Hi Mach (?)
Jan Merks is a consultant with a formidable and well-earned reputation in sampling theory and applications. I understand he sits on many committees in Canada which define standards for sampling and evaluation. The first of his "geostatistics scam" articles appeared under the title "Geostatistics or voodoo statistics" in 1992, in just about every mineral industry publication from the Engineering & Mining Journal to the Northern Miner newspaper. In this article he references Michel David's book (1978) and my 1979 book Practical Geostatistics.
In December 1993, after considerable pressure from my colleagues and many more publications of this article, I wrote a personal letter to Dr Merks inviting him to come down to Reno, Nevada and put his thoughts at a short course I was about to teach. I have now put both of these faxes up on the Web at http://www.kriging.com/correspondence so that you can judge for yourselves what the position was then. Please forgive the quality of the reproduction as thermal fax paper tends to fade with time!
Since then, Dr Merk's has made it his life's work to visit every site possible (e.g. Amazon) and post negative reviews and comments about geostatistics. His comments are coherent and persuasive and have influenced many people, like yourself, against this whole field. His premise is that statistical theory does not apply to auto-correlated or spatially related variables. This will come as an unpleasant surprise to all statisticans involved in the study of stochastic variables including such authors as Sir David Cox (Emeritus Professor of Statistics, Imperial College London and author of the basic textbook in stochastic processes), Noel Cressie (Director of Spatial Statistics at Ohio State
University) and even Brian Ripley (Professor of Statistics at Oxford University) -- not to mention Roger Mead (now retired, formerly Head of Department of Applied Statistics at Reading University, England) who taught me spatial statistics in 1969 before I'd ever heard of geostatistics.
Make no mistake, there are flaws in geostatistics both as a theory and in application. There is plenty of room for improvement across the spectrum and (hopefully) people around the world are working on this as we read. There are also advances in other approaches to spatial estimation which I (for one) watch with interest in the anticipation of new tools for the real world.
Criticism should be seen as a good thing and an aid to development. However, relentless negativity serves no-one on either side of this non-discussion. An exchange of ideas is more profitable than an endless stream of insults on either side.
In the meantime? Learn what you can and judge for yourself whether the ideas of geostatistics make sense in practice and could be applicable to your own problems.
Isobel Clark
http://www.kriging.com/courses
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