Computer

The Baltimore region showed nearly double-digit growth in export goods and services in 2010, with room to grow, according to a study released Thursday by the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based public policy organization. The report, titled "Export Nation," reviewed data collected from the 100 largest U.S. metro areas. Baltimore was ranked 27th, with exports valued at $9.7 billion. U.S. exports, led by manufacturing, grew faster than at any time since 1997, said Emilia Istrate, the study's lead author.

This summer, the Baltimore artist Robert McClintock can see one of his brightly colored original prints hanging in the prestigious Smithsonian Institution. He just can't get into Artscape. The 54-year-old McClintock is one of Baltimore's most popular — and populist — artists. Though his images of golden retrievers, local landmarks, firefighters and football players can be purchased for as little as $12, people buy enough of them to provide McClintock with gross annual sales that he describes as being in the high six figures.

A Hungarian man who blackmailed a U.S. hotel chain into giving him a job was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. Attila Nemeth, 26, was also sentenced to serve three years of supervised release following his time in prison, according to a statement by Maryland's U.S. Attorney's Office. Nemeth pleaded guilty in November to hacking the computer system of Marriott International Corp. and threatening to release the company's proprietary information unless the chain gave him a job maintaining the company's computer system.

Ralph William Townsend, a retired computer and systems expert, died Sunday of heart failure at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Columbia. The longtime Columbia resident was 82. Mr. Townsend was born and raised in Fitchburg, Mass., where he graduated in 1947 from Fitchburg Senior High School. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1948 and worked as an air traffic controller until being discharged in 1952. In the 1950s, he worked for McDonnell Douglas Corp. In the early 1960s he joined Rockwell International, where he was assigned to the Apollo lunar spacecraft program.

The National Security Agency says it found top-secret information on hard drives that were seized in a failed espionage probe, and the agency is refusing to release the computers — despite the continued protests of their owners. In court filings in Baltimore this week, the government says the seized computers "cannot lawfully be returned. " NSA's deputy chief of staff for signals intelligence concluded that disclosing the contents of one computer hard drive would "cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.

Along with Europe's financial crisis, Middle East unrest and sluggish U.S. growth, mutual-fund seller T. Rowe Price has identified a 2012 economic risk you probably haven't thought about. Every day, Wall Street firms armed with secret software bombard stock exchanges with thousands of electronic orders. Shares are bought and sold in milliseconds. The firms have zero interest in investing for the long term - or more than an eye blink, for that matter. Their computers seek trading irregularities to generate profit of a fraction of a penny per share.

Timothy Picciotti, a computer engineer who worked in defense systems and was active in Howard County youth athletics, died of cancer Dec. 27 at his Highland home. He was 46. Born in Akron, Ohio, he was the son of an electrical engineer and a homemaker. He earned a mathematics degree at Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio, and was hired by Westinghouse. He then came to Baltimore and worked in software systems engineering and technical management of airborne radar programs. He later earned two Bachelor of Science degrees, in mathematics and computer science, and a Master of Science degree from the Johns Hopkins University.

It's getting harder for a public school teacher to reach excellence. By "excellence," I mean being responsible for helping each student significantly develop his or her knowledge or learning capacity. This increased difficulty is not the fault of teachers. Rather, teaching now requires mastering two seemingly opposite responsibilities: developing the best and the brightest to regain America's educational standing in the world, while ensuring that each student learns the basic competencies assessed by state and federal testing - and applying them to classes increasingly diverse in a host of educational factors.

Two supporters of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning were barred Monday from the accused WikiLeaker's preliminary military hearing at Fort Meade. The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, said it would appear in federal court Tuesday to challenge the government's "suspicionless search and seizure" of a computer owned by another Manning supporter. Former Lt. Dan Choi, who attended the Article 32 hearing on Saturday and Sunday, tweeted that he was "pressing charges" after he was barred from entering Monday.

Defense attorneys for Army Pfc. Bradley Manning on Sunday grilled military officers about the intelligence analyst's dealings with classified information, suggesting that computer security at his Iraq base was lax and rules were routinely broken. Prosecutors sought to emphasize that Manning, the 24-year-old accused of sending hundreds of thousands of classified files to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, was well trained in how to handle sensitive information and knew not to distribute it. Manning's direct supervisor, Sgt. First Class Paul Adkins, was set to testify Sunday but invoked his Article 31 rights, similar to the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.