Last month, in an academic congregation at Northumbria University, I was formally awarded a Master of Science Digital and Technology Specialist (Data & Analytics) with Distinction.

Look! Actual proof!

Thanks to Mike, my Father-in-Law, for ripping that stream.

As my research was about "Exploring the visualisation of hierarchical cybersecurity data within the Metaverse", I thought it only fitting that I had a formal photo taken wearing the damned headset.

Don't worry, I also got a couple of sensible photos for my parents and in-laws.

Right! What's next?

The delete key was hammered mercilessly.

But... As all fans of Jasper Fforde know - there is a "Well of Lost Plots"; where rejected sentences live on in the eternal library...

As I was writing about the Metaverse, and as I love reading sci-fi, I decided to merge my interests!

So, here for posterity - and future inspiration - are some of my thoughts on how sci-fi influences the development of technology.

In "Magic Mirror: The Novel as a Software Development Platform", Mark Pesce eloquently argues that the developments we see in modern technology are predicted (if not determined) by science-fiction stories (Pesce, 1999). As a note of caution, Pesce's chosen examples all display the traits of survivorship bias. That is, there are an infinite number of "inventions" in sci-fi which have not come to pass. Given the long history of the genre, it is not surprising that some of its predictions have become reality. Nevertheless, it is important to remember the "anchoring" effect that mass media has on users' perceptions of what is possible with technology.

Technology companies frequently misappropriate terms from science fiction in order to make their products sound innovative and exciting (Newitz, 2021). The original Metaverse envisioned by Stephenson was a dystopian nightmare. It serves as an allegory for how the worst excesses of humanity can corrupt an environment. Similarly, the novel "Ready Player One" presents a world where VR has reduced the majority of humanity to serfdom (Rafif and Munjid, 2022). Given this, the author finds it inexplicable that Facebook chose to rebrand their company around the notion of the Metaverse. It is akin to a military power rebranding to be closer associated with The Empire from Star Wars, or a conglomerate explicitly citing the "Weyland-Yutani Corporation" from Alien as their inspiration.

Perhaps this behaviour should not be surprising as several major technology projects have been named after some of the most terrifying and dystopian fictional products - Skynet, Palantir, Panopticon to name but a few (Levendowski, 2022).

Future-gazing sometimes means imagining the worst-case scenarios which may be exploited by future adversaries. There is an inherent tension in this line of research. If the futurist publishes their research, a malicious user may take inspiration from their research. But if the futurist does not publish, people may not be able to defend themselves against novel attacks.

But real academic publications should have a DOI - it's an identifier which is supposed to make it easier for people to find and cite paper. You know how books have a unique ISBN? It's like that.

I couldn't find a way to publish this via my university, which was a little disappointing. And I didn't have the time or energy to rewrite it for submission to a journal. Then a couple of people suggest that I submit it to arXiv.

arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 2,243,321 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.

So I registered for an account using my uni email address and selected a suitable topic. I picked Computer Science / Human Computer Interaction - which felt the closest to what I'd written about.

The process was simple enough. Fill in a form then upload a PDF. Then the interminable wait for moderation. It only took two-week.

And, then, it was published!

And, with publication comes a persistent DOI - 10.48550/arXiv.2304.10542.

Now all I need to do is wait and watch my h-index grow 🤓

In that spirit, here's how I used the venerable pandoc to convert my MSc dissertation from .md into a variety of more readable formats.

Prep

I've no idea what you already have installed on your system but, at a minimum, you need to install the latest version of pandoc and you'll need a modern version of the weasyprint library.

I found pandoc's dependencies... interesting. Depending on your operating system, you may find yourself having to install all sorts of esoteric libraries.

Commands

This is what you'll need to run to generate the outputs. I'll show you the commands, then what you need in each file.

HTML:

pandoc dissertation.md \
   --citeproc --metadata-file=metadata.yml --embed-resources --standalone \
    -o ../output/dissertation.html

ePub:

pandoc dissertation.md \
   --citeproc --metadata-file=metadata.yml --epub-embed-font=fonts/font.ttf \
   -o ../output/dissertation.epub

PDF:

pandoc dissertation.md \
   --citeproc --metadata-file=metadata.yml --pdf-engine=weasyprint \
   -o ../output/dissertation.pdf

Metadata

You'll need a metadata file called metadata.yml. It must start and finish with ---

---
lang: en-GB
title: My awesome dissertation
bibliography: Bibliography.bib
csl: harvard-cite-them-right.csl
link-citations: true
reference-section-title: References
author: Terence Eden
creator: Terence Eden
rights:  🄯 CC BY-NC 4.0
keywords: [Some, comma, separated, keywords]
date: 2023-04-24
description: A dissertation about stuff
css: style.css
cover-image: media/cover.jpg
---

Hopefully all those entries are self-explanatory. Now let's go into each extra file that this requires!

Bibliography

I assume that you're using Zotero or some other citation manager. Export all your citations using in Better BibTex format as Bibliography.bib.

You may need to install a Better BibTex plugin.

Citation Style Language - CSL

Your citation manager probably already has your preferred CSL format. If not, you can download the .csl file from Zotero or from the CSL GitHub.

Layout CSS

The layout for HTML, ePub, and PDF is all controlled by CSS. Here's a minimum viable stylesheet. It's designed for A4 paper as well as screens. Figures and tables stay on their own printed page. Sections also get a page-break.

I've commented any interesting bits. Feel free to add to it for your own use:

@page {
    /* Set paper options */
    size: A4;
    margin: 1cm;
}

@media print {
    /* Stop figures & tables from being broken */
    figure, table {
      break-inside: avoid-page;
    }

    /*  Put each section on a new page*/
    h2 {
        break-before: always;
    }
}

@media screen {
    body {
        max-width: 45em;
        margin-left: auto;
        margin-right: auto;
    }
}

@font-face {
    font-family: "My-Font";
    /* WOFF2 for web, TTF for ePub */
    src:
        url("fonts/font.ttf"),
        url("fonts/font.woff2") format("woff2");
}

html {
    font-size: 1em;
}

body {
    text-align: justify;
    font-family: "My-Font", sans-serif;
}

a {
    color: #001aff; 
}

img {
    max-width: 100%;
    margin: auto;
    display: block;
}

/* Make references spaced out better */
#refs > div {
    padding-bottom: 1em;
}

figure {
    border: 1px solid gray;
    max-width: fit-content;
}

figcaption {
    font-size: .9em;
    color: rgb(24, 24, 24);
    text-align: center;
}

table {
    width: 100%;
    border-collapse: collapse;
    font-size: .9em;
}
td {
    padding: .5em;
    border: 1px solid black;
    text-align: left;
}

h2 {
    text-align: left;
}

p {
    margin:.5em;
}

Fonts

If you want a custom font, you'll need it in TTF and WOFF2 format. Not all eReaders can use WOFF2, so TTF is needed as a fallback. I recommend using FontSquirrel to generate the font formats.

Markdown

OK, now here we go! You can use a mix of Markdown and HTML.

A few points that may not be obvious:

• No need for a # top level heading. Pandoc will insert one for you.
• No need for a table of contents. Again, let Pandoc doc it.
• You will need to manually add lists for figures, acronyms, tables, glossary, etc.
• I like to use internal links in Markdown. For example

## 1. Introduction {#1-introduction}

### 1.1 Context {#1-1-context}

• That lets you write as can be seen [in Methodology](#2-Methodology)
• Speaking of which, I couldn't find a good way to do figures and captions in Markdown, so I reverted to HTML:

<figure id="figure-01">
   <figcaption>Figure 01 - A fictional depiction of 3D visualisations of Cybersecurity interfaces</figcaption>
   <img src="media/jurassic.jpg" width="" alt="Screenshots from the movie Jurassic Park. A young woman looks at a 3D display on a monitor. She exclaims It's a UNIX System. I know this.">
   <figcaption>[@spielbergJurassicPark1993]</figcaption>
</figure>

• Notice the way citations are done there? I, again, use Zotero and a VS Code plugin to insert citations. Don't attempt to do them by hand!
• No need to add your own list of references. Pandoc will add them where it sees:

<div id="refs">
## References
</div>

So, a sample document will look something like:

## 1. Introduction {#1-introduction}

### 1.1 Context {#1-1-context}
Blah blah blah

![Alt text.](media/photo.jpg)

Or

<figure id="figure-01">
   <figcaption>Figure 01</figcaption>
   <img src="media/example.jpg" width="" alt="Description.">
   <figcaption>[@spielbergJurassicPark1993]</figcaption>
</figure>

<div id="refs">
## References
</div>

## Appendix
* Some
* Bullets

Is it worth it?

Well, now, there's the question! You can just export these formats from Google Docs, Office 365, etc. But this method gives you much more control over what the end-product looks like.

Isn't yak-shaving fun⸮

My final project was a 10,901 word epic about... The ✨Metaverse✨.

Have I gone a little bit peculiar? No. I don't think so. I was advised to pick a project which would sustain my interest for 6 months. So I chose something which would have lots of modern papers to read. And, more importantly, justify me buying a new toy to play with⁰!

I was delighted and overwhelmed that it received a score of 80% - taking my overall grade to a Distinction. Nice 😎

What was it about

Have you ever had a spreadsheet that was too large to fit on your monitor? Have you ever needed to explore a database full of complex relational material, but felt restricted by your screen's size?

That's a problem that we regularly face at work. So what's it like to view and manipulate data in the Metaverse?

Do people enjoy the experience? Do they find it useful? Does it cause them physical distress? What are their attitudes to the Metaverse in general? Is this the future?

The answers were: yes, maybe, not really, mixed to poor, possibly.

Read all about it

I've released the paper as Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial.

You can read my dissertation online.

Or, you can download the following formats:

• ePub
• PDF

Or you can grab the MarkDown or HTML from my open source repository.

Publication?

I've no idea how I properly publish something like this. I guess I need a DOI and to submit it somewhere? If you have any experience in this area, please let me know.

And, yesterday, I got this...

All done!

I've got to say, it has been... an experience. I've relentlessly blogged about the process. The academic content was pretty good, but the administration by QA.com was nothing short of atrocious.

Missed deadlines, unhelpful staff, incompetent tutors, and admin staff who clearly didn't care about the student experience.

Here's an excellent example of the failure of student experience. After arguing (successfully) that they had to stick to their promised timescales for performing my End Point Assessment, I waited to find out if I had passed. I waited. And waited.

Then, one morning, I got an email from the university careers service letting me know I was eligible for their graduation services! That's how I found out that I had passed.

A few days later, QA sent my my apprenticeship completion certificate. Where they had got the name of my course wrong!

Bah!

I am so glad to be done with QA. I'm trying not to be bitter, but it seemed like they went out of their way to make the educational experience as stressful and annoying as possible.

But, now I'm done, I'm not going to dwell on them any further.

I was aiming to pass the MSc and am chuffed to bits that I got a distinction. I couldn't have managed that without the support of my loving wife. I'm also grateful to my employers - Cabinet Office. They funded this MSc, and gave me the time and space to study.

In the next few weeks, I'll publish my dissertation. It's a thrilling tale of what happens when you stick Civil Servants in the Metaverse and ask them to interact with giant datasets. Well, I found it interesting!

Right, time for a celebratory pint or two.

My main piece of advice is that you should read the official guidance from the Institute For Apprenticeships. If your training provider or Skills Coach tells you something which contradicts the Institute's advice - defer to the Institute.

So, what is the point of the portfolio?

The portfolio presents evidence from real-work projects and is used to help the apprentice to answer questions in the Professional Discussion.

That's it. When you have your Professional Discussion, you are expected to use your portfolio to answer any question you may be asked. If the assessor says "Tell me about a time you..." then all you need to do is find the answer in your portfolio and talk about it for a few minutes.

The apprentice uses their portfolio to answer questions in the professional discussion and may also reference other work they have undertaken in the workplace. Both the independent assessor and the apprentice will have access to the portfolio before and during the Professional Discussion

How should it be presented?

The portfolio must be an e portfolio presented digitally or on line

If your training provider tells you to use PebblePad - you can politely tell them you'd rather use Google Docs, Office 365, WordPress, or whatever you want.

OK, so what should be in it?

It must include: * a contents list and mapping against the knowledge, skills and behaviours; * a brief introduction/commentary by the apprentice, and highlighting, where appropriate, anything they would do differently; * evidence from two pieces of work that cover the core KSB’s and that will provide a structure for the professional discussion;

That's two answers per question, with a bit of evidence, and some reflection. Easy!

Right! Let's get cracking! But first, a disclaimer. This worked for me - that doesn't guarantee it will work for you. I passed my EPA Professional Discussion using a portfolio that I'd written in this style.

The Template

Here's the template I used:

• Situation - some background to show you understand the academic basis of the question.
• Task - the outcome you were trying to achieve. Or what you were asked to do.
• Action - what you actually did.
• Response - did it work? Include a screenshot of evidence.
• Reflect - "If I were to do this again, I would do ... This would have been better because... On reflection, the activity made me feel..."

Each of those needs no more that a few sentences. I literally copy and pasted that and filled it in. This isn't a creative writing exercise. You're not trying to hit an excessive word count. You are trying to efficiently answer the questions.

I aimed for about 40 words - 2 or 3 sentences - per section. Around 200 words per answer. The chances of your assessor reading any more than that is slim.

Examples

Here's a sample assessment criteria.

How to justify the value of technology investments and apply benefits

And here are my two pieces of evidence.

Situation 1

The UK's Health Data Research agency (HDRUK) wanted to convene a panel of experts to assess NHS related technology investments and their benefits (Stokel-Walker, 2021). They specifically needed expertise in determining the value-for-money of these technology investments and whether the benefits were worthwhile. In a UK health data context, this means Quality-Adjusted Life Years (Torrance and Feeny, 1989).

Task

I was asked to sit on the panel due to my strong experience with complex health technology projects. I had to assess dozens of different projects and justify whether HDRUK should invest in them - and what the benefits would be.

Action

I read several complex proposals and discussed them with other panel members. I quizzed the proposal writers on the benefits, their business plans, EBITDA, and other matters. I coordinated with my team to ensure that my attendance at these workshops would not negatively impact our other deliverables.

Result

HDRUK was pleased with my selection - and rejection - of the projects. They appreciated my comprehensive feedback on how they could justify the value of these technological investments. [Screenshot of email from HDRUK giving positive feedback]

Reflect

If I were to do this again, I would spend more time researching modern academic trends in procurement theory. I mostly used my own experience and expertise. On reflection, I may have relied too heavily on the opinions of the other panel members.

Situation 2

I was sent on an expensive Cybersecurity course. Due to the limited amount of public funds, I was asked to justify the investment and demonstrate how the benefits could be applied.

Task

The task was to create a blog post with a goal of demonstrating the value and explaining to a wider audience that I could apply the benefits.

Action

I wrote an internal-only blog post, with the assistance of the editorial team. I sought out the publication team and provided them with a brief - which they accepted.

Result

The blog post was popular internally and led to people asking me if they could take a similar course. The blog post was published externally and received moderate feedback showing that I hadn't wasted taxpayers' money.

The editorial and senior leadership team also thought it demonstrated excellence:

[Screenshot of a chat message from my boss giving positive feedback]

Reflect

If I were to do this again, I would place more emphasis on the course cost in order to show value for money. This might have encouraged the organisation to invest in more regular cybersecurity training. On reflection, I was underwhelmed with the course and feel that I need to stretch myself further in order to justify the value of these investments.

Other tips

Keep a brag document throughout the year. Every time someone emails you saying "thanks for doing that", take a screenshot and paste it in the document.

If people don't email you thanks - ask them for feedback.

The evidence should be a screenshot. But it can be of an email, of a presentation you did, or a document you wrote, or some source code. Anything really.

You are being assessed on your Knowledge, Skills, and Behaviours. It may help you to think of them like this:

• Knowledge: I can prove that I know...
• Skill: I can prove that I am able to...
• Behaviour: I can prove that I consistently...

Don't leave the portfolio until the end. Even with just a few hundred words per section, it's still stupidly long. Once a week, take a quick skim through it and see if anything you've done that week looks like it will even vaguely fit. If so, shove it in. You can always take it out later.

Don't worry to much about academic referencing. I threw in a couple to keep my Skills Coach happy - but the official document doesn't say you need to include them.

Above all, remember this:

The portfolio is not directly assessed; it is used to frame the professional discussion, where KSBs are to be assessed.

The portfolio is for you - specifically to help you pass your professional discussion.

Good luck!

Disclaimer

I jotted these down while doing the assessment. They are relevant to the Digital Technology Solution Specialist L7 MSc with a Data Analytics pathway. They will almost certainly be different for you.

I had my portfolio open on my screen and I constantly referred back to it during my answers. When asked for specific examples, I searched for them in the document and used that to help me talk about the topic. I also had a handy graphic from 6 Ways to Demonstrate Skills and Behaviours in End Point Assessment to remind me what talking points I needed to hit.

The assessor did ask follow ups questions if they thought I was unclear - and they steered back on topic when I strayed. I also asked at several points if my answers were unclear or if they needed more details. Some of the questions sections are short because I had (accidentally) covered the knowledge in previous answers.

Here are (roughly) the questions I was asked:

Business and Change Management

To what extent do you think that roadmapping is important for your organisation in the field of Data Analytics?

Can you give any examples of roadmaps that you have been involved in?

Can you give an example of any technology-related business change you brought into your organisation?

How did you achieve that change? What method did you use to bring about that change? What other methods did you consider?

Give me an example of how you negotiate budget approvals with your senior stakeholders?

Before you make a change, you need to make stakeholders aware. How do you communicate with different types stakeholders?

Leadership

Can you give an example of the different leadership styles you are aware of? What motivational techniques are required to lead a high performing technical team?

Identify some professional values which are needed in a high performing team?

Point to 3-4 specific values which are required by your role?

You're leading a team. How do you help them develop their own leadership skills?

What coaching techniques are you aware of?

How do you develop a good working relationship with your teams?

What different leadership styles are you aware of?

What leadership style do you have?

Technology

What factors influence technology changes to be brought in to your organisation?

Major Project

Briefly describe your major project?

Describe what you developed and how you developed it?

Data Analytics

Describe the social, ethical, and legal issues with data analytics?

How do you manage those concerns?

Good luck!

It is a bit of a nerve-wracking process but the assessor put me at my ease. It was a formal discussion - a bit like a job interview. But there was time for a bit of back-and-forth.

My top tips would be:

• Re-read your portfolio before the discussion so it is fresh in your mind.
• Do some vocal warm-ups to make sure you're comfortable speaking for long periods.
• Have a big glass of water by you.

The main point, I agree with. Citing a whole paper is a lossy process. Saying "Smith, J (1963) Practical Time Travel, Gallifrey Press" is basically fine but it doesn't tell you where in the publication the bit is you're citing.

Xiao & Ballou contend that the answer is to add a page number to every citation. I think that's a simple solution - but almost always the wrong way to solve the problem.

Firstly, page numbers aren't stable. If you've got the large-print version of a paper, it will have a different page numbers than the regular print edition. Paperbacks and hardbacks have different numbers. The paper copy might be formatted differently from the digital copy.

Secondly, most modern documents simply don't have pages. Anything published as HTML / ePub won't have a page number. Page numbers are a skeuomorph in those contexts.

Finally, even if there is a stable page number - is that precise enough? A page may have several hundred words in multiple sections. Page numbers aren't granular.

I've ranted before about I consider Quoting Page Numbers from eBooks is Considered Harmful.

So what's the solution?

URl fragments!

A properly formatted document should be accessible by sub-section. For example:

example.com/papers/time-travel.html#2.3.9-Eye-of-Harmony

That takes us to the paper we want, and straight to the anchor heading we're discussing. This also works with the obsolete PDF format.

Now, not all papers have the correct markup to do this. That's OK! We can cheat using Text Fragments. That allows us to link to the first instance of a specific string of text in a document. For example:

example.com/papers/time-travel.html#:~:text=Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow

I genuinely think both of those solutions make more sense than hoping that your reader has a copy of a paper in exactly the same format as you do.

One of the things I found most frustrating during my MSc was how... old fashioned academia was. PDFs with two column layouts, unreadable fonts, paywalled knowledge trapped in moribund formats. Let's try to drag it into the late 20th Century, eh?

Teachers had long-since given up on the state of my handwriting. So I got special dispensation to write up some of my work on whatever primitive word processor was installed on the PC. With one caveat: no spell check!

Which, even as a ten year old, I thought was reasonable. Learning to spell is an adult life skill. So using a spell-checker was cheating.

Once I got to secondary school, it was assumed that I knew how to spell. And there was no restriction on using Wrd 2.0's splel chek.

But I had one teacher him hated an grammar check. He thought it encouraged laziness of writing. Which, to be fair, it probably did.

Of course, come exam season, there were no computers. All answers were laboriously hand-written. The use of spell- and grammar-checking software had left me lazy. And my handwriting had atrophied beyond all hope. It's a miracle I passed!

Spell Checking is Artificial Intelligence.

It doesn't seem like it because it is so ubiquitous now. But it is more than just a computer looking up words in a list. There's a huge corpus of learning which goes into spotting homophones, predicting which word you meant, and calculating the likeliest candidates based on your previous writing.

I'm now in the middle of writing up my MSc dissertation. I'm doing it in Google Docs - because I'm a masochist.

Google Docs has a useful feature called Smart Suggestions which → offers to autocomplete your sentences.

Is that cheating?

I've signed a declaration to my University saying that my dissertation is all my own work. But it isn't.

Google's AI suggested a couple of dozen sentences. Google's AI proofread and corrected both my spelling and grammar. Just how much of my work was generated by 2022's Clippy?

The general consensus from my teachers is that it is not cheating.

Students are now using the GPT-3 AI to write their entire essays.

Is that cheating?

I think most people will instinctively say yes. A whole essay written by machine is cheating.

An autocompleted sentence is fine. But a whole essay is not. Where's the line? To reinvigorate an old joke "We've already established that some AI is cheating - now we're just haggling over character count".

If I need a paragraph summarising the history of mayonnaise, do I need to waste my time writing that - or can I outsource it to an AI? Doing so doesn't prove I understand the material. But is it materially worse than taking someone else's work and rewording it into my own style?

Perhaps AI isn't cheating when it is merely scaffolding?

When Clippy offered to help with writing a letter, it usually meant that it would show you how to format an address and whether to end with "Yours faithfully" or "Yours sincerely". Is it cheating to use a well-structured template?

This ramble-post is to say that I don't know. My essays are mostly my work. When the AI has suggested something, I've been free to reject it. But I rarely do. Google Docs knows what I want to write before I write it. Am I merely the editor of machine generated text?

One paragraph of this blog post was generated by OpenAI. Can you spot it?

Does it matter?

So, you want to write your dissertation or thesis in Markdown. But how do you manage all your citations?

1. Install Zotero
2. Install the Better BibTex plugin
3. Restart Zotero. The BBT plugin will launch a configuration screen - use it to set your preferences
4. Install VS Code (or VS Codium)
5. Install the VS Code Zotero plugin

Now, when you want to enter a citation in Markdown, the combined plugins will generate something like this:

## Abstract

Space is really big @adamsHitchhiker1979

That @adamsHitchhiker1979 is the citation.

Formatting citations

You want to export your Markdown to something like ePub or PDF with nicely formatted citations like (Adams, 1979)

Use Pandoc!

1. Install Pandoc
2. In Zotero, use File → Export Library. Export in Better BibTex format as test.bib.

Add the following configuration section to the top of your Markdown file:

---
bibliography: test.bib
...

Run the following command:

pandoc --citeproc test.md -o test.epub

Hey presto! You now have a nicely formatted ePub with all the citations in your preferred format, and the bibliography at the end.

Format the citations better

The citations don't look the way I want them to!

1. Download your preferred Citation Style from Zotero, save it as whatever.csl
2. Add the following into your Markdown file's configuration section csl: whatever.csl
3. Important Make sure that your citations are wrapped in [ and ] otherwise Pandoc will mess things up. See the Pandoc Citations Extension for more details.

Your Markdown should look something like this:

---
bibliography: test.bib
csl: whatever.csl
link-citations: true
...

# Intro

Computers are complicated [@verletComputerExperimentsClassical1967].

Then run pandoc --citeproc test.md -o test.epub - you can change the file type to html, pdf, or anything else your system supports.

Make it look even nicer

This is the boilerplate that I use.

---
bibliography: test.bib
csl: whatever.csl
link-citations: true
reference-section-title: References
title: My brilliant title
...

# Intro

Computers are complicated [@verletComputerExperimentsClassical1967].

## Something

More info [@smithEvolutionInnovationCapability2017]

<div id="refs">
## References
</div>

## The End
Goodbye!

That gives you a title, ensures that all in-text citations link down to the references, and puts the references somewhere other than the end. Here's the HTML it produces using pandoc --citeproc test.md -o bib.html :

<h1 id="intro">Intro</h1>
<p>Computers are complicated <span class="citation" data-cites="verletComputerExperimentsClassical1967">(<a
         href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/11/zotero-citations-in-markdown-publishing-to-epub-or-pdf/#ref-verletComputerExperimentsClassical1967" role="doc-biblioref">Verlet, 1967</a>)</span>.</p>
<h2 id="something">Something</h2>
<p>More info <span class="citation" data-cites="smithEvolutionInnovationCapability2017">(<a
         href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/11/zotero-citations-in-markdown-publishing-to-epub-or-pdf/#ref-smithEvolutionInnovationCapability2017" role="doc-biblioref">Smith <em>et al.</em>, 2017</a>)</span>
</p>
<div id="refs" class="references csl-bib-body" role="doc-bibliography">
   <h2 id="references">References</h2>
   <div id="ref-smithEvolutionInnovationCapability2017" class="csl-entry" role="doc-biblioentry">
      Smith, C. <em>et al.</em> (2017) <span>‘The <span>Evolution</span> of an
         <span>Innovation Capability</span>’</span>, <em>Research-Technology
         Management</em>, 60(2), pp. 26–35. Available at: <a
         href="https://doi.org/10.1080/08956308.2017.1276388">https://doi.org/10.1080/08956308.2017.1276388</a>.
   </div>
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</div>
<h2 id="the-end">The End</h2>
<p>Goodbye!</p>

If that was useful to you - or if you think you know a better way - please drop a comment in the box.

Oh, and go through an End-Point-Assessment with my portfolio to make sure I actually know what I'm talking about.

But, back to the report. I need to write a 1,000 word literature review. The only problem is… I've never done one of those before!

Sadly, my MSc provider aren't particularly proactive in providing resources to students - so I started looking for something to help me. I stumbled across the book "So, You Have to Write a Literature Review: A Guided Workbook for Engineers" by Berdanier & Lenart.

It's a fun and friendly book - and reasonably short! It presents a series of exercises to go through for conducting a literature review, with separate pathways for those doing multi-month reviews for their PhDs & those of us attempting something a little less ambitious.

This book is absolutely excellent. It helped me immeasurably. Every step was useful, the advice was reassuring, and it gave me several practical actions to take.

I 100% recommend it to anyone writing a literature review.

The authors encourage users of the book to scribble notes to themselves - so that's what I'm doing in the rest of this blog post.

Activity 1.1 Brainstorm Your Thoughts on Writing

Spend some time reflecting on the following questions: How do you feel about writing? Have you had positive experiences with writing? Negative experiences? What made those experiences bad? What writing-related anxiety do you bring into the present writing experience?

I enjoy writing. Well, I enjoy blogging. I like crafting a series of statements and refining them. My writing for academic assignments is a lot more formulaic. I find that frustrating. I also dislike being hemmed in by a word-count. I find that rigid and constricting. I'd much rather write where my mind takes me. Despite that, I've received good marks for my previous essays - so I'm obviously doing something right. Similarly, my blog posts can be pretty popular. That's either a sign of good writing, being in the Zeitgeist, of my tendency to be deliberately inflammatory. I quite often write what I feel - which isn't very polite. I then edit it down - usually after the good counsel of my wife.

I don't think I have any specific anxiety about writing. I mostly want to make sure that I can fit my argument into a brief word count. I worry that without room to expand example and provide counter-examples, I won't be able to sufficiently make a convincing case. Very occasionally I have a bit of writers'-block - but I find writing any old nonsense helps shake that away.

I think I'm looking forward to writing up this dissertation. It will be a lot less repetitive than other things I've written (another bugbear).

Activity 1.2

Develop Your Plan for Writing and Accountability 1) What is your goal? Why are you writing a literature review? What is the venue?

My goal is to write 1,000 words of adequate literature review. I genuinely want to review what other people have done. I want to learn from their mistakes and hope that I can learn something useful. I will be writing in my home office. Mostly. Occasionally on the sofa if I'm tired from standing.

2) When will you write?

I usually have Wednesdays as an OTJ day. I also tend to work on Sundays as well.

3) What are your strategies for writing accountability? Who can you reach out to as an Accountability Partner or to develop a Shut Up & Write group?

My long-suffering, and delightfully patient wife will be my accountability partner. I'll also use the student Discord server to let people know what I'm doing. I'll see if anyone else wants to "shut up and write".

But, ultimately, I'm accountable to myself.

4) What happens if you start to fall off your writing plan?

Fuck… Errr… Panic? My algorithm for writing is pretty good. I just need to repeatedly go back to that. I usually find I write too much. So I will try to front-load what I write.

Activity 3.2 Determine a Naming Convention for Your Literature

How do you want your literature arranged when you open your digital file folder?

If it were in a folder, YYYY Keyword1, Keyword2, Title. I don't think I care about the author. But I anticipate putting my reading into Zotero.

2) What information is most necessary for you to remember about each article?

A short description of what things it covers.

3) Does your advisor have a preferred file naming convention?

TBD.

4) Is there information that you would prefer to have in a different case (e.g. all caps) to separate it from other pieces of information?

Nope. Well, maybe "TO READ" or similar?

5) What file naming convention best fits the answers to the above questions?

Metadata at the start is generally useful. That can include keywords or notes.

6) What benefits does your chosen convention offer to you with respect to how you remember information?

Author isn't important. Most text can be grep'd, so a summary is most important.

7) Are there any downsides to this convention? If so, tweak your convention to mitigate these if possible.

Basically having anything is a file-system is a problem. Blockchain Zotero fixes this.

8) How will you organize your literature in digital folders?

In folders, I'd probable have a different folder for each "theme". But I'll probably settle on a folksonomy.

Activity 3.3

Select a Reference Manage

Zotero! I've been using it throughout this MSc. I'm aware that I haven't unlocked the full potential of it. So I should probably work out what things I'm missing.

Activity 3.4 Articulate Keywords and Main Players

1) What keywords might I use to begin to search databases for literature related to my project? (Consider both topics and methodological approaches.)

VR, metaverse, tree data structures, visualisation, security visualisations - things like that.

2) Am I aware of any “main players” or primary scholars who research in this space? (Your advisor may be one of these main players, and she or he, or a more experienced grad student in your group, can recommend others.)

Nope! And, sadly, the way QA have set up their MSc means that I get a generic academic supervisor. She's excellent - but not an expert in this subject.

Activity 3.5 Generate and Save Your First Batch of Literature

Search the keyword terms and/or researchers you have generated above. Open as many articles as you deem relevant – this is not the time to read them, though. Resist the temptation to read! If the title seems to be relevant to your particular literature review, open it, and then continue to find more literature. ... If the article is somehow not at all related to your search terms, close that article without saving it. However, if you judge the article to be relevant to your project, proceed to save the article in the naming convention you already selected.

This is a good exercise! Helped me find a ton of stuff.

Activity 3.6 But Professor, How Many References Do I Have to Have?

Open about 10 articles that mimic the venue for which you are writing. ... If you are writing master’s thesis or dissertation, look at past theses or dissertations from your research group.

Again, QA really hate the idea of sharing past work with us. It's a real weakness of their approach.

The rest of the book continues in this vein. By this point, I'd written enough of a literature review for my academic advisor to sign off.

I kept reading out of interest. I've no idea if it'll be useful in the future, but I certainly found it handy for my MSc.

This is my final assignment! It's from the PP2 module - where I take some CPD related to my profession. I picked Blockchain. Because I hate myself.

I've blogged about the course itself. The middle two parts of this paper are about that - why I chose it and how I put it into practice. The first and fourth parts are, as far as I can tell, unrelated. We have to write about reflection in the workplace. I am not very introspective, and I don't really enjoy it. So I found as many papers as I could to dispute the premise. The final part was about a modern issue of interest to professionals - which at least had the advantage of being interesting.

I was overjoyed with a mark of 81% (in the English system 50% is a pass, 60% is a commendation, 70% is distinction). That takes my on-course average to a shade over 71%. I wonder if I can keep that up for the final project?

I used my algorithm to write an assignment to complete this.

A few disclaimers:

• I don't claim it to be brilliant. I am not very good at academic-style writing.
• It is fairly inaccurate. Many of the concepts on reflection were not relevant to my workplace, so there is a lot of fudging.
• This isn't how I'd write a normal document for work - and the facts have not been independently verified.
• This isn't the policy of my employer, nor does it represent their opinions. It has only been assessed from an academic point of view.
• It has not been peer reviewed, nor are the data guaranteed to be an accurate reflection of reality. Cite at your own peril.
• I've quickly converted this from Google Docs + Zotero into MarkDown. Who knows what weird formatting that'll introduce!
• All references are clickable - going straight to the source. Reference list is at the end, most links converted using DOI2HT.ML.

And, once more, this is not official policy. It was not commissioned by anyone. It is an academic exercise. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

1. A critical review of three reflective models and selection of one of these to use to support your reflection in the assignment

1.1 Review of 3 models

The author has reviewed the assigned literature and beyond in order to compare multiple models of reflection. Three models are evaluated by the author in Table 1.

Ideally, reflection would allow professionals to pair with more experienced practitioners and compare the effectiveness of their learning (Oluwatoyin, 2015). In the author's experience, it is not the model which is important - but rather working in a team to understand how to learn and how others learn.

Table 1	ERA Cycle (Jasper, 2013)	Double Loop Learning (Argyris, 1977)	DIEP (Rogers, 2001)
Model
Strengths	Simple model.	Part of many Agile processes (Richardson, 2014). Suitable for business processes.	Structured model. Suitable for teams and individuals.
Weaknesses	Content free. Offers no structure to the reflection.	Not a "silver bullet" (Crossan, 2003). Risk of undermining corporate objectives (Soeters, 2022).	Not universally applicable. No feedback loop.

1.2 Evaluation of the effectiveness of the chosen module based on PP1

The author chose the DIEP reflective model for PP1 but did not find it as effective as hoped. Having extensively reviewed the literature, the author found strong evidence of the widespread use of reflective practice in healthcare (Norrie et al., 2012) but little convincing evidence that reflection is effective in digital organisations (Dors et al., 2020).

Additionally, evidence shows reflective practice rarely leads to altered behaviours (Granan, 2016). In two decades of work experience, the author has found specific models of reflection tend not to be the cause of improvements. Instead, modern digital employees are better served by concentrating on the act of reflecting as a team (Jha and Vazirani, 2021).

Others have concluded that reflection is "a contemporary label for an aspect of human thinking processes whose popularity has exceeded its conceptual and theoretical grasp" (Kompf and Bond, 1995) - although this is disputed by those who think these obstacles can be overcome (Denton, 2011). Many researchers think forcing reflection on learners is "futile" due to their desire to be seen as competent (McGarr and Ó Gallchóir, 2020) and the institutional disincentives to be honest (Hobbs, 2007). Others recognise that although isolated reflection is an "ambiguous moral exercise" (Hargreaves, 2004) it may be useful in a "safe and supportive environment" (Fernsten and Fernsten, 2005).

1.3 Comparisons with other models

In the author's opinion, there is little to distinguish between any of the popular reflective models. They only differ in the amount of administrative steps each theorist is willing to dedicate to "navel-gazing" (Andresen and Emerson, 1991).

As noted by Smith & Martin, most professionals in the author's field introduced to reflective practice do not continue with it when given a free choice (Smith and Martin, 2014). This failure to adopt reflection is present in many workplaces (Eaton, 2016). Furthermore, there is evidence showing forced reflective practice may be detrimental to the practitioner's development in the modern workplace (Hargreaves, 2004). Again, this is found across various types of profession (Wong, Whitcombe and Boniface, 2016).

While reflective practice is well accepted in fields like medicine (Ooi, Fisher and Coker, 2021), the author agrees with the critics who argue that there is a "marked dearth of evidence that reflective practice techniques yield more reflective practitioners" (Lilienfeld and Basterfield, 2020).

1.4 The relevance of the chosen model to the context of PP2

Due to the ever-changing nature of work, the modern employee must be prepared for lifelong learning. Reflecting on the learning process and achievements is thought to be critical to future employability (Helyer, 2015). However, the use of reflection has uncertain effectiveness (Mann, Gordon and MacLeod, 2009) and many novice practitioners find the application of reflection to be daunting (Walker et al., 2013).

There is a "theory practice gap" identified by Schön (Schön, 1987) - whereby practitioners aren't able to effectively utilise reflection despite repeated exposure to theoretical concepts. Therefore, the author has chosen to use DIEP as it is a familiar model which can be quickly iterated to uncover new ways of reflecting. The author's current working environment expects all processes to be rapidly iterative.

2. A discussion of the selection of CPD in relation to the wider technical area, the context within your organisation, and my specific role

2.1 Description

I chose a course which was designed to upskill me in an interesting new technology - Blockchain. It covered the basics of the technology and its applications.

Early Blockchain proponents said that "the digital revolution challenges us to develop new institutions in a much shorter period of time" (Szabo, 1997). As a new member of a team inside a newly formed institution, I wanted to see if Blockchain could help deliver rapid change. This fits with my organisation's recently published business objectives (Cabinet Office, 2021).

2.2 Relevance

There are various embryonic Blockchain projects within my organisation. For example the Royal Mint is planning a series of Non-Fungible Tokens (Sparkes, 2022) and legislators are interested in the possibilities of Blockchain voting (Holmes, 2022).

As this is a relatively new field, the Civil Service finds itself with a lack of expertise in this technology. With intense scrutiny from media, industry, and academia, I felt it was important to increase my knowledge in this area. Given the interest from senior stakeholders, I need to be able to swiftly and accurately evaluate future projects. As part of my organisation's 2025 roadmap, they have committed to exploring this technology (Wheeler, 2022), so it is of high relevance to my job.

2.3 Context

Our team deals with the security of critical national infrastructure - specifically, the integrity of the .gov.uk domain name ecosystem.

There are multiple parties with interest in this system, all with varying levels of trust in each other, which makes distributed technology particularly pertinent. There are also novel social, ethical, and legal implications which I wanted to explore, e.g. whether the immutability of Blockchain is compatible with our data protection obligations under GDPR. I also had to consider the ethical implications of endorsing a technology with a disastrous effect on climate change (Onat et al., 2021).

Finally, there are mixed views of Blockchain technologies, and many associate it primarily with scams (Phan, Li and Mentzer, 2019). I wanted to see if these issues would be a barrier to adoption.

2.4 Author's Role

I am a noted sceptic of Blockchain technology (Ross, Cretu and Lemieux, 2021) and wanted to provide more rigour to my analyses.

As part of my Personal Development Plan, I am looking for new technologies which will enhance my skills, reputation, and employability. With a predicted surge in Blockchain roles (Ge et al., 2021), I thought this CPD would help increase my employability and allow me to bring new skills to my employers.

2.5 Possible Alternatives

In conjunction with my team, I investigated other courses which may have been suitable. As indicated in my PDP, I have an identified learning need to acquire more practical knowledge of the fundamentals of DNS infrastructure. On-the-job training was thought to be a better route to learning these skills because they rely heavily on practical application rather than theoretical understanding. Some of the "soft skills" which I need to develop were not available as directed CPD. Finally, I investigated whether a series of video lectures on Blockchain would be acceptable (Gensler, 2018) - but they were unaccredited.

2.6 Evaluation

On reflection, I found this to be an extremely disappointing course. Although it taught me the key algorithms and history of the technology, the set text book was poorly written, with multiple factual and grammatical mistakes. Large parts of the book were plagiarised from other books and websites (Bavisi, 2021).

After discussing the course content with my peers, it became clear to me how much of the information was presented uncritically and without evidence. The course was provided by an organisation with a self-professed history of chauvinism and misogyny (Dallaway, 2021). While there were some interesting technical elements in the text, there was a lack of academic rigour which led to questionable conclusions.

3. An overview of how the CPD has been applied within my professional practice

3.1 An overview of the CPD

The course was a self-directed course designed to give an overview of various Blockchain technologies. It provided several case studies describing where this technology has been found useful, and mistakes which have been made with it.

It also discussed the basics of the Solidity programming language and how it can be used to implement "smart contracts". There was some investigation of environmental impacts, and which industries are ripe for disruption.

There was very little critical reflection on the flaws of the technology, and only a brief mention of the fraud it has facilitated (Trozze et al., 2022).

I learned the theories behind Blockchain, the programming languages used to construct Smart Contracts, and several practical use-cases.

3.2 Identification of specific projects for which this CPD has had an impact

My starting point was the flowchart created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) - see Figure 01.

Using this tool, I identified a project requiring shared data, which were immutable and didn't contain sensitive data, contributed by multiple parties, and where no single entity could be in control, resulting in a tamper-proof log of data. An engagement exercise was carried out with stakeholders to see if there was sufficient interest to create a proof-of-concept.

Figure 01 - Flowchart from NISTIR 8202 The flowchart presented in NISTIR 8202 demonstrates reasons to adopt Blockchain (Yaga et al., 2018)

The background to the issue faced derives from the complicated constitution of the United Kingdom. The UK is often described as a country of four nations (Adenuga and Ogunduyile, 2020), so our service encompasses the top-level domains of .uk, .wales / .cymru, and .scot (note, there is no TLD for N. Ireland (Webster, 2019)).

There are also TLDs for Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories, which are outside our purview. Of academic interest is the .gb TLD which represents Great Britain, but is all but abandoned (Martins dos Santos and Anastácio, 2022).

The multi-stakeholder group is complex; including separate legal and regulatory frameworks in each jurisdiction, various devolved competencies, and independence of operation which is both de facto and de jure. This is the perfect environment to see whether a "trustless" technology like Blockchain can thrive when applied to the seemingly anodyne task of collating DNS records.

Therefore, the CPD was applied to a project investigating the feasibility of using a permissioned blockchain to record DNS changes to critical domains.

3.3 Discussion and evidence of technical knowledge acquired in relation to the targeted apprenticeship standard.

A proof-of-concept model was created based around the concept of a Private blockchain.

A Private chain allows trusted participants to maintain a shared ledger i.e. it is not open to the public. This means it is quicker to iterate architectural design choices once all participants have agreed to them. It also requires less security against malicious nodes in the network. I learned that there are some disadvantages - because of the small number of participants it is hard to defend against multiple malicious nodes.

There are multiple ways to generate consensus in Blockchains. The course taught me that "Proof of Work" is the predominant method in public chains, but there are several more suitable consensus algorithms for Private Chains (Pahlajani, Kshirsagar and Pachghare, 2019).

Given the specific and limited number of participants, I decided to investigate voting consensus. This allows a pre-agreed quorum of voters to sign transactions to mark them as valid.

Any database - whether traditional or decentralised - needs to be designed for future requirements. While the proponents of Blockchain highlight the disparate nature of nodes as being essential for performance, I learned from a closer reading of the literature that there are several complex scaling issues related to how a Blockchain grows (Croman et al., 2016).

My investigation found that a Distributed Ledger would face two main scaling challenges. Firstly, the time taken to add records would slow down with every insertion operation due to the need to revalidate the entire chain. Secondly, consensus seeking algorithms introduce latency depending on the responsiveness of other nodes. Both of these are problematic for services which need rapid updates.

An interesting and innovative feature of some Blockchains are so-called "smart contracts" (Schuster, 2021). These can be thought of as stored procedures - code which exists on the chain and is executed by nodes under specified circumstances. For example, a smart contract could execute a transaction (writing data to the chain) when the chain reaches a specific state. In this paradigm, nodes will automatically run the code contained in the contract when all participants meet certain conditions.

Despite their name, there is little about smart contracts which would make a valid agreement under existing UK contract law (Rühl, 2021). As has been recently demonstrated, contracts created by programmers may have significant logical flaws which may lead to devastating financial consequences. These bugs cannot necessarily be detected with analysis tools (Ghaleb and Pattabiraman, 2020).

One repeated concern expressed by stakeholders was the inability for Blockchains to redact or remove incorrect data. Colleagues in HM Land Registry published a "lessons learned" retrospective which investigated the inherent problems they found with immutable data structures (Tombs, 2019). GDPR requires our organisation to correct any mistakes about our data subjects. Because of the immutability of the blockchain structure, it is impossible to remove or alter data while preserving the chain's integrity. This represents a fundamental contradiction - and sets up a dilemma which may not be resolvable (Tatar, Gokce and Nussbaum, 2020).

The skills I learned on this CPD enabled me to understand what Blockchain technology purports to deliver and - more importantly - comprehend its limitations and defects. I was able to create a research plan to meet the user needs of our stakeholders.

On presentation of the proposals, there was considerable - and justified - scepticism from all parties involved in this exercise. Some had little interest in the technology, and several were already convinced that this was a "solution in search of a problem". Another had recently lost a considerable amount of money on cryptocurrencies and was convinced all Blockchain-based projects were a scam.

In conclusion, there was little interest in progressing the solution once we had reflected on the limitations of Blockchain technology. Despite the high interest by Governments in Blockchain technology (OECD, 2018) my research has concluded they are technologically deficient. A more practical solution may be a Merkle Tree variant as implemented in Google's Certificate Transparency Logs (Laurie, 2014).

3.4 Reflections and commentary on the next stages of my professional development

I will reflect on the application of the CPD using the DIEP model (Rogers, 2001) as discussed in §1.4.

Describe

I investigated whether Blockchain could be effectively integrated into a multi-party DNS agreement. I undertook a complex investigation consisting of analysis, literature review, stakeholder discussion, and understanding of key algorithms. This formed a testable hypothesis to see if it could meet business needs. It could not.

Interpret

I am grateful that my workplace embraces a culture of "Fail Fast" (Ehrenberg and King, 2020). Being able to experiment in an environment with high psychological safety and no fear of ridicule was an empowering experience. Even though the experiment failed, it taught me about the storage solutions and information governance issues present in Blockchain.

Evaluate effectiveness

Although Blockchain presents some potentially interesting data structures and solutions to esoteric cryptography problems, there is little practical application yet. Through this experience, I learned how to identify scams and become aware of how zealots attempt to convert the unwary into their "digital ponzi schemes" (Scharfman, 2022). I also gained an appreciation for the way novel technologies get assessed within my organisation.

Plan for the future

While it is important to explore the frontiers of innovation and explore idea space for emergent concepts, there is a risk that over-hyped technology will quickly fall out of fashion once its deficiencies are well understood. Therefore, to protect my own credibility, the next stage of my professional development will need to be in a more practical direction.

4. A discussion of a contemporary challenge

4.1 A Contemporary Challenge

Digital exclusion from government services is a pressing issue for society. Lack of reliable and digital identity often means vulnerable users in the UK are unable to access vital online services (Crosby, 2008). Internationally, the World Bank estimates 1.1 billion people have no proof of identity (Rajendran, 2017).

The UK's approach to verification of users has been costly, difficult for departments to implement, and hard for people to use (National Audit Office, 2017). Can the UK take advantage of Blockchain technology to create a more inclusive digital environment?

The author performed "competitive intelligence analysis" by investigating whether other states are modernising their identity infrastructure with Blockchain. They discovered how India has started to experiment with building new services on Blockchain (Chowdhury and Saha, 2021). They also found theoretical explorations of how a state could craft a biometric identity system utilising Blockchain (Páez et al., 2020) - but with little exploration of user-needs.

4.2 Potential Solutions

The World Wide Web Consortium's proposal for "Decentralised Identifiers" (W3C, 2021) defines several methods of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

This would allow a diverse set of participants to make identity claims about themselves and others - see Figure 02. By recording these claims on a Blockchain, data subjects can prove when a claim was issued and who issued it. The issuer would also be able to unilaterally revoke their claims - although they could not expunge the record of the original claim from the Blockchain.

The system also relies on all parties being able to keep their private keys safe - a well known failing of PKI systems (Ruoti et al., 2015).

Figure 02 - DID Diagram © 2021 W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0

Could a state-backed blockchain be useful in providing a digital identifier to all of its citizens?

There are some superficial reasons to think so. Immutability of data may be attractive given how the hard drives of the UK's former National Identity Register were physically destroyed by a newly elected government (Boersma et al., 2014). An "always-on" connection to an online database is now possible given the surge in mobile internet access across all sectors of society (Ofcom, 2022).

But these need to be set against the complexity and uncertainties of the problem space. These sorts of intrinsic issues with multi-stakeholder systems are commonly referred to as "wicked problems" (Mertens, 2015).

4.3 The ethical role of the modern professional

Data Analytics professionals must identify the risks to both the user and the organisation from new technology. This can be via literature review or user research.

For the above example, a literature review reveals there are long-standing issues with the usability of PKI (Whitten and Tygar, 1999). Additionally, any system which relies on biometrics as a critical factor in authentication must contend with the fact that not all users will have those biometric markers. For example, some people have genetic mutations which prevent the development of fingerprints (Nousbeck et al., 2011).

The author believes the ultimate role of the Data Analytics professional is to stop the spread of unethical practices. As a member of the Chartered Institute for IT, it behoves the author to act under the auspices of their ethical framework.

This also means understanding the environmental impact of technology (Crooks et al., 2009). Given the continuing climate crisis (IPCC, 2022) and the exorbitant energy cost of Blockchain's "Proof of Work" algorithm (Schinckus, 2021), it is the author's professional opinion that all Blockchain technologies - whether in the identification space or otherwise - should be actively resisted.

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Copyright and Copyleft

This document is 🄯 Terence Eden CC-BY-NC https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

It may not be used or retained in electronic systems for the detection of plagiarism. No part of it may be used for commercial purposes without prior permission.

Any source code is under the MIT Licence

This document contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

While yak-shaving for my MSc, I found an interesting looking research paper authored by one JC Shakespeare.

As you can probably tell from that snippet, there is something a bit hinkey going on here. Here's the page that Google Scholar has scraped:

It's pretty easy to see what has happened here. The algorithm (whether via simple AI or complex regular expression) "knows" that a typical surname followed by a comma followed by a typical given name is almost certainly a reference.

And so "JC Shakespeare" becomes the author of a delightfully diverse set of papers.

Of course, Julius Caesar isn't the only play which gets picked up in this way:

Remember, AI is a great tool. It can be remarkably quick at drawing nearly correct conclusions from a diverse data set. When talking about AI, we usually discuss false positives and false negatives. But we also need to ask "is this the sort of mistake a human would make?"

As it happens, Google has been making this class of mistakes for a few years:

Alex Klotz

@AlexanderRKlotz

Google Scholar has parsed this cafeteria lunch menu as an author list, and it's delightful pic.x.com/jobE6Z7bpI

---

At the time, all the FOAF relationships were defined in terms of positive sentiment. There wasn't (and still isn't) a FOAF representation for "divorced" or "estranged" or "fired by". I thought this was a failing. I understand why we all might want to play nice on the Internet. But sometimes it is useful to know about "negative" relationships.

For example, I want to organise a seating plan for my wedding - it's helpful to know that Alice and Bill divorced and can't be on the same table, Carol doesn't talk to David. Bill is in a relationship with David and wants to keep it secret. Ellen would like to know Alice better. That sort of thing.

More modern versions of FOAF have properties like enemyOf and wouldLikeToKnow. Which I think makes a great deal of sense.

And so we come to Academic Citations.

Using Google Scholar (or any other knowledge graph) I can find just about any academic paper. More importantly, it lets me see every paper which references that paper.

Great! I can see if something has been cited lots of times, or very few times. That gives me a weak signal about its "importance".

But it tells me nothing about the sentiment of those citations.

Suppose I've just read (Smith, 2015) and I want to know whether the consensus is that the paper is a work of genius or absolute horseshit. What are my options? I can find all the citations of it, then manually read each one to determine whether the author thinks Smith is off their rocker or not.

Wikidata has support for this. The Cites Work property can have roles like "objection" and "endorsement"

This means, in theory, someone could build a knowledge graph which says "Smith's argument rests on Jones' paper, but Xi's paper and Zhang's paper both object to Jones. Hook disagrees with Zhang's analysis, but these 500 papers disagree with Hook."

Why is this important

One problem that modern social media has is that its algorithms have no knowledge of sentiment. Whether you share a cute kitten video to make your friends smile or share a hateful message by a bigot in order to whip up a frenzy against them - the algorithm sees the same signal; +1.

This means the outrage economy grows quickly. All "shares" are seen as positive sentiment. The algorithm sees lots of shares, interprets that a positive signal, and then further promotes the content - or similar content. There is very little way that a social network can filter content by "agrees with" or "disagrees with".

Things like Facebook attempt to map sentiment with a series of emoji.

In theory, you could tell Facebook not to show you posts which have more than 10% of anger reactions. Or only show you posts with positive sentiment. I say "in theory" because Facebook profits off your rage, so has no interest in helping you moderate your emotions.

Popping back to academia for a moment. I recently read a paper that I disagreed with. I wanted to know if I was alone in my objection. This is currently no way for me to find all the citations which also disagree with the paper.

Why this will never happen

The first thing that stops this is that it is a lot of extra work for a human to perform. With hundreds of citations per paper, it would be a massive burden to categorise every single paper mentioned in passing. Most academics can't even be bothered to write alt-text for their images, so any extra labour is likely to be resisted.

The second problem is that sentiment is hard! Can it be boiled down to just "agrees with" and "disagrees with"? What about "Agrees with methodology but not conclusion" or "Disagrees with some definitions but supports others"? There are hundreds of different sentiments. Even just positive and negative probably need degrees of strength associated with them.

In the glorious future where DEEP AI and MACHINE CLEVERNESS rules, it might be possible for a computer to read an academic paper and determine whether it concurs with the papers referenced therein.

Perhaps we need an army of (paid?) dogsbodies to manually go through every paper ever published and assess the sentiment behind each citation?

But, for now, we have to make do with weak signals and uncertain sentiment.

These are mostly notes to myself - but I hope if you find something interesting (or incorrect) that you'll leave a comment.

The final chapter of this dreadful book! Will it be an interesting or educational one?

Interoperability is a big problem. Multiple incompatible chains which can't easily communicate with each other. Some research in interledger protocols like Quilt. Also Tendermint which publishes packets from one chain to another - relies on the receiving chain to check the sending chain has published the corresponding packet.

Privacy. All transactions must be public due to its nature. How to obfuscate? Could homomorphic encryption work? What about Zero Knowledge Proofs?

• Indistinguishability Obfuscation
  • Not ready yet
  • Code is scrambled and will only run correctly if run in the right order.
• Homomorphic encryption
  • Ability to run computations on encrypted data without first decrypting it.
• Zero-Knowledge Proofs
  • No explanation given
• CoinJoin
  • A way of money laundering
  • Mix coins together and distribute back to all parties.

Standardisation. Early work being done by ISO/TC 307. There's also OS1 - the open chain standard.

Assignment

Scalable blockchain solutions Read the research paper at https://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/74bc987e6ab4a8478c04950616612f69/main.pdf.

Answer the following questions:

• How can sharding work for scaling blockchains?
  • Separate shards for different functions.
  • Split the consensus plane.
• How speed of PoW based proof works can be improved?
  • Larger blocks
  • Smaller time between blocks
  • Better gossip protocols
  • More efficient use of bandwidth - possibly via a P2P protocol.

These are mostly notes to myself - but I hope if you find something interesting (or incorrect) that you'll leave a comment.

I love how they've made up the acronym BaaS!

Apparently both IBM's Bluemix and Microsoft's Azure offer Ethereum blockchains. Electronic Government as a Service (eGaas!) might come soon.

Azure' blockchain is called Bletchly. Has "cryptlets" which are external to the chain oracles. Can be written in any language (LOL) and run in a container.

Designed to be a "click and run" service.

IBM's offering is Hyperledger Fabric.

And... that's it! No explanation of what they do, why you'd use them, or what the downsides are. A pathetic penultimate chapter.

These are mostly notes to myself - but I hope if you find something interesting (or incorrect) that you'll leave a comment.

Bitcoin is limited to 3-7 transactions per second. Ethereum isn't much better - max of about 20.

Can possibly be solved by on-chain solutions like increasing block size. Or off-chain - where transactions are performed offline, then bundled up.

Or, an abstraction where different layers of the chain are responsible for different things.

Controversy over Bitcoin block size proposals.

Ethereum has no fixed block size - instead the gas limit restricts the amount that can be created.

Or, instead of block limit changes, decrease the time between blocks. Ethereum is down to 14 seconds - which is better than Bitcoin's 10 minutes (!).

Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables - basically transferring information about the state, rather than the full state.

Sharding - similar to how traditional databases work. Multiple nodes splitting the tasks between them.

State channels - use out of band messaging for state updating.

Private blockchains - fast because participants don't need to mine.

Proof of Stake is faster than PoW (no evidence or explanation given.)

Sidechains - take things off main to a faster chain (why not move everything there?)

Subchain - poorly defined.

Tree chains - rather than a 1 dimensional chain, use a structure like a binary tree.

Bitcoin-NG - use leader blocks for PoW and microblocks (which don't require PoW).

Layer 2 solutions - like Lightning. Introduced in 2016, allows for off-chain instant payments.

Better consensus protocols. Either implemented in hardware, or move away from PoW.

Assignment

Read the paper at https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf.

Answer the following questions

• Do micropayments channels require trust?
  • No. They are trustlessly deferred to a later date.
• What is the use of SIGHASH_NOINPUT?
  • The two parties sign the transaction - but don't broadcast it to be validated.
  • Can allow for spending before signing from all parties.
• What is HTLC?
  • Hashed Timelock Contract
  • Lock a transaction via a commitment which can only be valid after a certain date
  • Revocable
• How can malleability be resolved?
  • Forking change to Bitcoin.
  • New sighash types
  • Allows parties to spend contracts without either being able to broadcast to the chain until both parties agree.

These are mostly notes to myself - but I hope if you find something interesting (or incorrect) that you'll leave a comment.

The first semi-practical module! Including how to write a smart contract on Ethereum.

A variety of "testnets" to play on before deploying to main. Also possible to use a private net.

Use of the geth client from https://geth.ethereum.org/downloads/

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @edentThe Certified Blockchain Professional book is poorly edited garbage.
I'm on the first practical module.
I start by creating a genesis block at `~/ethpriv/`
But, in the next command, it tells me to use `~/etherprivate/`!
Oh, and the rest of the switches are invalid… pic.x.com/za5hqnci1a

---

*sigh*

On to Solidity. The language of "Smart" contracts. The book says "Its syntax is closer to both JavaScript and C."

Nooooo! Why would you write anything contractual in either of those languages?

Solidity is statically typed so its syntax is checked at compile time.

Data types include bool and int (signed integer) and uint (unsigned).

address is a 160bit value.

balance the balance of the address in Wei.

send a method.

address to = 0x6414cc08d148dce9ebf5a2d0b7c2201234567890;

address from = this

if (to.balance < 10 & from.balance > 50)
   to.send(20);

Usual range of arrays, loops, etc. Functions and Libraries also available. Libraries can't have state or use inheritance, nor can their receive Ether.

Events can be written to the chain, which is useful for notifying a change of state, or the occurrence of an event.

Functions can be internal to the current contract - or they can be external; calling other contracts.

The throw allows a contract to be rolled back.

Can use Web3.js to communicate with Ethereum nodes via RPC using JS.

Metamask is a Dapp browser which lets people run Ethereum Dapps in the browser. Injects a Web3 object into FF & Chrome.

Then lots of tedious copy and pasting with no explanations - and lots of outdated commandline examples.

Oracles

Data feeds which enter data from the real world into smart contracts.

Use TLS Notary to "prove" provenance of the data. But essentially just saying that website X said Y at Z time.

IPFS

Use of decentralise storage, addressed by hash.

These are mostly notes to myself - but I hope if you find something interesting (or incorrect) that you'll leave a comment.

Can IOT record their data to a Blockchain? Probably not using PoW as they're too underpowered.

But there are advantages to recording in a decentralised way rather than reporting to a centralised "command and control" server. Centralised services might not be able to cope with billions of transactions. (hahaha!)

Similarly, storage will be cheaper if it is decentralised. (Why? How?)

Less risk of DDoS. (Note, Blockchain can and does suffer from DoS attacks.)

Devices can choose to pay each other for services. (Again, why?)

ASSIGNMENT

Visit https://www.iota.org/.

Answer the following questions.

• What is IOTA?
  • A blockchain for IoT
• What problem it is trying to resolve?
  • Costs are too high
  • Data is centralised
  • Uses Directed Acyclic Graphs rather than a single chain
• What are the common use cases of IOTA?
  • None, really. Small sensors which need to record data in a semi-verified way. Perhaps in-car sensors?
• How does consensus work in the tangle?
  • "The Tangle is IOTA's network. It immutably records the exchange of data and value. It ensures that the information is trustworthy and cannot be tampered with nor destroyed."
  • For every transaction sent, a node must confirm two others using PoW.
  • There is a central(!) co-ordinating node in the Tangle.