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February 13th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Fairfax group has ties to the Pharmaceutical Industry.. not surprised folks.
LATE last month the Herald reported on a lobby group of more than 400 doctors, medical researchers and scientists – dubbed Friends of Science in Medicine – pressuring universities to close down alternative medicine degrees, arguing the practices have no scientific basis.
On February 4, for News Review’s The Question, several experts expressed their views on the topic. The story was accompanied by an online poll asking readers ”Should universities teach alternative medicine?”
Voting progressed steadily at first but on Tuesday votes began rising from about 125,000 to more than 877,000 by the time voting closed on Thursday. The end result was 70 per cent no, 30 per cent yes.
The number of votes in the poll was about eight times more than the number of online readers of the story, a clear indicator that the poll had been gamed. Fairfax technical staff said the poll logs all but confirmed that the voting had been manipulated.
All Fairfax polls state that they are ”not scientific” but on controversial issues such as alternative medicine and internet censorship, they are held up by interest groups as a rock-solid gauge of public opinion.
In email messages seen by smh.com.au, supporters of alternative medicine, including Blackmores and the Complementary Healthcare Council of Australia, contacted their mailing lists urging them to vote ”yes” in the poll. Alas, the ”no” vote won by a landslide.
Despite his side scoring a majority in the poll, Professor John Dwyer, of the UNSW faculty of medicine and one of the founders of Friends of Science in Medicine, is dismayed that the poll was gamed.
He planned to use the result to support his argument against alternative medicine but ”clearly the numbers are all wrong and I think the poll was probably meaningless”.
Professor Dwyer said Friends of Science in Medicine members had nothing to do with the poll being rigged.
In the email sent by the Complementary Healthcare Council of Australia to members of its mailing list urging them to vote, the organisation’s consumer affairs director, Justin Howden, noted that the ”no” vote was streets ahead and said: ”We need to fight fire with fire.
”The smaller the gap we can engineer the less fuel for the Friends of Science in Medicine.”
Online polls are difficult to run effectively as they are easily gamed by people with even a little computer knowledge.
Publishers could block many of these techniques by tracking users’ IP addresses and only permitting one vote per IP address, but corporate networks and other shared environments that use single IP addresses across multiple users would be locked out.
”Polls on our sites do have some protections to stop gaming, but we publicly acknowledge these are not scientific polls,” the general manager of news at Fairfax Media, Darren Burden, said.
This month it was revealed that the Academy Awards would switch to electronic ballots in 2013, leading computer security experts to warn that the Oscars ballot may be vulnerable to rigging as cyber attacks could falsify the outcome and remain undetected.
Motivating the online poll riggers could be anything from the desire to cause mischief to winning prizes in online competitions.
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