Metrology in mining and metallurgy

A poster in my office reads, “Metrology, the Science of Measurement." It’s a bit faded because I’ve had it for so long. Standards Council of Canada had it printed for educational purposes. I got my poster with a set of slides about international units of measure. Most of them have since been redefined. The famous platinum-iridium artifact that has so long defined the International Unit of Mass is about to bite the dust. A sphere of pure silicon will take its place. The famous Central Limit Theorem has stood the test of time since Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754) brought to the world The Doctrine of Chances. De Moivre’s work underpins both sampling theory and sampling practice. His work is bound to stand the test of time until our planet runs out of it.

The science of measurement has always played a key role in my work. That’s why I put together Sampling and Weighing of Bulk Solids after I had completed my assignment with Cominco Ltd. I was pleased to see it in print in 1985. What pleased me even more was that ISO Technical Committee 183–Copper, lead, zinc and nickel ores and concentrates approved an ISO standard method based on deriving confidence intervals and ranges for metal contents of concentrate and ore shipments.

Several years later I got a slim paperback the cover of which I didn’t recognize. What I did recognize inside of it were my own charts and graphs embedded between Chinese characters. A friend of mine told me it was a Mandarin translation printed on rice paper. My book is protected by copyright but I have yet to be paid a single yuan. Teaching innovative sampling practices and sound statistical methods ranks much higher on my list of things to do than becoming a small c capitalist.

Sampling and Weighing of Bulk Solids
Mandarin translation, November 1989

My son and I were pleased when Precision Estimates for Ore Reserves was praised by Erzmetall and published in its October 1991 issue. The more so since peer reviewers in Canada, the USA and Britain did reject that very paper. One of CIM Bulletin’s reviewers spotted a lack of references to geostatistical literature. The other was ticked off because we were not “...relying on the abundant geostatistical literature...” We had found out that geostatisticians do not explain how to derive confidence interval and ranges for metal contents of in-situ ore. So we did in our paper and submitted it to CIM Bulletin on September 28, 1989.

Both of us had taken statistics courses at the same university but at different times. Ed leads the Eclipse Modeling Framework project and coleads of the Eclipse Modeling project. He is a coauthor of the authoritative book “EMF: Eclipse Modeling Framework” which is nearing completion of a second edition. He is an elected member of the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors and has been recognized by the Eclipse Community Awards as Top Ambassador and Top Committer. Ed is currently interested in all aspects of Eclipse modeling and its application and is well recognized for his dedication to the Eclipse community, posting literally thousands of newsgroup answers each year. He spent 16 years at IBM, achieving the level of Senior Technical Staff Member after completing his Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University. He has started his own small company, Macro Modeling, is a partner of itemis AG, and serves on Skyway Software’s Board of Advisors. His experience in modeling technology spans 25 years.

I was proud to have his pre-IBM credentials printed on the backside of Part 1– Precision and Bias for Mass Measurement Techniques. I shall convert all Lotus 1-2-3 files into Excel files and post them on my website. Some time ago Dr W E Sharp, the Editor-in-Chief for what was recently renamed the Journal of Mathematical Geosciences, wanted Dr Ed Merks to review papers on computer applications. Sharp asked me to write a paper on testing for spatial dependence by applying Fisher’s F-test. I did but we couldn’t agree on degrees of freedom for ordered sets.

Metrology in Mining and Metallurgy

First part but also the last

After Part 1 was completed in 1992 I went to work on Part 2– Precision and Bias for Ore Reserves. It was coming along nicely until Barrick Gold asked me in December 1996 to look at Bre-X’s test results for gold in crushed core and Lakefield’s test results for gold in library core. The hypothesis that 2.9 m crushed core and 0.1 m library core were once part of the same 3.0 m whole core proved to be highly improbable. CIM’s statistically dysfunctional but otherwise qualified persons were not at all keen to know how Bre-X’s salting scam could have been avoided altogether. Surely, life after Bre-X couldn’t have been any more bizarre. But that’s another story altogether!

The ISO copyright office in Geneva, Switzerland, suggests that it holds the copyright to ISO/FDIS 12745:2007(E)–Precision and bias of mass measurement techniques. Yet, this ISO standard is an ad verbatim copy of Part 1–Precision and bias for mass measurement techniques. Part 1 is supposed to be protected by Canadian copyright. So what gives? Didn’t ISO have to ask permission to reprint? What’s this world coming to when ISO violated Canadian copyright in 2007 just as much as China did in 1992?

What Ed and I have decided to do is put together a paper on Metrology in Mineral Exploration. I want to present it at APCOM 2009 in Vancouver, BC. Home sweet home! Maybe I’ll talk Ed into coming home for a while. I’ll have to post an abstract before the deadline. By the way, APCOM stands for Applications of Computers and Operations Research in the Mineral Industry. Acronym talk does make a lot of sense, doesn’t it?