Why Effective Interventions Do Not Work for All Patients

Why do interventions work in some places and not others: a breastfeeding support group trial.

In a cluster randomised controlled trial of a policy to provide community breastfeeding support groups in Scotland, breastfeeding rates declined in 3 of 7 intervention localities. From a preliminary study, we expected breastfeeding outcomes to vary and we prospectively used qualitative and quantitative methods to ask why. Ethnographic in-depth interviews, focus groups, observations and survey d...

Why most interventions to improve physician prescribing do not seem to work.

The "Dance or Work" Problem: Why Do not all Honeybees Dance with Maximum Intensity

A honeybee colony has to choose among several nectar sources in the environment, each fluctuating in quality over time. Successful forager bees return to the hive and perform dances to describe the food sources they have found. Each dancer tries to recruit other forager bees to fly to the source it has found. Some individual dancers clearly dance longer for higher quality sources, other dancers...

Why patients do not take their medication.

Why do color transforms work?

Numerous papers have been written regarding techniques to translate color measurements from an RGB device (such as a scanner or camera) into some standard color space. The papers seem to ignore the mathematical "truth"... that the translation is impossible. Do these color transforms work, or under what conditions do they work, and what are the limitations? Why is it that they work (if they do)?...