Young Matheron in 1954 took a shine to what he then thought was statistics. Professor Dr Georges Matheron in the 1970s saw it at that time as his new science of geostatistics. Professor Dr Noel A C Cressie in 1993 saw it more as what he came to call Statistics with upper-case S. He is the brains behind that sort of stats stuff at the Ohio State University. He teaches Statistics with upper-case S at OSU’s Department of Statistics. But why does he teach Statistics with upper-case S? Here’s in plain prose how Cressie put it in his Preface: “Notice that Statistics is capitalized to distinguish it from its other meaning: a collection of numbers that summarize a complex phenomenon – such as baseball or cricket”. Good grief! Could that really be the reason why he brought Statistics with a capitalized S to those who interpret statistics for spatial data? Has he paid any attention to the study of climate change? Turned out to be a bit of a mess, didn’t it? He cautioned elsewhere in his Preface, “We should not forget our roots”. But why then did Cressie forget his roots in mathematical statistics?

Dr Frederik P Agterberg went to work with geostatistics long before NRCan stood short for Natural Resources Canada. He is still Emeritus Scientist with NRCan`s Geological Survey of Canada. He is one of the most gifted geostatisticians in the world. As such, he has a soft spot for Professor Dr Georges Matheron and a penchant for his magnum opus. So much so that he called him the Founder of Spatial Statistics. He did so after Matheron had passed away in 2000. Matheron’s disciples didn’t agree with Agterberg’s view. Matheron taught them how to assume, krige and smooth with infinite confidence. So, they thought of him as the mastermind behind the Centre de Géostatistique and the Centre de Morphology Mathematique. What Matheron taught his disciples was inspired by one or other innovative theme that would call on his most creative thinking. That`s why they thought of him as the Creator of Geostatistics.

How I wish it were true! But that`s what W J Reichmann thought in 1961. It’s the very title of Chapter 1 in his delightful Use and abuse of statistics. The first line of its Preface points out: `Very few people nowadays can progress very far without at some point coming in contact with statistics`. Now that’s what I have been trying to tell the geostatistocracy since the early 1990s. So I pointed to Reichmann’s work in Abuse of Statistics. I own several scores of books on sampling and statistics. Applied statistics underpins sampling practice just as much as probability theory does sampling theory. As such, degrees of freedom play a key role in sampling practice but none at all in sampling theory. No ifs or buts! Except in CIM Bulletin. In Matheron’s tour de force of course. And in Cressie’s Statistics with a capital S!

Journel got down to shedding some light on October 15, 1992. He did so in a six page letter to the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal for Mathematical Geology. At that time, JMG’s Editor-in-Chief was Dr Robert Ehrlich, a professor at the Department of Geological Sciences with the University of South Carolina. Journel had “…a bit reluctantly…” agreed to go through my various notes. He left it up JMG’s Editor-in-Chief to decide whether his carefully crafted response should be sent to me. He did point out “…however, I strongly feel that Math Geology has had more than its share of detracting invectives.” Good grief! What could possibly be wrong with geostatistics?

This one is for you Mr. Plant Manager or CEO.  Especially if your company is publicly traded company you are very familiar with how tight money appears to be when it comes to funding projects that involve machinery and condition monitoring, which do not have a ½ to a 1 year ROI – it is virtually impossible to bring them alive.  I have seen projects not make it even though they would have saved the company tenths of thousands of Dollars in power savings, cooling water elimination, repair reduction etc.  You also know that little expense is spared when production is down because a machine broke that sometimes does not even need to have been a critical piece of equipment.  Bunches of money are then spent trying to expedite the repair or replacement.  Ironic, is it not? 

Acronyms serve to make long tags short. Ranking high among the world’s most famous acronyms are USA and IBM. Laser and taser are well-known objects that have but rhyme in common. EMF stands for Eclipse Modeling Framework. ASTM, DIN and ISO are familiar to those who develop and work with national and international standard methods. IAMG stood for International Association for Mathematical Geology from 1968 to 2007. IAMG’s Council in January 2008 resolved to call it the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences. What IAMG’s Council never did was set up an ISO Technical Committee on Reserve and Resource Estimation.

Planning and Doing (Implementation) come natural to us. However, setting time aside and reviewing what has been done or implemented is not common practice. Always stick with the process step that you are at the time. When you are planning stage, do not do any of the other two things. The same goes for the Doing and Reviewing part. You will save on nerves, effort and money if you do the well.

The most vital component to a successful team task is the review process. It is the most frequent overlooked task in any project you need to undertake. Some projects may make great progress at first and then later fail because along the course of anything you do in business there will always be some tweaking along the way and no one ever took the time to include this in a review phase. The “tweaking” changes the dynamics of a project and if no one takes time to record what, why and how it happened you will not be able to capture why the results were different than expected. This is extremely frustrating for everyone and wastes resources with a direct impact on the net bottom line because you will never know why you failed, or worse why you had success.

Dr Frederik P Agterberg tried to do so when he sang the praises of Professor Dr Georges Matheron and called him the Founder of Spatial Statistics. The keepers of Matheron`s magnum opus at his own Centre de Géostatistique didn`t quite see eye to eye with Agterberg`s rebranding. Matheron`s disciples were taught to hold him in the highest regard as the Creator of Geostatistics. It was Matheron himself who called geostatistics a new science in the early 1960s. Here`s in a nutshell what had inspired Matheron so much in his most creative of days. He taught that, “geologists stress structure and statisticians stress randomness”. I liked that a lot. I would have liked it even more had Matheron shown how to test for absence or presence of structure. All it would have taken is to apply Fisher’s F-test to the variance of a set of measured values and the first variance term of the ordered set. He would have had to count the number of degrees of freedom for each set. That was a bit of a problem. Matheron and his following never got around to counting degrees of freedom.

CIM stands for Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum. Once upon a time I was a proud CIM Member. Today I am the accidental CIM Life Member. My first message to CIM`s President was snail mailed on March 20, 1992. CIM`s President was William E Stanley of The Coopers & Lybrand Group in Vancouver. He was the first of many whom I had told why geostatistics is an invalid variant of applied statistics. We met, he listened to my story, and I wrote him a letter. CIM Bulletin of March 1989 had published Armstrong and Champigny’s A Study on kriging Small Blocks. Both authors were geostatistical scholars at the Centre de Géostatistique, France. They thought up the study since, “The kriging variance rises up to a maximum and then drops off.” What they found out is that “…mine planners are often tempted to kriging very small blocks.” How about that? Smoothing a little is good but smoothing very small blocks is bad. That sort of a pass-the-buck study did pass David’s peer review with red flags blazing.

The Bre-X fraud brought about an orgy of hand wringing but not even a token search for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The Ontario Securities Commission and the Toronto Stock Exchange set up a Mining Standards Task Force. Morley P Carscallen, OSC`s Commissioner, and John W Carson, TSE`s Senior Vice President, called on Canadian mining experts to set new standards. Of course, the old standards were dreadfully wrong. All it took was to assume gold between salted boreholes. That’s how Bre-X’s bogus grades and Busang’s barren rock added up to a phantom gold resource! So what did the Mining Standards Task Force do? It wrote a load of text but little else. Here’s why!