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Background: There is great heterogeneity in the quality of care among hospitals in China, but studies on the performance measures and prognosis of patients with heart failure (HF) are still deficient. Hypothesis: Performance measures have been used as a guideline to clinicans, however, the association between them and outcomes among HF patients in China remains unclear. Methods: We analyzed 4497 patients with HF from the Heart Failure Registry of Patient Outcomes study. Performance measures were determined according to the guidelines, and the patients were divided into four groups based on a composite performance score. Multiple imputation and Cox proportional‐hazard regression models were used to assess the association between the performance measures and clinical outcomes. Results: Overall, only 12.5% of patients met the top 25% of the performance measures, whereas 33.5% of patients met the bottom 25% of the measures. A total of 992 (22.2%) patients died within 1 year, involving a larger proportion of patients who had met only the bottom 25% of the performance measures than had met the top 25% (27.0% vs. 16.3%, respectively). The patients who met the top 25% of the measures had a lower 1‐year mortality rate (adjusted hazard ratio: 0.78, 95% confidence interval: 0.61–0.98). Conclusions: The association between performance measures and mortality appeared to follow a dose–response pattern with a larger degree of compliance with performance measures being associated with a lower mortality rate in patients with HF. Accordingly, the quality of care for patients with HF in China needs to be further improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design guidelines for traditional cultural artefacts play an important role in Culturally Inspired Design (CID) activities and design education. In this paper, a comparative study was performed to assess the impact of present‐day design guidelines for traditional Chinese cultural artefacts on novice designers in a CID process. In all, 42 novice designers enrolled in a cultural product design course participated in this study, under two different design conditions: an unaided condition and a guideline‐aided condition. Each condition includes three stages: identification stage, translation stage and implementation stage. In the unaided condition, each participant was asked to finish an investigative report on traditional cultural artefacts without any guidance and then carry out a detailed cultural product design. These results were then compared with those of the participants in the guideline‐aided condition, who received a design guideline for traditional cultural artefacts. The results were assessed by expert raters against six design metrics: breadth, depth, quantity, variety, novelty and quality. They revealed that the design guideline for traditional cultural artefacts in a CID process promoted the analysis of cultural features and increased the novelty and quality of design outcomes but resulted in decreased variety. We propose that the design guideline for traditional cultural artefacts may be useful as part of the design process and as a pedagogical tool in cultural creative design, but the best moment at which to introduce the design guideline should be further examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subaqueous mass‐transport processes are one of the mechanisms for transport of sediment into the deep sea. Internal structures and depositional processes of carbonate mass‐transport deposits are relatively poorly understood relative to siliciclastic facies due to their comparative paucity in the rock record. A variety of carbonate mass‐transport deposits, including slumps, debrites and deep‐channel‐confined density flow deposits, occur in Middle–Upper Ordovician slope deposits in western Inner Mongolia (Wuhai), China. These provide a rare opportunity to illustrate the emplacement history of carbonate mass‐transport deposits at the outcrop scale. The slumps and debrites host remarkable folds, chaotic beds and imbricated beds that reflect differences in both rheology and position on the slope. Individual slump sheets show gradations between undulating laminae, inclined and recumbent folds, highly deformed folds, and chaotic textures upslope from the toe region. Debrites are commonly interbedded with slump deposits, whereas imbricated beds are present in the middle and lower parts of the toes of slump sheets near the terminal wall. In the study area, thin‐bedded limestone with slump deposits of the Kelimoli Formation are overlain by fine‐grained, siliciclastic‐dominated, slope deposits of the Wulalike Formation. A thick breccia of the Wulalike Formation was deposited in a main feeder channel in south‐east Wuhai, but to the west‐north‐west the breccia was deposited in distributary channels possibly represented as a unique lower‐slope pattern of gullies. At the latter locality, the breccia was deposited solely within the channels on a steep west‐north‐west dipping slope under density‐driven flows. The mass‐transport deposits documented herein records passive to foreland basin tectonic transitions, and associated platform foundering and steepening of the slope. A slope facies model was constructed to demonstrate the spatial and temporal variations of mass‐transport deposits during basin evolution, and as such it provides a template for the interpretation of the deposits of ancient slopes that underwent passive to active tectonic transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The in situ zircon U‐Pb‐Lu‐Hf isotope records from end‐Permian volcanic interlayers in southwest China, integrated with previous studies, restructure the evolutionary history of the Yangtze Craton from Precambrian to Late Paleozoic. This includes early continental crust formation before ∼3.0 Ga and massive juvenile crustal growth at 2.6–2.4 Ga; large‐scale crustal reworking at ∼2.1–1.7 Ga; Neoproterozoic crust addition at ∼1.1 to 0.7 Ga; collision and subduction along the craton margin between ∼700–541 Ma; Early Ordovician to Late Silurian magmatism; and large tectono‐thermal events in the Middle Carboniferous to end‐Permian. Some zircons with TMD2 ages from 4.40 to 4.01 Ga and lower initial 176Hf/177Hf values of 0.280592 to 0.280726 may imply the existence of Hadean crust relics beneath the Yangtze Craton and their provenances could be associated with Hadean crustal remelting. This study further clarifies that the Precambrian‐age zircons between the end‐Permian volcanic interlayers, the complexes in the western margin of the Yangtze Craton, and the sedimentary Kangdian Basin, may share an affinity based on similar U‐Pb age spectra and Hf isotope features. It also shows that the Neoproterozoic tectono‐thermal event may be associated with large‐scale tectono‐rifting activity, which is different from the Grenville‐age continental collision between Yangtze and Cathaysia blocks in South China. The above findings support the inference of a widespread Archean basement extending to the western Yangtze Craton and a provenance in the Kangdian Basin that is derived from the weathering and erosion of Paleoproterozoic continental crust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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