The Land of the Savior: Óscar Romero and the Reform of Agriculture

This study approaches Óscar Romero by attending to his intimate involvement in and concern for the problematic surrounding the reform of Salvadoran agriculture and the conflict over property and possession underlying it. In this study, I situate Romero in relation to the concentration of landholding and the production of landlessness in El Salvador over the course of the twentieth century, and I examine his participation in the longstanding societal and ecclesial debate about agrarian reform provoked by these realities. I try to show how close attention to agrarian reform and what was at stake in it can illumine not only the conflict that occasioned Romero’s martyrdom but the meaning of the martyrdom itself.

Understanding Romero’s involvement in the debate about agrarian reform requires sustained attention to how it takes its bearings from the line of thinking about property and possession for which Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum stands as a new beginning. The enclyclical tradition developing out of Leo’s pontificate is commonly referred to as Catholic social doctrine or Catholic social teaching. Romero’s and the Church’s participation in the debate about agrarian reform in El Salvador is unintelligible apart from it.

What Romero and the encyclical tradition share, I argue, is an understanding of creation as a common gift, from which follows a distinctive construal of property and the demands of justice with respect to possessing it. On this view, property does not name, as it is often taken to mean, the enclosure of what is common for the exclusive use of its possessors—something to be held by them over and against others. Rather, property and everything related to its holding derive from the claim that creation is a gift given to human creatures in common. The acknowledgement of creation as a common gift gives rise to what I describe in this study as a politics of common use, of which agrarian reform is one expression.

In Romero’s El Salvador, those who took the truth of creation as common gift seriously—those who spoke out against or opposed the ubiquity of the concentration of land and who clamored for agrarian reform so that the landless and land-poor could have access to land to cultivate for subsistence—suffered greatly as a consequence. I argue that, among other things, their suffering shows how, under the conditions of sin and violence, those who work to ensure that others have access to what is theirs in justice often risk laying down their lives in charity. In other words, they witness to the way that God’s work to restore creation has a cruciform shape. Therefore, while the advocacy for agrarian reform begins with the understanding of creation as common gift, the testimony to this truth in word and in deed points to the telos of the gift and the common life in the crucified and risen Lord in which it participates

Plate-specific gain map correction for the improvement of detective quantum efficiency in computed radiography.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this work is to improve the noise power spectrum (NPS), and thus the detective quantum efficiency (DQE), of computed radiography (CR) images by correcting for spatial gain variations specific to individual imaging plates. CR devices have not traditionally employed gain-map corrections, unlike the case with flat-panel detectors, because of the multiplicity of plates used with each reader. The lack of gain-map correction has limited the DQE(f) at higher exposures with CR. This current work describes a feasible solution to generating plate-specific gain maps. METHODS: Ten high-exposure open field images were taken with an RQA5 spectrum, using a sixth generation CR plate suspended in air without a cassette. Image values were converted to exposure, the plates registered using fiducial dots on the plate, the ten images averaged, and then high-pass filtered to remove low frequency contributions from field inhomogeneity. A gain-map was then produced by converting all pixel values in the average into fractions with mean of one. The resultant gain-map of the plate was used to normalize subsequent single images to correct for spatial gain fluctuation. To validate performance, the normalized NPS (NNPS) for all images was calculated both with and without the gain-map correction. Variations in the quality of correction due to exposure levels, beam voltage/spectrum, CR reader used, and registration were investigated. RESULTS: The NNPS with plate-specific gain-map correction showed improvement over the noncorrected case over the range of frequencies from 0.15 to 2.5 mm(-1). At high exposure (40 mR), NNPS was 50%-90% better with gain-map correction than without. A small further improvement in NNPS was seen from carefully registering the gain-map with subsequent images using small fiducial dots, because of slight misregistration during scanning. Further improvement was seen in the NNPS from scaling the gain map about the mean to account for different beam spectra. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates that a simple gain-map can be used to correct for the fixed-pattern noise in a given plate and thus improve the DQE of CR imaging. Such a method could easily be implemented by manufacturers because each plate has a unique bar code and the gain-map for all plates associated with a reader could be stored for future retrieval. These experiments indicated that an improvement in NPS (and hence, DQE) is possible, depending on exposure level, over a wide range of frequencies with this technique.

Autobiographical Memories for Very Negative Events: The Effects of Thinking about and Rating Memories.

In three related experiments, 250 participants rated properties of their autobiographical memory of a very negative event before and after writing about either their deepest thoughts and emotions of the event or a control topic. Levels of emotional intensity of the event, distress associated with the event, intrusive symptoms, and other phenomenological memory properties decreased over the course of the experiment, but did not differ by writing condition. We argue that the act of answering our extensive questions about a very negative event led to the decrease, thereby masking the effects of expressive writing. To show that the changes could not be explained by the mere passage of time, we replicated our findings in a fourth experiment in which all 208 participants nominated a very negative event, but only half the participants rated properties of their memory in the first session. Implications for reducing the effects of negative autobiographical memories are discussed.

The beginnings of expertise for ballads

To study the beginning stages of expertise, 14 students, who were inexperienced with ballads, heard and recalled a series of 5 ballads over the course of 5 weeks. Compared with their first recall of the first ballad, their first recall of the fifth ballad had one and a half times as many words, two times as many rhyming words, and three times as much line structure evident in the written recall protocols. Compared with novices, the 14 beginning experts more often filled in blank spaces in novel ballads with words of the correct number of syllables and more often chose the original stanza of a novel ballad that was paired with a changed version of the stanza. The beginning experts were also able to compose, in 20 min, ballads about two thirds as long as the 10-stanza ballads they learned. Thirty characteristics were identified in the set of the five learned ballads. The ballads composed by the beginning experts used over half of these. The beginning experts also explicitly stated about one quarter of these 30 characteristics, but there was no statistical relationship between the characteristics used and the characteristics stated. Memory expertise is viewed as a pervasive aspect of cognition in which people make use of a variety of regularities in the material to be learned. © 1993 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

The Feasibly of Functionally Guided Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning Using Perfluoropropane-Enhanced MRI for Lung Cancer

Radiotherapy is commonly used to treat lung cancer. However, radiation induced damage to lung tissue is a major limiting factor to its use. To minimize normal tissue lung toxicity from conformal radiotherapy treatment planning, we investigated the use of Perfluoropropane(PFP)-enhanced MR imaging to assess and guide the sparing of functioning lung. Fluorine Enhanced MRI using Perfluoropropane(PFP) is a dynamic multi-breath steady state technique enabling quantitative and qualitative assessments of lung function(1).

Imaging data was obtained from studies previously acquired in the Duke Image Analysis Laboratory. All studies were approved by the Duke IRB. The data was de-identified for this project, which was also approved by the Duke IRB. Subjects performed several breath-holds at total lung capacity(TLC) interspersed with multiple tidal breaths(TB) of Perfluoropropane(PFP)/oxygen mixture. Additive wash-in intensity images were created through the summation of the wash-in phase breath-holds. Additionally, model based fitting was utilized to create parametric images of lung function(1).

Varian Eclipse treatment planning software was used for putative treatment planning. For each subject two plans were made, a standard plan, with no regional functional lung information considered other than current standard models. Another was created using functional information to spare functional lung while maintaining dose to the target lesion. Plans were optimized to a prescription dose of 60 Gy to the target over the course of 30 fractions.

A decrease in dose to functioning lung was observed when utilizing this functional information compared to the standard plan for all five subjects. PFP-enhanced MR imaging is a feasible method to assess ventilatory lung function and we have shown how this can be incorporated into treatment planning to potentially decrease the dose to normal tissue.