Sunday, September 27, 2009

Adversary, a new book by Kevin R. Glover

How do we explain to a child why a loving God allows bad things to happen to good people? How can a child make sense of a world permeated by evil and a loving all-powerful Creator? The Adversary, A Christian illustrated novel, addresses these questions by helping middle graders better understand the epic struggle between good and evil throughout biblical history

The major events of the Old and New Testaments are told by Obsessious, a small black, adolescent, celestial spirit who is ostracized by most of the other angels and archangels in heaven when God creates the first earth. Obsessious is drawn to Lucifer, God’s prince on earth, who pays attention to the lonely little angel by assigning him menial tasks. When Lucifer tries to overthrow God, he and the angels who stand with him, including Obsessious, are banished to a dark and ruined earth before Adam and Eve.

After God reforms the ruined earth, and creates man, Lucifer becomes increasingly unbalanced while trying to undermine the worldlings and retain his power. Children struggling with trying to understand their own “dark” sides will find a sympathetic character in Obsessious, who slowly regrets the bad decision he made to follow Lucifer instead of God. Obsessious fears his master and soon realizes that Lucifer’s war with God can never be won. He desperately wants to escape Lucifer, but lacks the courage to do so until he listens to Jesus and slowly understands the meaning of His parables. While Lucifer and his rogue angels seek to destroy God’s Son, Obsessious seeks and finds his own redemption.

Adversary is available at: http://www.lulu.com/ (search adversary, glover)
Adversary will be available soon at Amazon and Barnes and Noble

Thursday, September 17, 2009

TLT 471 TQ#4: Is the MFA the new MBA or is the future owned by MSMAs?

Andy Grove has been credited with the motto that, “Only the paranoid survive.” Tom Middleton, my very first real boss told me repeatedly me as a young salesman that everyone was my competition. I was selling pharmaceuticals at the time to general practitioners in Southeastern Ohio. Tom’s message was that I wasn’t just competing with other pharmaceutical salesman for quality face time with the doctor. He meant that I was also competing with everything else and everybody else who was vying for the doctor’s attention including the copier salesman, the office supply salesman, his wife, his kids, his patients and every transient thought or stomach grumble that might divert his availability, time and attention away from me. As a very impressionable young man at twenty-two, I learned early in my career that differentiation is the key to success. In addition, I learned that differentiation is often short-lived so a commitment to a life-long learning process was required to continuously broaden my skill set to always expand my ability to make personal and professional choices.

Daniel Pink suggests, in A Whole New Mind, that right-brained aptitudes will be more difficult to replicate in the new conceptual age. He argues that as information becomes more widely disseminated, and as products become cheaper and more abundant, due to the rise of the Asian knowledge worker and automation, it all becomes less valuable. He argues that the people who will thrive in this new era are those who can make sense of this often superficial, mass-manufactured, data-based tsunami by taking the data and communicating it with emotional impact in a way that is relevant to those they seek to influence. Pink’s fundamental argument is to differentiate oneself.

I’ve been creating and using stories for years now to differentiate myself from “competitors.” I use these stories in presentations, lectures, and in follow up correspondence, which includes these stories as well as hand written notes. I use these story cards (pictured above) to motivate, inspire and teach. The return on this investment of creating, producing and physically sending these cards out has proven itself well beyond anything I could have every achieved with an email message. I have “overcome modern life’s glut of options and stimuli” with mini-symphonies of story, art and personal investment that is not easily replicated by others. This act of creating what some would consider a low tech communication piece was only possible with modern technology - digital cameras, scanners, Abobe InDesign and Photoshop, and HP inkjet printers, which can produce inexpensive, high quality cards in low volumes. So, is this act of differentiation a left-brained (MS) or right-brained (MA) process? I argue both.

Ray Kurzweil suggests, in The Singularity is Near, that humans will be forced to merge with their created machines since the exponential growth in non-biological computing power will far outstrip our lame processing speeds. He foresees a future in which humans and machines will ultimately evolve together. His predictions that at some point the machine itself becomes “self-aware” and is able to independently become a creator itself is a truly frightening prospect. Perhaps I’ve seen too many science fiction movies, but I don’t buy his argument that this machine “intelligence that arises from the singularity will have great respect for their biological heritage.” In the evolutionary processes that Kurzweil so eloquently describes I don’t see where a “survival of the fittest” end game doesn’t play itself out – but I’m only through 100 pages of the book so far so I’ll reserve judgment. The one thing that I do believe is that the exponential hockey stick of technological innovation is inevitable and only those who endeavor to learn about and use it will be able to leverage the new tools to differentiate themselves in the new conceptual age. Even though I fear where we may let technology take us I tend to be an early adopter of technology – always seeking for ways to give myself an edge over my competition. I learned word processing and how to make electronic spreadsheets on a Commodore 64 machine. I bought a $1,300 mobile “bag” phone. I did these things to be able to address my customer’s issues and concerns faster. Through technological solutions I could be the first to empathize with their fear, uncertainty and doubt. So, was this act of differentiation a left-brained (MS) or right-brained (MA) process? I argue both.

For me the focus of education now and into the future should be to facilitate and encourage student creation of all kinds to reinforce this notion of differentiation for competitive advantage. The act of creation with and without technology is an experiential learning process that leads to the real application of knowledge and a life-long love for learning.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

TLT 471 TQ#3: Was our assignment really a tech plan?

I have been struggling with this notion of technology as an educational solution ever since I joined the LST MS program in 2005. As has been noted in most of the research we have read this semester, a “slapped on” technological solution of any kind that is not integrated into the core curriculum, typically does not yield anticipated learning outcomes. So I have approached this project as an educational intervention which happens to include a robust technology component. As such, my part 1 assessment of the target audience’s current state is more focused on offering a compelling argument to convince them that they have a problem, which at present they don’t see.

My “school district” is a typical average hospital. My hypothesis is that a comprehensive nursing peripheral IV catheter (PIVC) procedure training curriculum, which includes deliberate, increasingly difficult practice with task-based simulators, and human factors simulation, will ultimately reduce the number of peripheral IV catheter (PIVC) insertion attempts and the length of the PIVC procedure resulting in less adverse events like pain, phlebitis, infiltration and infection.

The need to build this compelling argument was discovered after researching many new hire nursing orientation programs. New nurse graduates (who have usually received no previous training in the PIVC procedure) receive 15-60 minutes of venipuncture procedural skills training in a classroom setting. During this brief training, they received a didactic lecture that reviews the the hospital's venipuncture procedure (checklist) and the classroom instructor models the procedure with a simulated prosthetic plastic arm. The instructor is often a nurse who is not certified in the venipuncture procedure. The full capabilities of the prosthetic simulation arm are typically not used during the training presentation and quite often the procedural instructions given are not up to date with current Infusion Nursing Society guidelines. Student practice on the prosthetic plastic arm during the classroom training is also usually voluntary. After this orientation, most new hire nurses are matched with hospital unit preceptors who are responsible for validating the new hire nurse’s PIVC procedure competency. Preceptors are usually not certified PIVC procedure practitioners nor has their procedural competency been validated or assessed before taking on the preceptor role. Typically, there are no formal new hire nurse PIVC competency criteria, no number of procedures required, and no summative assessments. Usually, these non-certified preceptors subjectively determine when new hire nurses can do the PIVC procedure competently based upon their own individual requirements.

Even though program instructors often recognize deficiencies in the PIVC training component of new hire nurse orientation resources are always limited and they often feel that their executive administrators will not see any value in freeing up additional PIVC instructional time. Since increased instructional time with a new mastery learning technology-based curriculum is needed to test our hypothesis, my “current state” assignment needs to include a review of these typical existing instructional issues. I needed to make credible predictions of patient risk associated with current instructional practices. Unless potential gaps are clearly identified and agreed to by all key stakeholders in any hospital I have no hope of selling them on the vision of a better mastery learning technology-based curriculum or its subsequent implementation.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

TLT 471. TQ#2. “A Perfect Storm of Mindlessness”(1)

As an indentured investor in the public school system of this country, all I can do is express my absolute dismay after reading the US Department of Education’s two executive summaries assigned this week. (2,3) Unfortunately, individually I lack the power to redirect the juggernaut of academic “mindlessness” expressed in the research that was reviewed in these two summaries. But perhaps, collectively, we can influence future efforts to improve student outcomes by demanding revolutionary change around the following four key initiatives.

  • Meaningful accountability for educational leaders and classroom teachers
  • The blended integration of technology into the curriculum
  • Focused experiential learning through problem solving that requires significant effort
  • A student assessment strategy that measures relevant knowledge application

Given the time, effort and money it took to execute the Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products research, I find it absurd that school principals and classroom teachers were “encouraged” by vendors to use the software products under investigation, but teachers could arbitrarily decide not to do so. Once recruited for the study, school districts top down, from the superintendent to the classroom teacher, should have been required to utilize the software – otherwise, why bother conducting the research at all? The ability of individual teachers in the intervention group to opt out “whenever” is a major flaw of this study, but consistent with Wenglinsky’s observation that a culture of learning is not valued and nourished in many school environments in which many teachers are indifferent and educational leadership is absent.(1) In my view teacher indifference won’t be eradicated until there is truly meaningful accountability for lack of performance. If optimal student performance isn’t evident, opting out of trying new methodologies should not be an option. School districts should be able to quickly remove any principal or teacher (regardless of tenure) who “opts out” of trying potentially new methodologies if the students they are tasked to teach are substandard performers.

The reading and mathematics software products used in this research were essentially drill and practice tutorials that supplemented the teacher and were not an integrated part of the curriculum. In addition, the software under investigation was used by the students less than 11% of the allocated and applicable instructional time. As a fervent believer in Ericsson’s deliberate practice methodology, I am not surprised that instructional interventions used less than 11% of the time result in no statistically significant change in student achievement.(4) There was no significant investment in either time or effort to truly test the potential impact of these software programs. In addition, these software programs did not seem to add any depth to the existing curriculum. I imagine that these drill and practice software programs probably replaced drill and practice print-based work sheets. Wenglinsky suggests that technology like this should never stand alone. He advocates a blended integration of technology into the curriculum that leverages multiple tools. His view is that technology should be imbedded and inseparable from creative teaching that has students spending significantly more time on less. He refers to one such creative teacher who said, “I would rather have my students spend an entire period on one problem, coming up with multiple ways of solving it, many of them dead ends, than have them solve 15 problems without engaging their brains.” (1)

This last comment leads us to the subject of attention and the fact that the temporary memory of our students is fleeting. Limited temporary memory capacity leaves us with students who selectively choose to attend to certain incoming information while simultaneously choosing to ignore other information. Selective attention is the only way that instruction reaches conscious thought. Wenglinsky, Driscoll, and Linn et al advocate student-centric instructional content that is presented in ways that are personnally meaningful or aligned in some way to student’s existing concepts or anchoring ideas (certainly not drill and practice software programs used in isolation). When a student’s existing long term cognitive files are connected in meaningful ways instruction being processed in short term memory will be relevant to the student and provide entry points for the new information to be permentantly filed, or encoded for later recall and application. When students encounter content that is not student-centric (drill and practice programs used in isolation) they are more apt to reherse or memorize the new ideas. Since these isolated, rehersed new ideas are not connected to existing ideas the instruction results in little to no cumulative learning and rapid forgetting. Using technology that is an integrated part of a curriculum, which is directed towards student-centric, relevant, experiential and demanding problem solving will increase their knowledge acquisition and application around more focused content.(1,4,5,and 6)

Finally, standardized tests that measure isolated student knowledge acquisition is just as uninteresting and irrelevant to students as the curricular content and teaching methodologies that they are forced to endure in most classrooms. The drill and practice software programs described in the IES executive summaries were certainly not interesting nor were they personally relevant to the students in these study populations. The software programs did not require any meaningful effort. These programs did not immerse students in an experiential and demanding problem solving process, and yet the IES embarks on this study expecting a lame standardized test to validate a lamely executed technology intervention. Nothing will improve in our public schools until we demand a student assessment strategy that measures relevant knowledge application. Performance assessments need to replace standardized multiple choice knowledge assessments because at the end of the day what students know is irrelevant – what students can do is everything. (1) A student may have memorized an extensive vocabulary (knowledge), but can he or she leverage that knowledge by articulating a compelling and persuasive argument in writing (applied knowledge)?

There are voices crying in the wilderness who are advocating the revolutionary changes reviewed here. For example, Professor Robert Sternberg’s alternative SAT (Rainbow Project) is more focused on having students describe their solutions to relevant problems than answer multiple choice knowledge assessment questions. Even though it has been shown to be twice as successful than the traditional SAT in predicting how well students will perform in college it has not been adopted (Pink, 2005).(7) And even though the SAT introduced a writing component to their multiple choice test in 2005 it is still not being used by most colleges in the evaluation of student applicants. Although I applaud the efforts of pioneers like Dr. Sternberg, I wonder if revolutionary change can ever happen when we can’t even adopt a small incremental improvement to student assessment like writing an essay on the SAT.

The Chinese characters at the beginning of this blog are translated as “Fu bu guo san dai”, or “wealth only lasts three generations.” The proverb is often expressed when discussing the United States because the Chinese believe that we lack the determination and discipline to fundamentally change any of the challenges described above.

Are they right?


References

  1. Wenglinsky H. (2005) Using Technology Wisely: The Keys to Success in Schools. Teachers College Press. Columbia University. New York. pp. 43-59
  2. Institute of Educational Sciences (2007) Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products: Findings from the First Student Cohort. Executive Summary. US Department of Education. Washington, DC.
  3. Institute of Educational Sciences (2008) Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report. Executive Summary. US Department of Education. Washington, DC.
  4. Ericsson K.A. (2004). Deliberate practice and acquisition and maintenance of expert performance in medicine and related domains. Academic Medicine. Vol. 79, No.10:S70-S81.
  5. Discoll, M.P. (2005) Psychology of learning for instruction (Third edition). pp. 111-152: Pearson Education, Inc
  6. Linn, M.C., Davis, E.A., & Eylons, B-S. (2004). The scaffolded knowledge integration framework for instruction. In M.C. Linn, E.A. Davis, & P. Bell (Eds.), Internet environments for science education (pp. 47-72). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  7. Pink D.H. (2005) A Whole New Mind. Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Riverhead Books. New York. pp. 39

Saturday, August 29, 2009

TLT 471. TQ #1 National Education Technology “Plan”

The picture above was taken of Michael Phelps after he won the 100 meter butterfly in the Olympics in Beijing by 1/100th of a second. Anders Ericsson (2004) would say that the 1/100th of a second difference between winning and losing was the result of “Deliberate, difficult practice undertaken over a long period of time, while receiving informative feedback, and having opportunities for repetition and correction of errors, which leads to elite performance.”

Phelps deliberate “difficult” practice includes swimming 80,000 meters a week (50 miles). He practices 365 days a years (52 days per years more than most other competitive swimmers. Every race that he swims is filmed above and below the water – every meter is broken down mathematically and analyzed by fluid mechanics programs. Numbers of strokes, speed of stokes, angles of fingertips entering the water, and the tilt of is head is adjusted based on this “feedback” to “correct his “errors” so he can reduce water resistance and increase his speed. His blood is drawn and a comprehensive blood analysis is run after each race to measure how many millimoles of muscular waste needs to be cleared out of his system before his next race. This “feedback” directs Phelps regarding the speed and the number of warm down laps he needs to swim after his races to drop his lactic acid levels back down to peak performance levels.

Why do I introduce you to this notion of deliberate practice and offer Michael Phelps as an example? I highlight the concept of deliberate, difficult practice, with meaningful and actionable feedback for the correction of errors (certainly not standardized tests), because foundational ideas like hard work, ambition, and dedication (time investment) were noticeably absent in the US National Education Technology Plan.

How can we possibly “Strengthen Leadership” without accountability and no mention of performance reviews with “teeth?” How will “Innovative Budgeting” ever occur in an educational system run by an undisciplined government that has proven it can’t fiscally manage anything well? The concept of “Improving Teacher Training” sounds good, but who is accountable for making it happen? I find it interesting that while completing my M.Ed at Temple (1999-2003) and my LST MS here at Lehigh (2005-2010), I have not had one online course. If not me, who? The grand generic verbalization continued with “Support eLearning”, “Encourage Broadband Access”, “Move Toward Digital Content”, and “Integrate Data Systems”, but I was left wondering about substance. If we actually achieve these goals as written and develop and disseminate quality educational content utilizing technology who will come if we haven’t addressed the foundational ideas of hard work, ambition, and dedication (time investment)? For example only 105,000 intrinsically motivated students enrolled for courses at the Florida Virtual School in 2008 (FVS Minutes, 2008), representing only 4% of the state’s total 2,640,000 students (Florida Department of Education, 2006).
.
The Florida Virtual School has truly embraced US National Education Technology Plan. If fact, based on my brief investigation of their work I was impressed by the diverse, robust curriculum and quality of the content. Clearly, the effort at FVS is to serve motivated, ambitious students who have high expectations by offering them coursework that might not be available at their school. Who else but the top 4% of students would want to take courses like AP Microeconomics, AP Art History, AP Computer Science, AP Statistics, AP Calculus, Mandarin Chinese, Latin, Marine Science, etc.? I took a brief tour of the Mandarin Chinese course and was amazed at its depth. Students are immersed in the Chinese culture as virtual exchange students in China as they learn to listen, speak, read and write the language. If fact, my brief exposure to the Mandarin course content has motivated me to call the school to see if I can enroll as an out of state (adult) student. Out of state students can participate in FVS courses for a fee. If this is an option I am also interested in taking the Flash Animation course and the AP Art History course, as well. FVS is an awesome example of what is possible, but it is, unfortunately, an exception. But the FVS example also exposes our bigger “foundational” problem – the elephant in the room that no one has the political courage to address – How do we create a culture of “chasing excellence” in which the remaining 96% of Florida students want to participate in the same kinds of challenging coursework? By serving only the top 4%, 10%, or 20% we still lose as a nation.

According to Craig Barrett (Intel Presentation, 2008), there are more kids in China learning English than our 307,305,000 US citizens (US Population Clock, Aug 29, 2009). In the United States, only about 24,000 students in grades seven through 12 study Chinese (Aratabi, 2006). We are doomed by these kinds of numbers unless we adopt an Asian culture in which everyone in the United States is passionately devoted to educational excellence that only results from hard work, ambition, and life-long dedication (time investment).

References

Aratabi, Lori (2006). With a Changing World Comes An Urgency to Learn Chinese. Washington Post. Saturday, August 26, 2006. Accessed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/25/AR2006082501418_pf.html, August 29, 2009.

Florida Department of Education, accessed at http://www.fldoe.org/news/2006/2006_11_17.asp , August 29, 2009

Florida Virtual Schools Board of Trustee Official Minutes, Tuesday, June 24, 2008, accessed at http://www.flvs.net/Pages/default.aspx, August 29, 2009

K. Anders Ericsson, Ph.D. / Department of Psychology / Florida State University
Ericsson K.A. (2004). Deliberate practice and the acquisition and maintenance of expert performance in medicine and related domains. Academic Medicine. Vol. 79, No. 10: S70-S81

US and World Population Clock, accessed at http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html, August 29, 2009.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Who Needs Tutorials When You've Got Phunland!

When I was doing my homework this weekend, my 15-year old daughter looked over my shoulder. She first asked me what I was doing and then almost immediately gutturally moaned the word “physics” when she noticed the “2D physics sandbox” descriptor under the “phun” logo. Even though she won’t experience physics until next year, the course reputation has already been clearly communicated to Kelsey by her three older siblings. It’s also interesting to note that this groan came from an honors student who plans on pursuing a biology or chemistry undergraduate major when she enters college in 2011. But…as she watched me work within the application for a few minutes, Kelsey asked me if she could try the program and I promptly relinquished my seat to observe her.

I found it interesting that she quickly disregarded the program’s tutorial – like father, like daughter. I too, found the tutorial to be non-intuitive and frustrating. It seemed that I should be able to apply the tutorial directions directly into the program by following sequential instructions – which would have been awesome – but I could not achieve this kind of functionality. Fortunately, the Phunland program itself is so interesting and elegantly simple, that even people not intrinsically “wired” for physics like Kelsey and me felt compelled to just experiment with the program, learning through trial and error, which, I would argue is the ultimate goal of any science course or program. Through trial and error (and a little bit of back and forth with the tutorial for basic command guidance) with simple geometric shapes, springs and water, I spent an inordinate amount of time adjusting the friction and density of my moving objects in an effort to try and control the gravitational movement of my objects. As I navigated through the program I concluded that this is a wonderful constructivist teaching tool that quickly establishes baseline accurate or inaccurate understandings and through experimentation constructs new meaning for learners. I’m assuming that Phunland is the program you refer to as “aimed at high [intrinsic] motivation” given a learner’s natural tendency to want to play with the program, and Concord’s “molecular Work Bench” as the application focused on “deeper content.” If so, I’m not sure I agree with this general statement because I think that Phunland, used to enhance the instruction of a gifted physics teacher, could truly help make physics relevant and meaningful to even the most resistant and intimidated science students, helping to achieve a much deeper level of content understanding.

The Concord Molecular Work Bench program utilized sequenced instruction to step through a lesson focused on random motion and molecular stickiness. In fact, I would say that the instructional design of the lesson really negated the need for the typical “how to use the program” tutorial and replaced it with linearally sequenced content with instructions that simply moved the learner through a lesson with very, very specific learning objectives. While the program clearly transferred the ideas of “stickiness” variables of positive and negative charges as well as the effects of temperature on self-assembly, for me there was no depth of understanding transferred. So even though the sequential instructions made the application easy to use and navigate this “strength” was also the program’s weakness in that experimentation beyond the well-defined lesson parameters was not possible. Even though I am often a fan of the Corcord Consortium methodology, because manipulating animations teaches complex content infinitely better than any textbook can, I’d have to say that I preferred Phunland’s more free wheeling blank canvas approach when comparing the two for this assignment. I think that both programs could be powerful adjunctive tools in the hands of a good teacher depending upon the specific learning objectives that need to be achieved.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Sketchup and POV-Ray Assignment


The first image above was developed using POV-Ray, the coding for which can be found below. The second image was developed using Google's Sketchup. I found the Google product to be easy to learn and will probable find ways to utilize this application in our day to day training development work at B. Braun. The Sketchup illustration above is a diagram of a laminar flow hood, which is utilized in pharmacy clean rooms for sterile compounding processes.
The POV-Ray application was an exercise in futility. I found the program to be insanely complicated, non-intuitive and very frustrating. My dominate learning styles are visual spatial and verbal/linguistic. I am a weak logical mathematical learner, so the trial and error of arbitrarily plugging in coordinates to just place a star in my solar system illustration (above) was incredibly time consuming. The ability to copy, paste and drag shapes directly on the actual rendered image would have made creation a lot easier. If PON-Ray and Photo shop were a combined application, I could see it's ability to automatically create relationships between image objects to be compelling, but for me the inability to work on the "canvas" with PON-Ray wasn't a pleasant experience.
#include "colors.inc"
global_settings { assumed_gamma 1.0 }

background { color rgb <0,> }


camera { location <0.0,>
direction 1.5*z
right x*image_width/image_height
look_at <0.0,> }

light_source { <0,>
color rgb <1,>
translate <-5, 5, -5> }

light_source { <0,>
color rgb <0,>
translate <6,> }

light_source { <0,>
color rgb <0,>
translate <6,> }

sphere
{ <0,>, 2.5
pigment { color Gray }
finish { specular 0.6 }
normal { agate 0.25 scale 1/2 }
}

sphere
{ <-2, -3, 5>, 0.5
pigment { color Blue }
finish { specular 0.6 }
normal { agate 0.25 scale 1/4 }
}

sphere
{ <-2,-3, 12> 1.5
pigment { color Cyan }
finish { specular 0.6 }
normal { agate 0.25 scale 1/2 }
}

sphere
{ <2,>, 0.5
pigment { color Blue }
finish { specular 0.6 }
normal { agate 0.25 scale 1/4 }
}

sphere
{ <2,>, 0.25
pigment { color Cyan }
finish { specular 0.6 }
normal { agate 0.25 scale 1/4 }
}

sphere
{ <2,>, 0.25
pigment { color Red }
finish { specular 0.6 }
normal { agate 0.25 scale 1/4 }
}

sphere
{ <0,>, 0.25
pigment { color Red }
finish { specular 0.6 }
normal { agate 0.25 scale 1/4 }
}
sphere
{ <-5, -4, 8>, 0.05
pigment { color White }
finish { specular 100.6 }
}

sphere
{ <-5.5, -4.5, 8.5>, 0.05
pigment { color White }
finish { specular 100.6 }
}
sphere
{ <3,>, 0.05
pigment { color White }
finish { specular 100.6 }
}

sphere
{ <3.5,>, 0.05
pigment { color White }
finish { specular 100.6 }
}
sphere
{ <3.5,>, 0.05
pigment { color White }
finish { specular 100.6 }
}
sphere
{ <2.75,>, 0.05
pigment { color White }
finish { specular 100.6 }
}
sphere
{ <2,>, 0.05
pigment { color White }
finish { specular 100.6 }
}
sphere
{ <2.5,>, 0.05
pigment { color White }
finish { specular 100.6 }
}
sphere
{ <3,>, 0.05
pigment { color White }
finish { specular 100.6 }
}
sphere
{ <1.85,>, 0.05
pigment { color White }
finish { specular 100.6 }
}