On 31/07/2012 11:09, Jo Stein wrote:
On 30.07.2012 22:01, Nightjar wrote:
On 30/07/2012 17:11, Jo Stein wrote:
...
Birger Svihus is a professor and you are not. That is why we should
trust him more than we trust you.

One of the first things we were told at university was to remember
that professors are only human and that we should not assume they are
right, simply because they are professors.

None of my professors said that.

When I was at university, they were centres of learning, where we were
encouraged to think for ourselves, not the degree factories they seem to
be today.

They all knew that they were at the top.

Ours knew they were human.

I am at the top without beeing a professor.

Does that mean that your peers do not agree with your assessment?

Accidents can happen.
When the The Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giæver graduated
from my university, he got the grade 4.0 i math and physics.
1.0 was top and 6.0 was bottom.
He became a professor by emigrating to the US where 4.0 was the top.

In the long run the systen has a selfcleaning property.
Quality floats to the top and stay there,
garbage sinks to the bottom and stay there.

You have never heard of the Dolson Principle, which states that those at
higher levels can reach those levels politically and/or by luck, and
need very little actual ability or knowledge to perform their jobs?

An alternative view is the Peter Principle, which states that people
will rise in an organisation until they reach the point at which they
are no longer competent to do their job, after which they will stop
getting promoted.

Today Ivar Giæver stays at the bottom as a climate skeptic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivar_Giaever
On 13 September 2011 Giaever resigned from the American Physical
Society over its official position that "the evidence is
incontrovertible."

So, he is a person who is willing to stand up for his principles. That
would, IMO, make him well worth listening to whether you agree with him
or not and several contributors here, myself included, would agree with
him about climate change having taken on all the aspects of a religion.

His book is based on knowledge gained during 100 years of breeding
pigs at Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway.

His specialities appear to be the nutrition of chickens and fish.

Pigs are more suitable as they have the right size.

However, they are not his area of speciality and, in any case, the aim
of nutrition in pigs is to gain weight, not lose it.

Colin Bignell