TWC: Have They Screwed Their Last Female Employee?
Posted by Phoenix Woman on May 11, 2008
Salon’s Broadsheet and the blog Time in Moments remind us about The Weather Channel’s history of not only tolerating sexual harrassment, but of punishing those female employees who refuse to submit to it — acts which are finally coming back to haunt them as they try to sell themselves for top dollar to a new owner:
Ms. Andrews isn’t stupid. Before her contract was up she filed a demand for arbitration according to her contract with The Weather Channel. Her complaint? The company TWC allowed Bob Stokes to sexually harass her.
She won. On January 31st, 2008, the arbitrator issued an award of an undisclosed amount to Ms. Andrews.
For some reason the Weather Channel doesn’t want this little story out in the media while a bidding war is going on. They want that 17 pages of arbitration hidden until they get a new owner.
Awww. Rick Santorum’s favorite cable channel is in trouble. Gee, you mean that TWC’s coddling a lawsuit and bad-publicity magnet among their employees might just hurt their marketability? What a shame. Not.
By the way: If you want to go look up US weather online, the NOAA’s own website, http://www.weather.gov, is a much better bet — and it’s free.
MEC said
Isn’t it interesting that The Weather Channel has a nearly identical URL — weather.com instead of weatherchannel.com. I wonder how many people look for the government site but use .com because it’s the most common URL extension, and get the commercial site instead?
Phoenix Woman said
Eggszacktly.
Stormcrow said
Here’s something you may not know.
You can hack the National Weather Service Forecast Office web page, by hand, to point to a location within yards of any specific point you wish.
This is a multi-step process, but once you’re done, simply bookmark the URL to preserve the result for future use.
First, you obtain North Latitude and East Longitude numbers for the location you are interested in. I use Google Maps to do this.
Now, dial up http://www.noaa.gov/.
Put the approximate zip code into the search box and clock “Go”.
When I do this, using zip code 98087, here’s the URL I get in return:
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/forecast/MapClick.php
?site=sew&smap=1
&textField1=47.853&textField2=-122.283
I have intentionally broken the URL into three pieces here, both for legibility and for clarity.
Notice that the first piece is no longer generic to NOAA. The “wrh” interpolated by NOAA when I searched on the zip 98087 specifies “Western Region Headquarters”.
I don’t yet know what “smap=1″ means, but I think that if the zip code is close, this should not matter.
The paydirt is in the last of the three pieces:
&textField1=47.853&textField2=-122.283
Writing this generically and breaking down further, we see
“textField1=47.853″ and “textField2=-122.283″
Yes, these mean what you think. textField1 is north latitude. textField2 is east longitude. And you can tweak these however you like. These variables can also be specified down to five decimal places rather than merely three, as shown here.
Once you have your chosen values plugged in, reassemble the URL and enter it into your bowser.
If you do an A-B comparison between NOAA forcast by zip code and by precise position within that zip code, you will find that they differ!
I first reported this result on a web forum six months ago. Another member added this commentary, explaining why the extra precision is useful.
Charles said
That’s truly amazing.