da: A smiling human with short hair, head tilted a bit to the right. It's black and white with a neutral background. You can't tell if the white in the hair is due to lighting, or maybe it's white hair! (Default)
da ([personal profile] da) wrote2004-09-17 10:19 am
Entry tags:

Mistaken identity

hee hee hee.
Simon Cozens blogged about eliyon.com, a commercial search engine specifically for CVs. It will auto-generate a person's past work history.

If you give it a name and a company, it seems to do surprisingly well... for some results. It found a few friends who I'd not expect, and gave a reasonable history, with a few errors.

My profile includes somebody else's company under past employment, because he's got the same name as me and a company with the same initials. Perfectly reasonable AI mistake based on not enough information.

However, if you search for my dearly beloved at his place of employment, it looks fairly good at first glance, then becomes completely wrong. Only one reference to the author of the same name, which is good; current employer is accurate, good... Then there's the obituary... then you realize he's switched genders!

Apparently he, ahem, she was the owner of a rare coin shop in Toledo Ohio until she moved to Denver in '99 and died in 2001.

She "enjoyed travel, Mardi Gras, fine dining and attending musicals with friends."

That's partly right...

[identity profile] melted-snowball.livejournal.com 2004-09-20 08:43 am (UTC)(link)
Well, I do enjoy travel, and I have gone to Mardi Gras. I tend to hate "fine dining" because I believe that anything that feels the need to describe itself with that adjective almost certainly isn't. And we saw Urinetown just a couple months ago.

Oh. You're referring to me still being alive, huh? Oh. Details, details.