Dissertation Published

So, after dozens of hours of work, my 1995 dissertation is published on the Internet.

This work honors the hundreds of hours that I spent documenting years of work on the project itself.

The document on the Internet differs from the printed version in a few ways:

• It isn't broken into pages, but there are separate HTML documents for each chapter and each appendix.
• The bibliography isn't formatted yet.
• The screenshots from TOOL are colored instead of black-and-white.

Otherwise, I've been very careful to leave in original mistakes, except for a handful of typo corrections. But nothing substantive.

So, it stands as it did in 1995. In some ways it is considerably out of date. But the main topic is still pertinent today. How to facilitate programming by end-users is still an open question.

Golden Gate Bridge

Yes, we are back in the San Francisco area, even though we had a bad experience here only two and a half months ago.

But, we only drove into San Francisco today because I missed the exit at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Did a quick u-turn at the south end and drove back to the Vista Point parking area at the north end.

Then we proceeded to walk the length of the bridge from north to south (8,981 feet!), took a brief rest on a bench, ate an ice cream bar and walked all the way back. Two hours of very pleasant workout.

At the very middle of the longest span, where the suspending cable is lowest, I was able to reach up and touch it. What fun!



Otherwise, we're just hanging out, enjoying a beautiful location, surrounded by vegetation and bird song. Barbecued suppers. Good company.

Finished converting Chapter 3 of my dissertation.

Sausalito

In case you don't know where it is, Sausalito is just north of San Francisco: the first town after the Golden Gate bridge.

And that's where Sara and I are located right now. We are house-sitting, enjoying the home of a friend of a friend, who is herself whale-watching in Mexico.

We had a long but uneventful drive yesterday from Elko, Nevada, having arrived there the night before, after Andrew's birthday party. Hard to believe he will soon be 19.

I have now published Chapter 2 of my dissertation.

Painful Times

Not being allowed to defend my dissertation was a painful time. But, there is no point in belaboring that now.

Whatever the reasons my adviser and the department had for their decisions, I am going ahead with my own decision to self-publish the dissertation on the Internet.

It is proving quite painful to convert WordPerfect documents into HTML documents. Microsoft Word helps a bit, but doesn't do a very good job of rendering the images. I'll work more on those as time permits.

In the meantime, I've finished the first cut at converting Chapter 1.

All But Dissertation Defence

In 1986, while I was an assistant professor at the University of Lethbridge, I enrolled in the Computer Science Ph.D. program at the University of Calgary.

It is important to a university that its professors hold the Ph.D. degree, so the University of Lethbridge encouraged and helped me in this endeavor. I was in a tenure track position, and as I neared the next evaluation point, it became clear that I would not complete the requirements of the Ph.D. degree in time. For that and other reasons, I left this position and took employment at WordPerfect Corporation in Orem, Utah.

I kept in touch with the department at the University of Calgary, and, shortly before the 10 year limit, completed the writing of a dissertation. All that was left then was to defend it in front of a committee. This I was not allowed to do.

So, I hold what is considered to be a Ph.D. ABD (all but dissertation). In my case, the dissertation is written but not defended.

Looking through old disk drives recently, I located the files from which I printed out the dissertation. Now, I am in the process of publishing the dissertation on the Internet. It is quite difficult because the documents were produced using WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, and Microsoft Word doesn't convert these files very well.

So, I'm running WordPerfect inside of DOSbox and saving each file in a generic format and then hand editing by inserting HTML tags. The diagrams are screen-captured from Word's attempt, or reconstructed. Otherwise, I am leaving everything exactly as I wrote it in 1995.

So far all that I have to show for it is Chapter 6.

10 Million People Could Do It

In my previous post, I claimed that it couldn't be done. Well, I was wrong.

One person could examine every (30 generation) ancestral line in 34 years, giving each line one second.

But, 10 million people could accomplish the same task in less than two minutes.

That's one dimension of the solution.

The other one is that it's not really 2 billion ancestors in a family tree, but 2 billion places or roles: Father, Mother, Paternal Grandfather, etc. We could represent, or name, these places with simple strings:

F and M
FF, FM, MF and MM
FFF, FFM, FMF, FMM, MFF, MFM, MMF and MMM

and so on. These are isomorphic to the binary strings that I constructed in an earlier post about the "Powers of two."

As a more intense example, in my family tree there is an ancestor at position FFMMMFFFFFFFFFFMMFFFMMMMMFFMFF, who happens to be William the Conqueror. I would be very surprised if this illustrious gentleman didn't pop up in at least one other place in my family tree.

The point is that sometimes the same person will be found at more than one place, playing more than one role in the same family tree. If my son were to marry one of my third cousins, his children would find that the person in position FFFMMF (Caspar Witsch) might be the exact same person as the one in position MxxxF (again, Caspar Witsch). This cuts out a huge section of his or her the family tree.

Replace each "x" with one of "F" for father or "M" for mother. I'm not going to say precisely which family of third cousins he might marry into! To his children, I will occupy position FF. Everyone descended from position FFF is either me or one of my sisters. Everyone descended from FFFM is one of my (paternal) cousins, from FFFMM a second cousin, and from FFFMMF a third cousin. From my hypothetical grandchild's point of view, all of my third cousins are descended from individuals in positions FFxxxx (of which there are 16 possible; in other words, any one of my great-great grandparents). The grandchild's mother, being one of my third cousins is a great-great grandaughter of one of these 16 people. This would make the child both a 3rd great grandchild and a 4th great grandchild of Caspar Wintsch--his or her own fourth cousin once removed.

Getting back to the work at hand, if we combined the family trees of all of the 10 million people, chances are really good that they would have a lot in common. My sisters' family trees are identical to mine. My cousins' (and nephews') family trees are half the same as mine, and so on.

How many people have lived in the world since the year 1000? Let's suppose 20 billion lived in the areas from which the 10 million people drew their 30 generations of ancestors.

So, these 10 million people have no more than 20 billion distinct ancestors shared among them. If we spread out the work, each ancestor could be contemplated for one second in under an hour.

But, one second isn't very much time to devote to another human life.

What if we wanted to see that each of the 20 billion ancestors got 3 whole hours of the undivided attention of one of our 10 million workers. The 60 billion hours, split 10 million ways, would require 6,000 hours of each worker's time. A full-time work-year contains 8 hours per day times 250 days per year, or 2,000 hours. So, if we could convince each of our 10 million workers to devote 3 years of full-time work, every person who ever lived could get 3 hours of attention. And the 10 million people could still take off nights, weekends, holidays and some vacation time.

So, it could be done, after all, if only we could convince 10 million people that it is that important.

It can't be done

In my last post, I showed an ancestral line from William the Conqueror all the way to my grandfather.

Here is another ancestral line from a contemporary of William down to my grandfather. It was chosen more or less at random from 64 possible ancestral lines leading to Margred Verch Llywelyn, and from there this line is the same as the first one.

Iwerydd Verch CYNFYN             1024
Owain Ap EDWIN                   1044
Angharad Verch OWAIN             1065
Susanna Verch GRUFFYDD           1095
Margred Verch MADOG              1129
Llewelyn Ap IORWERTH             1173
Margred Verch Llywelyn           1210
Maud de Clifford                 1234
Eleanor Giffard                  1275
Elizabeth le Strange             1308
Roger Corbet                     1330
Robert Corbet                    1383
Roger Corbet                     1412
Anne Corbet                      1438
Blanche Sturry                   1472
Thomas Whitcomb                  1502
William Whitcomb                 1528
John Whitcomb                    1558
John Whitcomb                    1588
Johnathan Whitcomb               1628
Johnathan Whitcomb               1669
Johnathan Whitcomb               1690
William Whitcomb                 1719
Oliver Whitcomb                  1749
Oliver Whitcomb                  1772
Hannah Whitcomb                  1806
Lucinda Haws                     1828
Mary Elizabeth Holdaway          1856
Arthur Marion Conrad             1882

There are 268,435,456 ancestral lines of 28 generations (2 raised to the power 28). Counting ancestral lines from around 1000 AD down to myself there are well over a billion -- 268,435,456 for each of my four grandparents.

I don't think it is particularly easy to understand just how many lines this makes. But, a simple calculation will convince you that, if you set yourself the task of contemplating each one of the ancestral lines of 30 generations for just one second each, it would take you just over 34 years to complete the task.

And, if you wanted to go back another 300 years (10 generations) on each line, you would need 34,000 years to contemplate each line for one second. Oh, wait. Let's give you credit for the 34 years you have already spent. That leaves you a mere 33,966 years to go!

Well, that's one reason it can't be done.

Mercifully, there are not enough surviving records to complete the research going back 30 generations. And, of course, that's another reason it can't be done.

So far, I've found about 10 lines that go back that far, meaning that I am one millionth of a percent done with my genealogy research.

Still, it's a fun hobby. Fits right in with my fascination with time.