Looks like this observation could be related to that of another paper out today:
astro-ph/0509628
Title: A large population of galaxies 9 to 12 billion years back in the history of the Universe
Authors: O. Le Fevre, S. Paltani, S. Arnouts, S. Charlot, S. Foucaud, O. Ilbert, H. J. McCracken, G. Zamorani, the VIMOS VLT Deep Survey team
They also observe an excess brightness at high-z (though with a different data set - VLT). They confront galaxy formation models, and say we need a model that can produce more galaxies with more stars at these reshifts, z~4.
Lerner takes a different approach, and thinks the evidence is stronger for abandoning the expansion of the universe. His results come from HST at high-z.
2 different ways of explaining the same observation?