Will Knott

Well the budget is over, and the government released the text of the Financial Statement (the budget preamble if you will) made my Brian Lenihan yesterday.

So I ran it through Wordle to see what patterns emerged.

We have a big “government”, a large “tax” and a much smaller “payment”, “pay” and “spending”. Oddly, “Public” is almost as big as Government.

Now then, its unlikely that a Minister would put the text of their speech in to something like Wordle, but if they did, the resulting speech might be, well, interesting.

They have the statements from other years too. I think I might have to play with comparison tools (once I’m on a more powerful machine).

take care,
Will Knott

If I have the timing right, this will be uploaded while I’m at an interview, so it seems timely.

My CV as a tag cloud…

Robin Blandord came up with the idea to run his CV through Wordle.net to see what it would look like as a tag cloud. It’s been repeated by Ellybabes, Sinéad Cochrane and Paul Browne. Sorry that it’s in simple black & white and not visually pleasing as the others; I thought about adding it to my physical CV or embed it in the files to see if there was a change in uptake. Given that most (if not all) recruitment agencies parse the résumés they recieve through something similar, it might make sense. Wordle is a Java application which parses text, ignores common words, and creates a tag cloud. The size of the word is proportional to the how often it occurs in the CV.

Putting something like a résumé through it might take a bit of tweaking. Plurals are (currently) counted separately, and other common phrases show up. I needed to tweak my CV to stop my address showing up in the tag cloud for instance.

The other thing is how “management” looms large over both “software” and “database” (with “sql” peeking in there). I didn’t expect that, nor expect to see something similar on the other technical people’s clouds.

Does it give an accurate picture which should be used as a reflection or consideration for employment, or is it really easy to “game” the results to create an artificial profile?

And given the full social media treatment, does a tag cloud of a persons delicious account cast a different reflection than their résumé?

So then,
You hiring?

take care,
Will Knott

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