Encourage Winston Ewert to lift the five-year embargo on his dissertation

In the days before electronic dissemination of theses and dissertations, I heard of a trick to see if someone had paid attention to your work: insert a buck between the pages of the library copy, and check on it a year later. Obviously, communication among scholars has changed radically. But what remains the same is the hope that someone will actually delve into the full account of your scholarship — i.e., that the document amounts to more than an exercise that you had to complete in order to move on to other things.

Students rarely withhold their theses and dissertations from public view. It makes sense if you have developed a valuable trade secret, or if you reasonably believe that someone might steal your results. There has been no such sense in the one-year embargoes that students working with Professor Robert J. Marks II at Baylor have placed on their masters' theses. But I never groused. And I waited patiently to see Winston Ewert's dissertation, Algorithmic Specified Complexity (August 2013). However, it turns out that he has opted for a five-year embargo.

This is exactly the opposite of what Winston should do. Please contact him to explain that shutting out the light is a bad move for someone who has chosen the path of creationism. He provides an email address at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab website.