RE:Are you people for real?JSNFernley,
Grow up. If you wish to convey something to a group of people, you might try a different approach. This isn't high school.
The Oban grades are intentionally smeared over a minimum of 2 m as this represents minimum mining widths, which is more meaningful in terms of reporting what could potentially be mined. No smearing is done beyond the minimum and high grades are reported as “including”. Grade smearing becomes misleading when abritrarily done over long unjustified lengths, such as reporting 10 m at 10 g/t instead of 0.5 m at 200 g/t.
As far as upper cutoffs are concerned, they are a necessity in resource calculations (and estimated statistically) in order to mitigate high-grade smearing during interpolation, and may or may not lead to significant loss of metal (in total resource) depending on the number of high grades that are cut. Having said that, the next resource estimate on Windfall may very well use lower cutoffs depending on the stats.
For drill results reporting, it’s really a choice (albeit common) since in this case upper cutoffs are picked randomly and are not particularly meaningful, except to show that the issuer is being conservative in reporting intersections. Description of the reporting parameters is key but unfortunately not always disclosed in press releases. Should be part of 43-101 reporting standards but it is not.
Finally, Rubicon had nothing to do with the choice of upper cutoffs – that disaster was mostly due to very bad geological interpretation and random obliteration of inferred resources once the panic set in.
-- MM