TL:DR: Global water temperature data from <1940 was collected by sailors collecting buckets of water from the ocean and recording the temperature of their bucket water. But some recorded data was rounded (thanks, Air Force!). Then, researchers had to transform their data. ^Go to the 3 minute mark to see the bucket-boat-water-temperature technique in action Here is the original research,  published in Nature . NPR covered the research article . Reporter Rebecca Hersher didn't discuss the entire research paper. Instead, she told the story of how the researchers discovered and corrected for their flawed ocean water temperature data. This story might be a little beyond Intro Stats, but it tells the story of messy, real archival data used to inform global climate change and b) introduces the idea of data transformations. Below, I will highlight some of the teaching items. Systematic bias: The data were all flawed in the same way as they were transcribed without any da...