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Project GEESE is Project NUTRIA At a Table Near You. Also, HRSA’s Service Area Competition (SAC) FOA is out

According to the New York Times, “the city’s too fertile and apparently pesky geese will soon face a grim fate, but will not go to waste: They will go to feed hungry Pennsylvanians.” I’m not making this up.

The idea might sound familiar to Grant Writing Confidential readers. Isaac wrote a post called “Project NUTRIA: A Study in Project Concept Development,” which describes how to conceptualize project development while parodying some of the crazy concepts we see bandied about. A nutria, for those who don’t know, is basically a very big rat, and they were apparently terrorizing Seattle not long ago. So Isaac suggested that low-income and/or homeless individuals be trained to capture the nutria and turn them into food.

This was (mostly) a joke.

The New York Times article, however, indicates that something quite similar is actually happening. No word on whether there’s a job training element to the proposed project or an acronym. If whoever runs this program needs an acronym, we’re willing to contribute one gratis: Project GEESE (Geese Expeditiously Evicted and Served to Everyone). You could change “Evicted” to “Eviscerated.” No word yet regarding whether any of the unsuspecting geese will force fed first to produce foie gras, which I’ve eaten once and would not care to eat again.

Furthermore, you may want to take a gander at this article article from a different source, which claims that “Due to strict New York guidelines regulating the processing and distribution of goose meat, local authorities finally decided to send them off to Pennsylvania, which already has an established protocol for distributing slaughtered geese.” Who knew? So there’s a bureaucratic perspective to this feathered tale as well.

In other acronym-related news, the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) Service Area Competition (SAC) Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) has been announced, which you should celebrate by asking WTF took so long and ordering some BBQ.

EDIT: In “Why Soup Kitchens Serve So Much Venison,” Henry Grabar reports that “a growing percentage of [venison served to the homeless and needy] comes from the suburbs of American cities, at the unlikely but unmistakably American intersection of bow hunting, pest control and hunger relief.” There are too many deer and too many hungry people, and they intersect here.

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More on Drugs

Drug use, like healthcare and a number of other modern political background noises, offer endless fodder for debate and study, especially when mixed with teenagers. Now the New York Times has an article about teenagers, risky behaviors, and why some programs aimed at teens are likely to fail:

For example, a study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found that teenagers were more likely than adults to overestimate risks for every outcome studied, from low-probability events like contracting H.I.V. to higher-probability ones like acquiring more common sexually transmitted diseases or becoming pregnant from a single act of unprotected sex.

“We found that teenagers quite rationally weigh benefits and risks,” Dr. Reyna said in a recent interview. “But when they do that, the equation delivers the message to go ahead and do that, because to the teen the benefits outweigh the risks.”

For example, she said: “The risk of pregnancy from a single act of unprotected sex is quite small, perhaps one chance in 12, and the risk of contracting H.I.V., about one in 500, is very much smaller than that. We’re not thinking logically; they are.”

For that reason, [two professors wrote in an article that] traditional programs […] appeal[ling] to teenagers’ rationality “are inherently flawed, not because teens fail to weigh risks against benefits,” but because “teens tend to weight benefits more heavily than risks when making decisions.”

In light of research like this, programs designed to prevent teens behaving badly are unlikely to be cut or shrunk any time soon because teenage risk-taking is a perennial and perhaps biological imperative. This is great news for nonprofits that seek grants in the apparently endless “War on Drugs” to save teens from themselves.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

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Gangs, Again

Hot on the trail of yesterday’s post about L.A. gangs and statistics, the New York Times published “Los Angeles Combating Gangs Gone International.” It begins:

Two gangs that originated on the streets here have grown so large in El Salvador that there are two prisons in that country devoted exclusively to their members, one for each gang, according to officials who traveled there recently to meet with the local authorities.

That is just one measure of the way gangs in this city with the worst gang problem in the United States have bolstered their presence in Mexico and Central America, where they attract new members eager to come here.

Over the course of the article, you won’t notice any numbers regarding how many active gang members operate in L.A., and not until the fourth paragraph do you actually learn that its premise rests on 23 people being convicted of extra immigration crimes. In addition, the only two people quoted are, for lack of a better term, anti-gang professionals; evidently the reporter knows what Isaac said about narratives:

If you’re having difficulty building your argument with data, a good technique is to call local “experts” for quotes. For example, find and call the police unit responsible for gang suppression in your target area, then ask leading questions. Invariably, the officer will tell horror stories about rampant gang activity. Just ask if you can quote her and she will almost always agree. It’s always fun to include the names of some local gangs in your proposal for a dash of reader titillation.

I’ve written about questionable New York Times articles on my personal blog, and there is something vaguely rotten about “Los Angeles Combating Gangs Gone International.”

You also don’t get the names of the gangs, but one is almost certainly “Mara Salva Trucha” or MS-13 (sometimes spell “Salvatrucha”), which is famous enough or has good enough PR to merit a Wikipedia page, although you shouldn’t necessarily trust what you read there. Still, given all the publicity MS-13 has received, you can always cite Bloods, Crips, and MS-13 affiliates as making up your local gang problem.