MN Transplant

It actually came from President Obama, it was not an NWS decision. Obama completely overhauled the hiring system across the government. The NWS actually lobbied to keep it since it has been determined by the NWS that SCEP is a very beneficial program for the NWS.

Here's the executive order: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/12/27/executive-order-recruiting-and-hiring-students-and-recent-graduates

No matter what the wording was, the real reason this came about was that certain groups, including veterans, charged that agencies were using SCEP and the other programs to circumvent the traditional hiring rules (they weren't wrong).

(My wife is in federal HR)

Neither the article nor the link to the data in the article specify whether the employment is within the actual field of study or not... I would venture a guess that it applies to any employment and not just within the field.

They took the data from the American Community Survey (ACS - Census Bureau), so it is actually a nice set of data, but it is definitely going to miss things like whether you are working in the field of your major. In fact, the last page of the Physical Science section has the following breakdown for sector of employment for the At Sci majors:

1) Public administration

2) Professional services

3) Information

4) Manufacturing (durable)

5) Education services

I wasn't sure which thread to put this in, but Yahoo news came out with a list of 10 college majors with the lowest unemployment rates. Ironically, atmospheric sciences and meteorology was 9 on the list with a 1.6% unemployment rate. Where or how they came up with this information, I have absolutely no idea. This practically seems blasphemous to me given the number of unemployed mets out there. I'd be more than willing to bet that the actual figure is much higher than 1.6% and that this is simply an example of shoddy journalism. This piece is about as bad as the article US News came out with a while ago stating that mets had an average (or was it median?) salary of 85K, something we all now isn't true. Link to the article:

http://news.yahoo.co...-163049193.html

Here's the Georgetown data:

http://cew.georgetown.edu/whatsitworth/

http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/physicalsciences.pdf

Considering that the unemployment rate for college grads is only 4.4%, it isn't as much of a leap down to those really small numbers.

Bad damage at home

it was for most of it but we had about 2-3 seconds of more violent shaking nearer the end

7th floor. Only heard the dropped ceilings shaking until the big S-wave bump at the end. Got the F out then.

Damn cell lines jammed immediately.

Fun stuff.

Just an FYI for those who don't know - UAH has a C-band research radar called ARMOR. You can get real-time imagery from a link on the left here: http://nsstc.uah.edu/ARMOR/index.html

Couple more. The first is what I consider a classic northern VA shot, of the impression of a plow that ran off the road.

34 inches in Crofton which was the closest snowfall report to my location in Odenton, truly epic and amazing.

My funny story to share is my husband and I going to the grocery store Thursday night. We didn't need the basics (we had gone earlier in the week before the news got serious about the threat) but we did want junk food and booze for the weekend. So here we are with our little cart filling up on cookies, chips/dip, fatty breakfast sandwhiches, ice cream, frozen pizza and appitizer meals while everyone else is clearing out the store of bread, milk, TP, eggs, fruits/veggies and meat. We are standing in line, our cart just a little over half full looking around at people with overflowing carts or even multiple carts just FILLED with endless amounts of the basics, like the world was coming to an end. We were given dirty looks, people were even making comments under their breath about how we were not going to survive the weekend on just junk food. It was incredible.

The woman who rang us up at the register smiled and thanked us for not going crazy and giving her a small break from the endless amounts of purchases she had been ringing up for hours. We smiled and laughed as we walked out with our 60$ purchase of junk food while everyone else fought over the last gallon of milk. Cracks me up to this day how insane people got due to the storm. Only to see people back out again on Tuesday buying MORE food for Wednesdays storm.

You were smarter than we were. We had the basics early on also, but didn't buy any junk food. By Tuesday we were desperate for a bag of Doritos or something. Fairfax Co. contracts out the snow removal in my neighborhood and they tried to send a pickup with a blade to clear our street Tuesday morning. It failed about a half block away. The picture below is of a bunch of us clearing out a path in the street. My wife and I made a Safeway and Home Depot run quick before the blizzard started, but couldn't get back up the hill to our house. So, we had to dig out a parking spot in the adjoining street, put the car there, and walk our junk back to the house. The car would stay there until Friday morning after the blizzard, which meant that our street wasn't fully plowed for an entire week.

Had waited since '04 for a true east coast snowstorm. It did not disappoint

Sure would be nice to have the obs threads from Eastern