The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

Wirth -- who, as it happens, met Horvath in the 1980s when they were both in graduate school studying psychic phenomenon -- co-authored a suspect academic study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Reproductive Medicine in September 2001. Wirth's study -- widely derided following its publication -- indicated that women's chances for a successful in vitro fertilization doubled when total strangers in far-off countries prayed on their behalf.

One Chronicle source said the study -- in which neither the subjects nor their doctors were told they were part of the experiment -- had "bewildering" methodological flaws. Another speculated that the whole thing was faked. The Journal finally removed the much-criticized paper from its Web site, reports the Chronicle, after Wirth's guilty plea in the Adelphia case.

And to think we thought that the weirdest things to come out of Adelphia were the hundred pairs of bedroom slippers that Adelphia bought for Chief Financial Officer Tim Rigas. We obviously weren't thinking hard enough.

4. Super Subscribe Me

A big shout-out this week to Hollinger International (HLR Quote). Thanks to them, we've got a whole new set of numbers not to trust.

See, on Tuesday, the publisher -- best known for its free-spending, snooty, privilege-loving former CEO Conrad Black -- announced that the circulation figures at its Chicago Sun-Times had been overstated "over the past several years."

By how much, they're not saying; the rival Chicago Tribune floats a 25% overstatement, but the Sun-Times' new publisher told Crain's Chicago Business that's the wrong number.

Anyway, we're amused by Hollinger's statement that the new leadership at the Sun-Times has worked on "ensuring the accuracy of circulation figures reported to the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC)."

That's odd. The ABC, if you don't know -- it's actually short for Audit Bureau of Circulations, plural -- is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for circulation numbers reported by most major consumer magazines and newspapers in the U.S. It's the reason that advertisers and other observers actually trust the statistics we read about how many people are getting copies of particular publications.