Professionals pine for public trust

Professional designations are powerful symbols. The public at large tends to trust those who do qualify. Noblesse oblige, bien sur! Here’s what the public ought to know! The current code of ethics does not always protect the public at large. I was aware of this code long before I read the Vancouver Sun of March 1, 2012. Much of it is posted under Correspondence on my website. The National Engineering and Geoscience Month (NEGM) was this year held in Vancouver, BC. Its members have as strong a need to be appreciated and understood as I do! But far too few of its members remember as well as I do how geostatistics converted Bre-X’s bogus grades and Busang’s barren rock into a massive phantom gold resource. Kilborn Engineering Pacific Ltd cooked up Bre-X’s phantom gold resource here in Vancouver, BC. I had given my short course on sampling and statistics at Kilborn’s Office long before Bre-X Minerals got into drilling holes at its gold property in Borneo, Indonesia. It bothered but few professionals that geostatistics as Kilborn knew it in the 1990s morphed into stochastic mine planning at McGill University in 2010s. Among those who couldn’t care less whether or not functions have variances is UBC Emeritus Professor Dr Alastair J Sinclair, PEng. He took a liking to Matheron’s thinking in the 1970s. He has been teaching Matheronian geostatistics to scores of students at the University of British Columbia.

Dr A J Sinclair, PEng, PGeo
Professor Emeritus

Since the 1990s I have explained in rich detail on my website and in my blogs why geostatistics is a scientific fraud. Why then do so many APEG Members ignore one-to-one correspondence between functions and variances? One would expect that sort of scientific fraud to be at variance with APEG’s Code of Ethics. What I want to know most of all is whether or not the properties of variances have ever been a matter of any concern to APEG’s Members. So I tend to ask a lot of questions. Where have degrees of freedom gone? Who lost the Central Limit Theorem? What has happened to unbiased confidence limits for masses of contained metals? Dr Alastair J Sinclair, PEng, PGeo still does not accept one-to-one correspondence between functions and variances. He is still teaching his students all about assuming spatial dependence between measured values in ordered sets, interpolating by kriging, smoothing to perfection, and rigging the rules of applied statistics with impunity.

Assume, krige, smooth and be happy!

Here’s what Mr Tom Sneddon, MSc, PGeol, Manager of Geoscience Affairs, APEGGA Calgary wrote in response to my emessage of March 2, 2012:

“The Vancouver Sun article you refer to was placed by our sister organization, the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia, but its content applies equally to the practice of geosciences anywhere in Canada as we pledge a common code of ethics and we all play by the same rules of conduct. You are quite right in saying that geologists and geoscientists in Alberta are bound to use only techniques and software that the practitioner is completely familiar with and understands. That is a fundamental rule of professional practice. Further, Alberta geoscientists are mostly industrial practitioners who are pretty pragmatic about what kind of methods they use in exploring for oil, gas and minerals. If a particular body of knowledge or set of techniques or algorithms don’t find dollars, their ultimate objective, they are not going to use those techniques.

As your publications suggest, good science (and by extension applied science) depends on a healthy load of skepticism and debate before an idea or concept can even be conditionally accepted as good professional practice. APEGGA provides one particular platform where ideas are openly and enthusiastically discussed, sometimes at great length: the Readers’ Forum in our bi-monthly magazine, the PEG. If you would like to have your views known and engage in a debate with our over 63,000 members, please send a note to George Lee, The Editor in Chief of the PEG (glee@apegga.org) allowing him to print you letter. Since many of our members use geostatistics as a tool for mineral exploration and development, I look forward to hearing the range of views they will surely express.”

PEG's Editor in Chief wrote: “This is not a debate we’ll get into, for at least three reasons. First, the subject matter is not part of our mandate as a non-technical publication. Second, the complexity of the subject and the need to present both sides, in fairness to UBC and Dr Sinclair, would require a full story, which we don’t have the space or the mandate for. And finally, it’s set in B.C. – our focus is Alberta. Sorry we can’t help you. All the best”.