hi cosmo-torun,

Monday morning and afternoon discussion at Benasque were especially interesting for us! Glenn Starkman pointed out how important the observed

S_{1/2} approx 0

is. (Spergel et al 2003 definition of S_{1/2}, which we calculate with a slightly different version, S_xi in our new paper http://arXiv.org/abs/0807.4260 )

He argues that this was already noticed in *COBE* data. Some of his talk is probably in:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0605135

He pointed out that it's not just low C_2 and C_3 which give low S_{1/2}. In fact, at least up to C_5 is needed.

Also, for a cosmic concordance infinite flat model, there needs to be a conspiracy between the various low l's in order that *all* of them are sufficiently low in order that the result is a low value of S_{1/2}.

The main suggestion from his talk to explain this was the general approach at making a relativistic version of MOND - TeVeS - rather than cosmic topology - but the Aurich et al. PDS simulations suggest that the PDS is a good candidate for resolving the "Missing Fluctuations" problem.

On Tuesday, Dominik Schwarz gave a very thorough talk on the Averaging Problem.

Some rough notes and/or pointers to speakers' articles which should more or less match their talks are on the twiki:

http://cosmo.torun.pl/Cosmo/BenasqueNotes2008

pozdr z gor Pyrenees :) boud