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President Barack Obama nominated Joshua Wright, a professor at George Mason University's School of Law, to serve on the Federal Trade Commission. Wright would replace Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch, whose term is set to expire this month. Both Rosch and Wright are Republicans. By law, no more than three commissioners on the five-member panel can be from the same party. Wright served as the scholar in residence at the FTC's Bureau of Competition from 2007 to 2008. He has both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA. His academic work focuses on antitrust law, economics, consumer protection, intellectual property and contracts.

President Obama also nominated F. Scott Kieff, a professor at The George Washington University Law School, to the U.S. International Trade Commission. Kieff studied microbiology and economics as an undergraduate at MIT and received his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He is an expert on intellectual property issues. The ITC, which has the power to block the importation of patent infringing products, has found itself at the center of global legal conflicts over smartphone patents.

Twitter is finally joining its competitors in making money off of what it knows about its users. The booming microblog quietly rolled out to advertisers earlier this month a new targeting method, one that helps campaigns and companies reach people based on what users they follow and what they retweet.

“What you can do now is reach people who have certain interests but who may not necessarily follow you,” said Peter Greenberger, director of sales in Twitter’s Washington office. “You couldn’t do that two weeks ago.” Up until the latest innovation, advertising on Twitter has meant buying a promoted tweet that appears when certain words or phrases are searched or getting a tweet atop the feeds of current followers. Now, however, Twitter is deducing what specific users are interested in based on what they talk about and with whom they interact — a model pioneered by Facebook and Google. The tweets can be geo-targeted, too, which makes it useful for candidates hoping to reach people only in swing states or in their particular districts.

Filmmaking free of the ruling Communist Party is discouraged in China. The Film Bureau, part of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, vets scripts, grants production licenses, controls studios and equipment and coordinates releases. Making a film without approval risks harassment, warnings and, in extreme cases, blacklisting, a caution to others not to work with offenders. Independent film took off in the late 1990s in China with the importing of inexpensive, compact digital technology, freeing filmmakers to experiment in private without bulky film cameras drawing unwanted attention. Today, high-definition digital cameras cost even less and are smaller, bolstering eager users’ ability to tell stories their own way. This independent spirit comes at a time when mainstream films are booming in China. In 2011, ticket sales jumped 30 percent to hit $2.1 billion and are expected to surpass Japanese sales by January, making China Hollywood’s largest export box office.

According to a poll from the Leading Education by Advancing Digital (LEAD) Commission, teachers and parents say schools should be doing more to improve access to technology in education, with access to the Internet high on the list. The vast majority of parents and teachers said they would rather spend money on Internet-connected digital devices than the same amount on text books.

• More than half of teachers (61%) and about the same percentage of parents (63%) polled said they thought that the country was "behind the curve" when it came to public school use of technology. Other findings include:
• 82 percent of teachers and 71 percent of parents believe a greater use of technology would be helpful in connecting learning inside and outside of the classroom
• 89 percent of teachers and 76 percent of parents would choose to spend $200 per student for an Internet-connected device over $200 per student for new science textbooks
• 82 percent of teachers believe that they are not receiving the necessary training to use technology to its fullest potential in the classroom
• 95 percent of teachers and 90 percent of parents believe that home access to high-speed Internet gives students a big or moderate advantage when it comes to classroom performance.

The study was released in advance of a symposium at Stanford that will discuss the study findings and include Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and others talking about current barriers to and opportunities of high-tech classrooms.