Praise for ASTM Committee E11

Praise for ASTM is also due for correcting the first name of Dr Jan Visman. I had reported on May 22, 2011 to ASTM’s President that it was misspelled. Catharine Allan, Administrative Assistant, Technical Committee Operations, made the correction and kept me posted. Now that’s the iconic society I got to know so well. ASTM Committee D05 on Coal and Coke has been working with applied statistics ever since Greg Gould became its driving force. One reference in Visman’s 1947 PhD thesis reads, Gould, G B, How to use laboratory tests in judging coal values, Combustion 11, 31-37, 1939-1940. How about that? Visman was already aware of Gould’s work! Gy’s 1967 and 1971 works do refer to Visman but his 1979 Sampling of Particulate Matter no longer does. On the contrary, Gy praised in his Introduction not only Matheron’s theories but also David’s 1977 textbook. Gy’s praise may well be the reason why David blew a fuse when Merks & Merks showed how to test for spatial dependence between gold assays of ordered round in a drift.

Greg Gould’s friends called him GG. When I met Greg for the first time he told me that his number one textbook was Volk’s Applied Statistics for Engineers. I still have my first copy. Volk explores all properties of variances in a chapter called Analysis of Variance. Visman applied the additive property of variances to partition his sampling variance into its composition and distribution components. I divided the set of primary increments into interleaved pairs so as to get a single degree of freedom. Gy would put his set of primary increments in a single basket. Clearly, the French sampling school didn’t respect the concept of degrees of freedom nearly as much as do statisticians. That’s why I put together a paper called The Properties of Variances. I wanted to prove that kriging variances and classical variances are as different as night and day.

GG’s grasp of sampling and statistics made him a valuable member of ASTM Committee E11 on Quality and Statistics. He didn’t attend the meeting of ISO/TC27 at Vancouver, BC in 2009. Here’s where and when SGS’s Charles D Rose talked about multivariate analysis when testing for bias between paired data. He didn’t talk about trace elements in rocks or soils but about bias test data for total moisture and dry ash in coal. The power of Student’s t-test to detect a bias is best defined in terms of Bias Detection Limits and Probable Bias Ranges. C D Rose and R M Srivastava seemed to have solved in 1993 some sort of sampling problem. They did it with a fractal correlation function but without degrees of freedom. Scores of degrees of freedom deprived papers were presented in 1993 at David’s bash. Thus it came to pass that David’s 1977 Geostatistical Ore Reserve Estimation was praised for no reason whatsoever.

British Columbia got stuck with environmental guidelines cooked up by R Mohan Srivastava and his FSI pals. Mo ticked me off by dismissing degrees of freedom. He put up a squabble when Sandra Rubin’s “Whistleblower Raises Doubts over Ore Bodies” was published in the National Post of September 30, 2002. Mo beats around the bush with the best when talking about degrees of freedom. All the same, a gifted geostatistocrat thought Mo was witty.

Geovariances’ Dr M Armstrong
Past Editor: De Geostatisticis
Coauthor: A Study on Kriging Small Blocks

Both Armstrong and her coauthor failed to grasp why kriging variances rise and fall. They thought mine planners were over-smoothing small blocks. So they cautioned against over-smoothing. As luck would have it, testing for spatial dependence didn’t play much of a role in Matheronian geostatistics.

Stanford’s Journel made geostatistics a piece of cake by assuming spatial dependence between measured values in ordered sets. So, he didn’t even teach his students how to apply Fisher’s F-test.

Stanford’s Professor Dr A G Journel
Unencumbered with Fisher’s F-test

Mineral analysts, too, are blamed when metal grades of mined ores are lower than geostatistically “engineered” grades. Mineral analysts do know that interpolation without justification makes no sense in any science. I have talked about sampling and statistics at several of their annual meetings. I even put together a paper on Self-defense for Mineral Analysts.

ASTM awarded me in 1995 for 25 years of continuous membership. Peter S Unger, Vice Chairman, Committee E-11, had written on March 4, 1995, that Ricardo Stone, 1st Vice Chair, would review my notes and contact me. Hennie and I enjoyed luncheon with Carol and Ricardo. I explained that measured gold grades of mined ore were lower than geostatistically engineered gold grades at Hecla’s Grouse Creek mine. Hecla's chief geologist and his dad were both into geostatistics. That’s why the assay laboratory was blamed for low gold grades. I had met its chief assayer at some other mine in the USA. He asked me to visit the Grouse Creek mine and figure out what was wrong. All I did was apply Fisher’s forbidden F-test to gold grades of ordered blast holes. Spatial dependence dissipated into randomness between 20 and 30 m. Yet, the geostatistical model was based on assumed spatial dependence at 100 m. Hecla’s Grouse Creek never made the predicted grade. As fate would have it, geostatistical software was already converting Bre-X’s bogus grade and Busang’s barren rock into a massive phantom gold resource. ASTM Committee D-18 on Soil and Rock is still kriging and smoothing as much as does the world’s mining industry.