dr. John Bear's SITUATIONAL ETHICS

[Brian Crawford]

People might often wonder why or how could John Bear stand the company of the keyboard sociopaths, porn kings & other unsavory charachters at degreeinfo or degreediscussion.

Proposed pay is embarrassing (see three previous paragraphs re minuscule advance), but it should be interesting and satisfying work, I think, with a bit of 2nd hand glory. Not co-authorship, but at least profuse thanks and acknowledgement in the book, and possibly (but no guarantee) title page credit in the "with the help of..." model that I've done a few times before.

So mr. Bear again exerts great SITUATIONAL ETHICS: the best option here & now might not be the best/most moral option there & then.
So probably mr. Bear thought he didn't care about the sociopaths, the nutcases, the porn kings...as long as they were driving business to him & helping him sell books, he'd "give credit for invaluable help" to a vicious paroled felon with genital herpes.

We really should cut and paste the threads and add the link as well. We all know these DI administrators can delete and/or edit their posts:

John Bear
Senior Member

Registered: Jan 2001
Location:
Posts: 4106
John Bear looking for paid helper for degree mill book project
The good news: After six months of trying, my agent finally has an offer for the book on degree mills that Allen Ezell (founder of FBI's dipscam project) and I are planning to do.

The bad news: The publisher wants a bigger book than we had planned (100,000 words), and they want it in just over three months. Possible, but demanding.

The good and bad news: It is a major publisher (not Ten Speed), who knows how to market and promote books. But the advance is minuscule.

If I'm going to get this done, I am going to need a research assistant for a month or perhaps six weeks, part time, to collect, review, combine, and summarize information -- from this forum, other forums, the internet in general, and hundreds of files (electronic and paper) that I have accumulated.

I am quite sure it can all be done at a distance, by Email, mail, fax, and phone.

Proposed pay is embarrassing (see three previous paragraphs re minuscule advance), but it should be interesting and satisfying work, I think, with a bit of 2nd hand glory. Not co-authorship, but at least profuse thanks and acknowledgement in the book, and possibly (but no guarantee) title page credit in the "with the help of..." model that I've done a few times before.

That said, if the notion of spending at least ten and at most 20 hours a week for 4 to 6 weeks (probably starting in a week or two at the most) for ten bucks an hour has possible interest, please communicate privately: john@ursa.net or fax (510) 528-4254.

(Contract not yet in hand; it's at that sluggish stage where our agent is discussing foreign language rights and second serial rights in Israel and who pays for indexing and suchlike, but it should happen in the next week or 10 days.)

Thanks for your attention.

John


Last edited by John Bear on 10-12-2003 at 08:41 AM