?
I'm afraid the decision has been made for above our level	Just do this and shut up
We've got to follow some strict guidelines	We're going to do this my way
We have to maximize our resources	You are working weekends until further notice
You need to be more proactive	You should have protected me from myself

Mike Aamodt, a Professor of Psychology at Radford University serves as our Associate Editor for the Technical Affairs column and as our unofficial humor editor. If you have a technical question you want answered/discussed, wish to comment on this month's article, or want to share a humor item please contact Mike. He may be reached by email (maamodt@runet.edu), phone (540) 831-5513 or fax (540) 831-6113.