Deborah, a third-year graduate student, and Kathleen, a post-doc, have made a series of measurements on a new experimental semiconductor material using an expensive neutron source at a rational laboratory. When they get back to their own laboratory and examine the data, they get the following data points. A newly proposed theory predicts results indicated by the curve.
During the measurements at the natinal laboratory, Deborah and Kathleen observed that there were power fluctuations they could not control or predict. Furthermore, they discussed their work with another group doing similar experiments, and they knew that the other group had gotten results confirming the theoretical prediction and was writing a manuscript describing their results.
In writing up their own results for publication, Kathleen suggests dropping the two anomalous data points near the abscissa (the solid squares) from the published graph and from a statistical analysis. She proposes that the existence of the data points be mentioned in the paper as possibly due to power fluctuations and being outside the expected standard deviation calculated from the remaining data points. "These two runs," she argues to Deborah "were obviously wrong."