Case Study Needed

Read Silver Blaze – the short story by following this link:  Silver Blaze

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous short story Silver Blaze, about the theft of a racehorse by the same name and the murder of its trainer, Sherlock Holmes points out to a Scotland Yard detective “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” The detective replies, “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” And Holmes replies, “That was the curious incident.” The dog didn’t bark because the beast knew the thief and murderer, which narrowed the list of suspects.

While Holmes is a fictional character, this type of information has serious implications in the real world. We are usually looking for the obvious signs—the smoking gun, the barking dog, the rushing rapids. We don’t often ask ourselves, “What information is missing?” Sometimes, as with the barking dog, the missing information is just not there. Other times, there are people around us who make deliberate attempts to obscure it.

What information is missing?

For example, how many people were killed in the war in Iraq in its first four years? If you said more than 3,000, you’re only looking at part of the data. That was the number of U.S. military casualties by late 2006. The Iraqi civilians and security forces killed in the war topped 26,000 in October 2005, according to the official U.S. government count. It could actually have been as high as 70,000 or even higher by mid-2007. The data we look at are usually just U.S. casualties, but the broader data give a different picture of the war’s impact.

Deliverable
Write a short paper focusing on the importance of complete, reliable, unaltered, and accurate data as the basis for decision-making and problem solving.  You do not have to write it on the stories above.  You can simply use them as examples of what happens when you do not look at complete data.  

Specific Case Study Guidelines:

•         The paper must follow APA 6th edition formatting with a cover page and reference page

•         The paper is to be written in Time New Roman, 12-point font and double spaced

•         A minimum of three peer-reviewed sources must be used per lesson.

Example of resource reference

Reading

http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Arthur_Conan_Doyle/Memoirs_of_Sherlock_Holmes/Adventure_I_Silver_Blaze_p1.html