Bingo!!! An assay. Developing an ore body into a delivered product is very similar. Before anything goes forward they want to know the cash in, cash out, longevity, and foresight into market stability. If it' s going to take 3-4 years to clear enviro, socio, and logistic barriers and another 2-3 to construct the extraction facilities before seeing a dollar come in there is no room for slop. For a start up a sloppy assay can make or break them. For an established company it is far easier to carrying into developement.
That's all good, what about the statistics? That's really what we're talking about here. You can't claim to have a validated assay without some criteria based on the statistics. Are 12 and 10 really different, or are they the same thing? If you went out and sampled again, would you get exactly the same answer? The real world is messy and filled with variability, which is why we use statistics to evaluate outcomes, and why I would never present anything to my portfolio committee without vetting how robust the answer is, i.e statistics.
Yes DB, statistics isn't science. It's a tool we use. The house we build is not a hammer.
NASA claims this was the 6th warmest Nov. NOAA says 4th. Which is it or do we just say "close enough" and go with 5th?
Well, they only go by their own respective records, so we say they're both correct. Then we take their samples, and do a statistical test for equivalence, and realize that they are not statistically different from one another. We say exactly the same thing as we would say to anyone who says there has been a pause in the temperature record since 1998, 2001, or 2005.
Small point of order, NOAA says it's the 7th warmest November -tied with 2008- on record.