User:William P. Coleman

Welcome to my Wikipedia user page. It has a little information about my background and the projects I'm working on or might be available to help with. Then there's a whole bunch of useless userboxes.

Some explanation about using my real name. Many Wikipedians prefer anonymity and making their contributions with no recognition by name. That would be my preference too, but I've chosen to obey a different imperative: namely transparency in order to avoid conflict of interest. So, I'm here under my own name. I respect those who've made the other choice and in many ways agree; I hope they'll respect my choice and my reasons.

Please do not edit my user page.

Day job
In my day job, I'm a professional biostatistician -- interested in in applications of statistics, mathematics, and artificial intelligence to clinical trials, outcomes, and medical decision making, as well as to healthy communities and sustainability. For some years, I have not been university-affiliated, but have a small consulting business that is independent, one-man and intended to stay that way. I have taught philosophy, mathematics, and statistics at the university and postgraduate level, been an investigator or coinvestigator on several academic research projects, and a consultant to numerous industrial firms. I've held a peer-reviewed grant from NASA to develop telemetric medical decision support for the space station. I was a designer of the largest multi-center clinical trial ever held in spinal cord injury, and am a member of an NIH clinical study section. My CV can be downloaded as a pdf.

Arts
Otherwise, I've written several screenplays, a stage play, some short stories and a novella. I have a novel about half finished. I also like to write essays about the visual arts. I take photographs.

Philosophy, Ancient Greece
Before turning to getting a PhD in computers and statistics as a way of making a living, I studied classics in high school and philosophy as an undergraduate and graduate in college. I'm deeply interested in ancient Greek philosophy and literature.

Ancient China
I study Tai Chi (both Yang Style and Chen Style), and I work on translating the Tao Te Ching and classical Chinese poetry. Lately, I'm especially fond of the poems of Su Tung P'o.

Blog
Almost all of the above-mentioned, varied topics are also represented in my blog, which is intended as a non-profit source, reusable under a Creative Commons "by-nc-nd" license. My basic plan is to contribute factual reporting to Wikipedia -- and original research and opinion to the blog.

Contact
wpc at wpcmath dot com

Projects
Yes, I realize I've joined a lot of projects. But, that reflects the reality. I'm actually interested in all these things, and active in them in various ways. I hope to make at least some contribution to each project and to be available to other users who might want my advice or help in these areas. If you need me, please leave a message on my talk page.

In all these projects, of course, my basic plan is to keep checking with the project talk page and finding grunt work to do. In some, though, I have specific ideas about contributions I'd like to work on.

Arts
I'm currently very active on Nausea (novel), which was the Novels WikiProject Collaboration of the Month in January.

Logic
Consider joining
 * Philosophy
 * Logic
 * Philosophy of Language
 * Theoretical Linguistics
 * Mathematics
 * Statistics
 * Biostatistics

NY State
Consider joining New York State routes