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\"This book - written by Dr John Bastin, a leading authority on the study of Sir Stamford Raffles - offers an alternative biographical account of Raffles, as seen through his relationship with some of his closest friends and contemporaries. The people featured include the naturalists Joseph Arnold, Thomas Horsfield and Nathaniel Wallich, who received support from Raffles in carrying on their scientific research, and the orientalist John Leyden, who influenced Raffles's study of Malay and Malay customs. Examining Raffles and his social circle presents an original perspective of the man and of the colonial world in which he lived, and his correspondence with his friends and scientific colleagues reflects his attitude and opinions on a range of issues, including his desire to extend the benefits of education. The book is a highly original contribution to the study of Raffles in the bicentenary year of his founding of Singapore\"--Back cover.

National levels of personal health-care access and quality can be approximated by measuring mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal in the presence of effective medical care (ie, amenable mortality). Previous analyses of mortality amenable to health care only focused on high-income countries and faced several methodological challenges. In the present analysis, we use the highly standardised cause of death and risk factor estimates generated through the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) to improve and expand the quantification of personal health-care access and quality for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2015. We mapped the most widely used list of causes amenable to personal health care developed by Nolte and McKee to 32 GBD causes. We accounted for variations in cause of death certification and misclassifications through the extensive data standardisation processes and redistribution algorithms developed for GBD. To isolate the effects of personal health-care access and quality, we risk-standardised cause-specific mortality rates for each geography-year by removing the joint effects of local environmental and behavioural risks, and adding back the global levels of risk exposure as estimated for GBD 2015. We employed principal component analysis to create a single, interpretable summary measure–the Healthcare Quality and Access (HAQ) Index–on a scale of 0 to 100. The HAQ Index showed strong convergence validity as compared with other health-system indicators, including health expenditure per capita (r=0·88), an index of 11 universal health coverage interventions (r=0·83), and human resources for health per 1000 (r=0·77). We used free disposal hull analysis with bootstrapping to produce a frontier based on the relationship between the HAQ Index and the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a measure of overall development consisting of income per capita, average years of education, and total fertility rates. This frontier allowed us to better quantify the maximum levels of personal health-care access and quality achieved across the development spectrum, and pinpoint geographies where gaps between observed and potential levels have narrowed or widened over time. Between 1990 and 2015, nearly all countries and territories saw their HAQ Index values improve; nonetheless, the difference between the highest and lowest observed HAQ Index was larger in 2015 than in 1990, ranging from 28·6 to 94·6. Of 195 geographies, 167 had statistically significant increases in HAQ Index levels since 1990, with South Korea, Turkey, Peru, China, and the Maldives recording among the largest gains by 2015. Performance on the HAQ Index and individual causes showed distinct patterns by region and level of development, yet substantial heterogeneities emerged for several causes, including cancers in highest-SDI countries; chronic kidney disease, diabetes, diarrhoeal diseases, and lower respiratory infections among middle-SDI countries; and measles and tetanus among lowest-SDI countries. While the global HAQ Index average rose from 40·7 (95% uncertainty interval, 39·0–42·8) in 1990 to 53·7 (52·2–55·4) in 2015, far less progress occurred in narrowing the gap between observed HAQ Index values and maximum levels achieved; at the global level, the difference between the observed and frontier HAQ Index only decreased from 21·2 in 1990 to 20·1 in 2015. If every country and territory had achieved the highest observed HAQ Index by their corresponding level of SDI, the global average would have been 73·8 in 2015. Several countries, particularly in eastern and western sub-Saharan Africa, reached HAQ Index values similar to or beyond their development levels, whereas others, namely in southern sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia, lagged behind what geographies of similar development attained between 1990 and 2015. This novel extension of the GBD Study shows the untapped potential for personal health-care access and quality improvement across the development spectrum. Amid substantive advances in personal health care at the national level, heterogeneous patterns for individual causes in given countries or territories suggest that few places have consistently achieved optimal health-care access and quality across health-system functions and therapeutic areas. This is especially evident in middle-SDI countries, many of which have recently undergone or are currently experiencing epidemiological transitions. The HAQ Index, if paired with other measures of health-system characteristics such as intervention coverage, could provide a robust avenue for tracking progress on universal health coverage and identifying local priorities for strengthening personal health-care quality and access throughout the world. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

•Limited edition (LE) sellouts are unlikely to increase a brand’s perceived uniqueness – regardless of their immediacy.•For hedonic LEs, immediate sellouts reduce a brand’s hedonic value and repurchase intentions, whereas non-immediate sellouts do not show such effects.•Directly selling hedonic LEs through the manufacturer’s app and a raffle reduces the negative outcomes of immediate LE sellouts but does not fully mitigate them.•Managers selling hedonic LEs should ensure that the number of LE units at least satisfies the initial demand.•For utilitarian LEs, sellouts consistently negatively impacted a brand’s hedonic value and repurchase intentions, regardless of sellout immediacy or distribution strategy. Limited Editions (LEs) are common in premium markets. Before launching a new LE, managers must decide how many units to produce and, thereby, influence how quickly it sells out. Our research examines (a) how sellout immediacy, (b) a hedonic vs. utilitarian nature of LEs, and (c) distribution strategies (the manufacturer’s app and raffle vs. retailers) influence perceived uniqueness, hedonic, and utilitarian brand value and, finally, brand repurchase intentions. For hedonic LEs, immediate sellouts harm repurchase intentions, whereas non-immediate sellouts do not. Switching to sales via an app and a raffle reduces these negative effects of immediate sellouts. However, for utilitarian LEs, negative outcomes dominate regardless of the sellout immediacy or distribution. These findings highlight that sellouts of utilitarian LEs and immediate sellouts of hedonic LEs are a threat to brand value and repurchase intentions.

Due to the endless epidemic, the world has moved to the metaverse world. To keep pace with the changes in the cosmetic market, research on customer experience using non-fungible tokens (NFTs) was conducted. This review study is an empirical analysis that focuses on introducing the safety of the metaverse world into cosmetics in the absence of customer experience in the cosmetic market due to the rapid transition to a non-face-to-face society in the COVID-19 pandemic. This review of consumer experience is a critical literature review. In this study, a technical review approach was used. Using the PRISMA flow chart, a total of 453 references were selected using representative journal search sites such as PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, RISS, and ResearchGate. Accordingly, a total of 28 papers were selected in the final stage from 2013 to 2022. This literature review focuses on the NFT cosmetics market, which expands the consumer experience into a fun experience by focusing on the sustainable safety of new consumer changes in the metaverse beauty market. This is an empirical analysis focused on the cosmetic consumer experience for the new launch of cosmetic brands using NFTs in the future beauty and cosmetology market. This narrative review article focuses on sustainable and safe experiences for beauty and cosmetics consumer experiences in the post-COVID-19 metaverse, NFTs in the metaverse, FUN for the MZ generation, and new consumer experiences. NFTs, which are a leading novel cultural and social phenomenon and utilize fun raffles in the sustainable and safe metaverse of the MZ generation that embodies the digital world, are a new era in the beauty market. Accordingly, by confirming the change, they are expected to be used as an important marketing material and strategy in the global metaverse cosmetological market for sustainable and safe spaces and consumer experiences.

In a series of studies, we examined novel predictions drawn from a conceptualization of probability as psychological distance. Manipulating construal level in a number of different ways and examining a variety of probability judgments, we found that participants led to adopt a high-level-construal mind-set made lower probability assessments than did those led to adopt a low-level-construal mind-set. Moreover, this occurred even when construal level was manipulated in a context separate from the judgment task and the manipulation was unrelated in content to the events being judged. These findings suggest that broad processing variables can exert a widespread influence on probability judgment.