Discrete seasonal hydroclimate reconstructions over northern Vietnam for the past three and a half centuries

We present a 350-year hydroclimatic year (HY) index for northern Vietnam derived from three discrete seasonal reconstructions from tree rings: an index of autumn rainfall from the earlywood widths of Chinese Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga sinensis), the first such record from this species, and two nearby published Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) reconstructions from cypress (Fokienia hodginsii) tree rings for spring and summer, respectively. Autumn rainfall over the study region constitutes only around 9% of the annual total, but its variability is strongly linked to the strength of the atmospheric gradient over Asia during the transition from the boreal summer to winter monsoons. Deficit or surplus of autumn rainfall enhances or mitigates, respectively, the impact of the annual winter dry season on trees growing on porous karst hillsides. The most protracted HY drought (dry across all seasons) occurred at the turn of the twentieth century at a time of relative quiet, but a mid-to-late eighteenth century multi-year HY drought coincided with a period of great societal turmoil across mainland Southeast Asia and the Tay Son Rebellion in northern Vietnam. A mid-nineteenth century uprising accompanied by a smallpox epidemic, crop failure and famine, occurred during the worst autumn drought of the past two and a half centuries but only moderate drought in spring and summer. The “Great Vietnamese Famine” of the mid-twentieth century was dry only in autumn, with a wet spring and an average summer

Developing a model of guilty plea decision-making: Fuzzy-trace theory, gist, and categorical boundaries

This is the author accepted manuscriptAll materials and data are available at https://osf.io/v82tu/?view_only=ca81c3e96aca4d6788e33f1432250343.Objective(s): To date, most research on plea bargaining has used some form of the Shadow of the Trial model (SOT) to frame defendant decisions. In this paper we proposed and tested a new conceptual model of plea decision making, based on Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT; Reyna, 2012), for the context in which a non-detained, guilty defendant chooses between a guilty plea or trial, where both the plea and potential trial sentence entail incarceration. Hypotheses: Plea decisions will be affected by (1) meaningful, categorical changes in conviction probability (e.g., low-tomoderate; moderate-to-high), and not by more granular changes within categories, and (2) the presence and magnitude of categorical distinctions between plea offer and potential trial sentence, rather than fine-grained differences between individual offers. Method: We conducted three vignette-based experiments (N1 = 1,701, N2 = 1,098, N3 = 1,232), using MTurk participants. In studies 1 and 2, we manipulated potential trial sentence and conviction probability, and asked participants to indicate either the maximum plea sentence they would accept (Study 1), or whether they would plead guilty to a specific offer (Study 2). In study 3, we manipulated plea discount and potential trial sentence, and measured plea acceptance. Results: Maximum acceptable plea sentences were similar within, and different between, “groupings” of meaningfully similar conviction probabilities (Study 1). Plea rates were similar within, and different between, “groupings” that comprised plea offers of similarly meaningful distance from potential trial sentence (Study 3). Results also provide insight into the plea rates that might be expected under different combinations of the independent variables (Studies 2 & 3). Conclusions: Results support a new conceptual model of plea decision-making that may be better suited to explaining case-level differences in plea outcomes than SOT and suggest that future research extending this model to a wider range of contexts would be fruitful.UK Research and Innovatio