Journal Comment
A monthly publication devoted to scientific transactions and specialist technical topics is unlikely to be on the priority reading list of the majority of the mining and metallurgical community. But it is the ambition of the Publication's Committee to make the Journal of much wider interest to our general membership from technician trainees to mine managers to CEO's of our constituent companies. It is to entice general readership that some 1200 words of valuable space are devoted to the Journal Comment each month. This is intended to highlight some of the features and impact of the papers to excite and activate attention.
To entice this preliminary glance before confining the publication to the book shelf or even the wpb, the author has to call on a large measure of journalistic licence in style, titles and quotations. It is essential to be spicy, controversial and even provocative to separate it from the abbreviated authoritative but necessary scientific style of the bulk of the contents.
The Journal Comment aims to be an enticement to dig into some important feature of the papers in the issue. For this reason it has been decided to include it as a separate item on the Institutes Web Site. This might provoke those who enjoy twittering, blogging and googling to submit comment and criticism, all of which will be welcomed and responded to. At least it is proof that somebody has read it.
R.E. Robinson
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Created: Friday, 01 August 2008 02:00
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Written by R.E. Robinson
‘The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away’ Linus Pauling
An excellent piece of work in this issue (‘A Review of the Physical Properties of Base Metal Mattes’) which being highly specialized, will be glossed over by most of our readers. This led me in a convoluted way to the topic of this Journal Comment. There have been a number of references recently to the difficulty of attracting venture capital (VC). In a discussion paper from the South African Venture Capital Association in May, the situation in South Africa has been comprehensively and well analysed. The primary authors were J.P. Fourie (Executive Officer SAVCA), Greg Voigt (Blue Catalyst) and Ela Romanowska (Seed Fund Manager, Innovation Fund), and is well worth reading. The noteworthy motivation for the paper is: R&D spend and patent rates indicators, as compared to other developing countries such as Korea and China, show that for South Africa’s economy to remain competitive, R&D spend and the translation of R&D activity into economically traded goods and services, through inter alia the creation of high tech, high growth potential, high risk ventures, needs to be accelerated dramatically.
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Created: Tuesday, 01 July 2008 02:00
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Written by R.E. Robinson
‘ The lecturer should give the audience full reason be believe that all his powers have been exerter for their pleasure and instruction’ Michael Faraday 1781–1867
For once I am not taking my theme from the papers in this issue. This is not because they are unimportant. Safety, rock bursts and rock mechanics are as important as one can get in the mining business. The reason is that I attended the monthly meeting of the Johannesburg Branch, which was a panel discussion on the topic of coal, energy supplies and electric power generation. Clearly, I was not the only one who rated these topics as worthwhile discussing and probably the hottest topics so far this year since load shedding started in January. The speakers from Eskom and from power consumers were excellent on the economic situation in SA. After short highlight presentations, they were joined by a panel of prominent authorities to field the discussion points raised by a sea of hands in the audience.
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Created: Sunday, 01 June 2008 02:00
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Written by R.E. Robinson
‘Contrary to popular belief, good scientists don’t seek to prove a hypothesis true. We make every possible effort to prove it wrong by subjecting it to the most withering attacks we can dream up. (It’s actually great fun). This refusal to accept a new idea until it has run a gauntlet of testing is the very reason scientific ‘truth’ is so reliable.’ Paul G. FitzGerald, PhD, University of California
I am compiling this Journal Comment during some of the most unhappy and turbulent times I have experienced in South Africa. It is not appropriate to use this Journal to comment on the social, economic and political impact of savage mob violence in the xenophobic atrocities we have experienced, other than to observe that a major contributing factor is the horde of jobless impoverished populations living in squalid shanty towns. In sharp contradiction, it is in these turbulent but exciting times that we have more opportunities than ever before to create jobs at a comprehensive range of skill levels in numbers large enough to break the back of the unemployment scourge. There are millions of houses to be built with water reticulation and effluent systems.
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Created: Thursday, 01 May 2008 02:00
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Written by R.E. Robinson
Proverb, dating back to 1772
I had just returned from my visit to family in Australia when I was faced with the latest issue of papers for the May Journal. To find a common theme from this mixed bag of topics was not as difficult as first anticipated thanks to some experiences on my visit. Our family in Melbourne is like almost all households in Australia, highly digitalized with five computers in a family of five. I and my laptop were very soon hooked up to high-speed facilities. Perhaps the most enjoyable were the 24-hour broadcasts from the Australian Broadcast Corporation, completely free of advertisements and excellently presented, authoritative and thoroughly informative and entertaining with news, topical, political, science, international and general discussion features.
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Created: Tuesday, 01 April 2008 02:00
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Written by R.E. Robinson
‘tithe—tax of one tenth, esp. one payable in kind taken for support of clergy and church’ The Concise Oxford Dictionary
The annual student papers are as interesting as ever. Nickel and platinum are always fascinating to me and most other members. Perhaps the most ambitious paper is that on computational fluid dynamic modelling of a hydro cyclone. To achieve such a model, which can be used in practical design and for optimizations has been a ‘Holy Grail’ target for mineral engineers for half a century. Some innovative thinking could have a most valuable outcome. I should like to hope that a logical conclusion to these projects might be papers in the transaction section of our Journal. This leads me to ponder whether this has a reasonable possibility of happening. A brief attempt to get a figure for the number of research workers in the field of mining and metallurgy reveals that at Wits in the department of Materials and Process Engineering there are 80 postgraduates. There are now many other centres of tertiary activity in mining and metallurgical research: Stellenbosch, Pretoria, KwaZulu, Potchefstroom (University of the North West), RAU (Johannesburg University of Technology) and Cape Town. So I guess that there are maybe several hundred worthwhile publications emanating from the MSc and PhD theses at our universities.
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Created: Saturday, 01 March 2008 02:00
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Written by R.E. Robinson
‘There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and never ending inflation’ Quoted in an after-dinner speech by a Cabinet Minister
In the previous issue, our guest commentator, Dr Sam Spearing, made some powerful observations on the importance of mining engineers. This importance is emphasized at this time of a power crisis and even more so if extended to all other engineers and specifically those involved in power stations. We are in for a rough ride and the allocation of electrical power to the various consumers, involves decision making of the highest strategic importance. We have suddenly been transformed from a euphoric climate of abundant low-cost coal and low-cost electrical power into a crisis of shortage, rationing and unquestionably high double digit inflation in energy costs. This is a frighteningly different world!
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Created: Friday, 01 February 2008 02:00
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Written by Administrator
The Publications Committee felt that the following comment was worth publishing to give Prof. Robbie Robinson a break. He will be back next month. Prof. A.J.S. (Sam) Spearing is Corresponding Member of Council for the USA. He is associate professor of mining and mineral resources engineering at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. The Journal welcomes contributions from other Corresponding Members of Council. Mining is the most fundamental of the engineering disciplines as without the raw materials, we have nothing and no other engineering disciplines. The old adage: ‘If it cannot be grown it must be mined’ is as true now as it ever was. In fact mining forms an essential part of bulk farming by providing not only the equipment but also most of the fertilizers (sometimes, however, not sensibly used).
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Created: Tuesday, 01 January 2008 02:00
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Written by R.E. Robinson
‘It is no use saying we are doing our best You have to succeed in doing something necessary’ Winston Churchill
It is difficult to resist the temptation to do what most of the commentators do at the beginning of a New Year. This is to review the past year with the satisfaction of saying ‘I told you so’, and then to pontificate on New Year’s resolutions aimed at avoiding the sins of the past causing disasters in the future. There was a temptation to discuss aluminium plants in relation to Escom’s capacity to produce power. Fortunately this was overcome by the publication of this suite of papers from the Heavy Minerals Conference (now a regular feature on our programme), which made it irresistible to reminisce on the unpredictable path of scientific and technological advancement.
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Created: Saturday, 01 December 2007 02:00
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Written by R.G.B. Pickering
The end of 2007 marks the close of one of the most exciting years in the history of the Southern African mining industry. I have been involved with the industry only since 1969. The nearest I have been to the rocketing growth that is currently being experienced was when the United States dropped the gold standard, and in a few years the price of gold escalated from $32 per ounce to nearly $850 per ounce. We experienced a massive growth in gold mining. In the current high demand for commodities we have seen prices of nearly all the minerals mined in Southern Africa reach new highs, with a corresponding increase in capital investment and major brownfield and greenfield expansion.
This, in turn, has resulted in many job opportunities in mining and a realization that the lean years have left us with a substantial skills shortage, plus an age gap where we have a few grey heads and many youngsters, but are short of the in-betweens. The SAIMM now has established, or is in the process of consolidating, new branches in Zambia, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe where, with the help of our members, we plan to carry out the key objectives of our Institute. These can be summarized as: to disseminate scientific and technological knowledge and to identify, represent and promote the interests and needs of our members and other professionals in the mining and metallurgical industries. I am sure 2008 is going to be just as hectic as 2007 has been. So please take this opportunity at the year end to relax and recharge your batteries. Follow the mining emphasis on safety, and take care while travelling. Have a blessed Christmas and a joyful New Year. R.G.B. Pickering President December 2007
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Created: Saturday, 01 December 2007 02:00
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Written by R.E. Robinson
Please put some lolly in the poor families’ hat’ Parody on a Christmas chant This is the appropriate time to express the hope that all readers have a joyous festive season and to convey my best wishes for the forthcoming year. But it is also the time to pick out some items that relate to features of the industry in 2007. Very pleasingly, there have been a lot of papers on the mining aspect, many of which relate to mine planning, decision making and the selection of mining methods. It is fitting that in this end-of-year issue there are several papers on this topic including the application of ‘fuzzy logic’ to assist in decision making.
