Shutterstock's new tools revamp photo and video search

Shutterstock labs' Spectrum search results in the red range for images with the keyword "healthy."

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

It's a challenge for anybody selling a wide range of anything online: how do you get the right products in front of the right customers?

Shutterstock, which sells stock-art photos and videos to customers such as ad agencies and PowerPoint presenters, has the matchmaking problem in spades. With 550,000 active customers and more than 23.7 million images, pairing the right buyer with the right photo isn't easy.

Which is why the New York-based company, which went public last October, is retooling how it presents its products to better compete with iStockphoto and other rivals.

Shutterstock has just launched a new stock image discovery tool called Spectrum on its labs site that lets people explore categories of photos based on their dominant color.

Shutterstock founder and CEO Jon Oringer

(Credit:
Shutterstock)

It's not the first such move. Last year, it launched an
iPad app whose "mosaic" interface presents wall-to-wall images that customers can browse rapidly by swipe gestures. A similar interface for the Web, Instant, was the first Shutterstock labs project.

And it's not the last, said Chief Executive and founder Jon Oringer: an overhaul for video is on the way so customers can evaluate footage with something approaching the ease and rapidity that they can check the results of searching for still images.

"With 50 thumbnail image results, it's very easy to scan. When it's 50 video clips, it's very hard to scan -- you don't know what's in each video," Oringer said. "We're working on ways to take that whole page of data and show it to you really quickly."

On top of that, the company takes a very Googley approach with its traditional photo-search techniques, in which customers type in search keywords and see an array of image thumbnails. "We're tracking hovers [where people direct their mouse pointers], clicks, and downloads," checking how customers refine searches and otherwise gathering data on what converts a search into a purchase, said Wyatt Jenkins, the company's vice president of product. "Our results are more relevant."

The formula is working, said Lee Torrens, who watches the industry closely at Microstock Diaries.

"They're innovating a lot on the buyer-side functionality, helping them catch up to iStock in terms of getting buyers to the image they're seeking as quickly as possible," Torrens said. "Overall, they're growing very quickly, remaining uniquely friendly to contributors, and pushing closer and closer towards iStock."

Shutterstock labs' Spectrum search results in the violet range for images with the keyword "healthy."

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The new search techniques can appeal to different designers or to the same designer in a different mood. With the new avenues for exploration, "We see people downloading different images. It gets their creativity moving in a different direction," Oringer said. And relative use of the iPad app increases on the weekends, he added.

So far, the company's held things together in its transition from private to public. Revenue for its most recently reported quarter, ended Sept. 30, increased to $42.3 million from $31.2 million the year earlier. Net income increased from $4.3 million to $6.6 million.

Shutterstock raised $82 million in its October IPO, when the shares went public at $17 piece. Its stock now trades above $24.

Oringer has a big stake in how things go at the 250-employee company -- indeed, by owning 55.2 percent of the company's stock, a controlling stake.

Shutterstock's share price has risen to the $24 range since its IPO at $17 in October.

(Credit:
Yahoo Finance)

Stock imagery in a nutshell
Stock photos are a staple in advertisers' imagery diet -- the senior couple strolling through the park, the fit-looking woman in a yoga pose, the businesspeople shaking hands. They're used in everything from annual reports to blog posts.

A decade ago, the stock-photo business moved from the hands of a relatively small number of professional photographers to a vastly larger pool of people as digital camera image quality improved and the Internet provided a global market. Making the commerce possible were microstock start-ups, led by iStockphoto, which old-school agency Getty Images acquired in 2006.

Microstock companies offered photos for relatively cheap on a "royalty-free" basis, meaning that customers could pay once to license a photo and then use it over and over in many ways. It's a much more liberal mechanism than the traditional rights-managed approach that came before, in which photo use is limited to particular geographic regions, times, and other constraints.

There are plenty of microstock companies out there -- well established Shutterstock competitors also include Dreamstime, Fotolia, and 123RF Images. With dozens of other out there, photographers can call on even more middlemen such as PicWorkFlow that'll retouch photos, add keywords, and upload to multiple microstock agencies.

Shutterstock tries to set itself apart. One way is that doesn't try to draw contributors into exclusive partnerships that increase royalty payments if photographers sell imagery only through a single microstock.

"The bottom line is that as a microstock photographer it just doesn't make sense to be exclusive to any one agency," Oringer said in a blog post. Among the company's reasons for not offering exclusivity: "Image marketplaces that offer exclusivity to contributors must favor certain images...While other agencies sort their search results based on maximizing revenue, we maximize on search success."

Sales by subscription
Another distinguishing feature is that Shutterstock offers a subscription model. Customers that spend $249 a month (or less, if they sign up for longer periods of time) may download up to 25 images each day. Most microstocks, in contrast, sell images one at a time, an option Shutterstock also offers.

About half the company's revenue comes from subscription plans, according to the company's regulatory filings. (Video footage, a fast-growing part of the company's business, is not available through subscriptions.)

And Wall Street likes subscription businesses, with their lower churn rates.

"What makes us a good candidate for going public is we are at the core a subscription product with predictable, repeat, recurring revenue helps smooth things out on a quarter-to-quarter basis," Oringer said. "In general, we have remarkable consistency in terms of acquiring subscribers and monitoring how much they download. That's been stable. If the stability was changing, we probably would taken a different route -- gone for a more private kind of equity raise."

Shutterstock labs' Spectrum search results in the blue range for images with the keyword "healthy."

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Subscriptions might seem like a bad idea for the contributing photographers who supply Shutterstock with images. The company only passes on 25 cents per photo to photographers for a shot sold via a subscription plan, according to Shutterstock's photographer payout formula, though that rate goes up to as much as 38 cents as the photographer's lifetime photo sales increase.

In contrast, an on-demand purchase of a single image generates 81 cents to $1.24 for lower-resolution images and $1.88 to $2.85 for high resolution.

Low cost, high volume
But subscriptions can also encourage customers to loosen up, downloading images more often and not losing a lot of sleep over which one is best or over which resolution to buy, Oringer said.

"Shutterstock is selling more images than anybody else in the world," with two images downloaded each second on average, Jenkins said. "In sheer volume, we're the clear leader...The subscription is a motivator."

And of course customers who like it will continue with their subscriptions, which ultimately is good for Shutterstock contributors. Shutterstock customers who spent money in 2010 spent more than double as much in 2011, accordinging to a company regulatory filing. And from 2010 to 2011, customer growth was 71 percent. (The company hasn't yet released 2012 statistics.)

The approach is the opposite of iStockphoto's strategy, which emphasizes upselling customers to expensive images, but Torrens said it works.

"Their business model still makes them the cheapest of the cheap," Torrens said. But photographers forget about that fact, "especially when Shutterstock sends them more money at the end of the month than any other agency."

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New Theory on How Homing Pigeons Find Home

Jane J. Lee

Homing pigeons (Columba livia) have been prized for their navigational abilities for thousands of years. They've served as messengers during war, as a means of long-distance communication, and as prized athletes in international races.

But there are places around the world that seem to confuse these birds—areas where they repeatedly vanish in the wrong direction or scatter on random headings rather than fly straight home, said Jon Hagstrum, a geophysicist who authored a study that may help researchers understand how homing pigeons navigate.

Hagstrum's paper, published online Wednesday in the Journal of Experimental Biology, proposes an intriguing theory for homing pigeon disorientation—that the birds are following ultralow frequency sounds back towards their lofts and that disruptions in their ability to "hear" home is what screws them up.

Called infrasound, these sound waves propagate at frequencies well below the range audible to people, but pigeons can pick them up, said Hagstrum, who works at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California.

"They're using sound to image the terrain [surrounding] their loft," he said. "It's like us visually recognizing our house using our eyes."

Homeward Bound?

For years, scientists have struggled to explain carrier pigeons' directional challenges in certain areas, known as release-site biases.

This "map" issue, or a pigeon's ability to tell where it is in relation to where it wants to go, is different from the bird's compass system, which tells it which direction it's headed in. (Learn about how other animals navigate.)

"We know a lot about pigeon compass systems, but what has been controversial, even to this day, has been their map [system]," said Cordula Mora, an animal behavior researcher at Bowling Green State University in Ohio who was not involved in the study.

Until now, the two main theories say that pigeons rely either on their sense of smell to find their way home or that they follow the Earth's magnetic field lines, she said.

If something screwed up their sense of smell or their ability to follow those fields, the thinking has been, that could explain why pigeons got lost in certain areas.

But neither explanation made sense to Hagstrum, a geologist who grew interested in pigeons after attending an undergraduate lecture by Cornell biologist William Keeton. Keeton, who studied homing pigeons' navigation abilities, described some release-site biases in his pigeons and Hagstrum was hooked.

"I was just stunned and amazed and fascinated," said Hagstrum. "I understand we don't get dark matter or quantum mechanics, but bird [navigation]?"

So Hagstrum decided to look at Keeton's pigeon release data from three sites in upstate New York. At Castor Hill and Jersey Hill, the birds would repeatedly fly in the wrong direction or head off randomly when trying to return to their loft at Cornell University, even though they had no problems at other locations. At a third site near the town of Weedsport, young pigeons would head off in a different direction from older birds.

There were also certain days when the Cornell pigeons could find their way back home from these areas without any problems.

At the same time, homing pigeons from other lofts released at Castor Hill, Jersey Hill, and near Weedsport, would fly home just fine.

Sound Shadows

Hagstrum knew that homing pigeons could hear sounds as low as 0.05 hertz, low enough to pick up infrasounds that were down around 0.1 or 0.2 hertz. So he decided to map out what these low-frequency sound waves would have looked like on an average day, and on the days when the pigeons could home correctly from Jersey Hill.

He found that due to atmospheric conditions and local terrain, Jersey Hill normally sits in a sound shadow in relation to the Cornell loft. Little to none of the infrasounds from the area around the loft reached Jersey Hill except on one day when changing wind patterns and temperature inversions permitted.

That happened to match a day when the Cornell pigeons had no problem returning home.

"I could see how the topography was affecting the sound and how the weather was affecting the sound [transmission]," Hagstrum said. "It started to explain all these mysteries."

The terrain between the loft and Jersey Hill, combined with normal atmospheric conditions, bounced infrasounds up and over these areas.

Some infrasound would still reach Castor Hill, but due to nearby hills and valleys, the sound waves approached from the west and southwest, even though the Cornell loft is situated south-southwest of Castor Hill.

Records show that younger, inexperienced pigeons released at Castor Hill would sometimes fly west while older birds headed southwest, presumably following infrasounds from their loft.

Hagstrum's model found that infrasound normally arrived at the Weedsport site from the south. But one day of abnormal weather conditions, combined with a local river valley, resulted in infrasound that arrived at Weedsport from the Cornell loft from the southeast.

Multiple Maps

"What [Hagstrum] has found for those areas are a possible explanation for the [pigeon] behavior at these sites," said Bowling Green State's Mora. But she cautions against extrapolating these results to all homing pigeons.

Some of Mora's work supports the theory that homing pigeons use magnetic field lines to find their way home.

What homing pigeons are using as their map probably depends on where they're raised, she said. "In some places it may be infrasound, and in other places [a sense of smell] may be the way to go."

Hagstrum's next steps are to figure out how large an area the pigeons are listening to. He's also talking to the Navy and Air Force, who are interested in his work. "Right now we use GPS to navigate," he said. But if those satellites were compromised, "we'd be out of luck." Pigeons navigate from point to point without any problems, he said.

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Obama Prods GOP on Immigration Negotiations

Jan 31, 2013 6:00am

                                                                        (Image Credit: John Gurzinski/Getty Images)

President Obama has apparently had enough of leading from behind.

During the health-care push, Obama left Congress to its own devices. On immigration, he’s doing just the opposite, attempting to prod Republican legislators to the middle by demanding a vote on his own plan.

The president insisted Tuesday that Congress vote on his plan as soon as possible, barring agreement on something else.

“It’s important for us to recognize that the foundation for bipartisan action is already in place,” Obama said, referring to a bipartisan Senate bill offered up by the so-called Gang of Eight senators, which looks much more palatable to Republicans than Obama’s own plan. “And if Congress is unable to move forward in a timely fashion, I will send up a bill based on my proposal and insist that they vote on it right away.”

In doing so, Obama dared Congress to say “no” to something specific.

It’s the same strategy Obama used in the “fiscal-cliff” talks. With a year-end deadline approaching, he pushed Congress to vote on his own plan: to let higher income tax hikes go into effect if lawmakers couldn’t cut a deal themselves. Obama asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to call “an up-or-down vote” on that plan, the president announced in a Dec. 28 appearance before cameras at the White House.

“If members of the House or the Senate want to vote ‘no,’ they can, but we should let everybody vote,” Obama said then.

Republicans hate such a negotiation tactic. Throughout Obama’s White House tenure, GOP aides have griped that the president and congressional Democrats have sought political gain while refusing to negotiate in good faith. On immigration, it’s the same.

The Obama plan includes a faster path to citizenship and nothing to trigger border-security enforcement. It would also clear an easier path for same-sex couples.

Before Obama rolled out his immigration plan in Nevada Tuesday, Sen. Marco Rubio of  Florida raised concerns that the president would launch a “bidding war.”

In a radio interview with Rush Limbaugh, Rubio dismissed the notion of an up-or-down vote: “It’s going to have to go through committees and people are going to have their input. There’s going to be public hearings.  I don’t want to be part of a process that comes up with some bill in secret and brings it to the floor and gives people a take it or leave it.

“I want this place to work the way it’s supposed to work, with every senator having input and the public having input,” Rubio said.

A Senate Republican aide jabbed, “The president’s been gone from the Senate a long time and perhaps he has forgotten that it’s a lot easier to pass legislation if he works with Congress.”

Obama has presented Republicans with a plan they will like much less than what’s been crafted by the bipartisan Senate group. The group plan includes triggers to enforce border-security measures, more unmanned drones and no provisions making it easier for same-sex couples seeking to immigrate or naturalize.

Unless other Republicans come up with a plan of their own, the president has given Republicans a choice between the left and the middle. It’s not hard to tell which they’d prefer.

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Earth and others lose status as Goldilocks worlds

Bad news for Kepler-22b. Once deemed the most habitable world outside our solar system, it no longer looks life-friendly. More strangely, Earth's habitability rating has also taken a hit. Both results are thanks to a redefinition of the habitable zone – the region around a star in which liquid water can theoretically exist.

Also known as the Goldilocks zone, because temperatures are "just right" for life there, the habitable zone is the main tool that exoplanet hunters have to rank their finds. But researchers are still using a definition coined in 1993. "Those habitable zones have not been updated in the last 20 years," says Ravi Kopparapu of Penn State University.

He and his colleagues have a new definition. The zone's boundaries have always depended on the star's temperature, plus estimates of how well the atmospheres of any planets would absorb heat from their star. But in recent years, lab experiments have turned up new figures for how water and carbon dioxide absorb light from different types of stars. The redefinition is based on these figures – and pushes the zone further from the star than the old definition.

Now, many planets, including supposedly balmy Kepler-22b, look too hot. However, the redefinition should also bring into the habitable fold planets that were thought to be too cold.

No ultimate judge

Shockingly, Earth – which used to be smack-bang in the middle of our sun's habitable zone – is now a scant million kilometres away from the warm edge, so almost too hot for liquid water. Of course, we know Earth is robustly life-friendly – the mismatch is probably because neither definition accounts for clouds, which reflect sunlight away from Earth.

As Earth shows, the Goldilocks zone is no ultimate judge of habitability, something exoplanet researchers have known for years. As well as clouds, volcanic activity or the location of other moons or planets in the solar system, may be important for life to develop on planets like Earth.

For now, however, with clouds not visible on an exoplanet, and many other details unknown about alien solar systems, the habitable zone is the best guide we've got – and thanks to Kopparapu's team, it just got a bit better.

"I think this is going to be the new gold standard for the habitable zone," says Rory Barnes of the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the new work. "But I think we should always look at planets in the habitable zone and say, maybe. It's not that planets in the habitable zone are inhabited, it just means we can't rule them out yet."

Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/1301.6674

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Cricket: Warne calls for new Australia coach

SYDNEY: Test great Shane Warne on Wednesday called on Australia coach Mickey Arthur to be replaced by former New Zealand skipper Stephen Fleming days after branding the nation's cricket chiefs "muppets".

The outspoken leg-spinner, who said he was "frustrated on many levels at present", praised Fleming as "the best opposition captain we played against" on his website www.shanewarne.com.

"I believe he brings a lot to the table, a calmness, an intelligent understanding of the game and a very good cricket brain. He's a good communicator too as well as a good leader of men."

Warne, 43, who also wants former Test wicketkeeper Rod Marsh as chairman of selectors, said the current Australian set-up was not working as the players gear up for two Ashes series against England over the next year.

In a post entitled "Where is Australian cricket at? Part 1" on his website, Warne said: "The next 12 months is the biggest 12 months of cricket for the Australian cricket team in a long, long time.

"If we do nothing now, we will be where we were 30 years ago. There needs to be urgent action and a new strategy/plan put in place."

In Twitter comments on Monday, Warne blasted Cricket Australia's policy of rotating players, which has attracted stinging criticism from other greats of the game.

Cricket Australia CEO James Sutherland has told Warne he is happy to discuss Warne's ideas but has expressed disappointment with the manner in which he expressed his concerns, CA said on its website.

Australia, third in the Test and one-day rankings, lost the recent Twenty20 series against Sri Lanka after drawing the one-day series and beating the visitors in the Test series.

Warne was last week fined A$5,000 (US$5,250) for a code of behaviour breach in the domestic Big Bash League.

And he apologised earlier this month after a foul-mouthed rant against West Indian all-rounder Marlon Samuels that earned him a ban and a A$4,500 fine.

Warne claimed 708 Test wickets in a celebrated career that also courted controversy, including a fine for taking money from a bookmaker. He was sent home from the 2003 World Cup for taking a banned diuretic.

Also on Wednesday, CA said that Australian pace great Dennis Lillee has been appointed to CA's's high-performance team as a fast bowling advisor.

- AFP/al

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Michael Dell to use personal funds to seek majority control -- report

Dell founder and Chief Executive Michael Dell.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

Just weeks after reports surfaced that Dell was looking to go private, the company's founder appears willing to put his personal funds where his mouth is.

Michael Dell may kick in equity financing of $500 million to $1 billion combined with his 15.7 percent stake in the company to seek majority control of the company, according to Bloomberg. That would push his ownership stake past 50 percent.

With the investment, Dell would be contributing more than half of the total $8 billion to $9 billion equity check. The remainder of the takeover would be financed by debt and "possibly some of the $11 billion of cash Dell reported it had as of September 30," according to Bloomberg.

This follows on the heels of reports that Microsoft may contribute $1 billion to $3 billion and was in talks with Silver Lake Partners to help take Dell private.

However, the WSJ today reported that Microsoft's role in the new company has been a sticking point in negotiations. Though the deal is still expected to stay on track, Microsoft wants to have a say in some of Dell's operations rather than just being a source of funding, according to the WSJ's sources.

Dell, a one-time leading PC maker, has hit hard times of late. The company's stock has continued to lose value as it defends itself against rivals, and despite the many acquisitions it's made over the past several years, there are concerns about how fast those businesses are taking off. Some industry watchers are hoping that going private could give it the reboot that it needs.

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Timbuktu’s vulnerable manuscripts are city’s "gold"

French and Malian troops surrounded Timbuktu on Monday and began combing the labyrinthine city for Islamist fighters. Witnesses, however, said the Islamists, who claim an affiliation to al Qaeda and had imposed a Taliban-style rule in the northern Malian city over the last ten months, slipped into the desert a few days earlier.

But before fleeing, the militants reportedly set fire to several buildings and many rare manuscripts. There are conflicting reports as to how many manuscripts were actually destroyed. (Video: Roots of the Mali Crisis.)

On Monday, Sky News posted an interview with a man identifying himself as an employee of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a government-run repository for rare books and manuscripts, the oldest of which date back to the city's founding in the 12th century. The man said some 3,000 of the institute's 20,000 manuscripts had been destroyed or looted by the Islamists.

Video showed what appeared to be a large pile of charred manuscripts and the special boxes made to preserve them in front of one of the institute's buildings.

However, a member of the University of Cape Town Timbuktu Manuscript Project told eNews Channel Africa on Tuesday that he had spoken with the director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, Mahmoud Zouber, who said that nearly all of its manuscripts had been removed from the buildings and taken to secure locations months earlier. (Read "The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu" in National Geographic magazine.)

A Written Legacy

The written word is deeply rooted in Timbuktu's rich history. The city emerged as a wealthy center of trade, Islam, and learning during the 13th century, attracting a number of Sufi religious scholars. They in turn took on students, forming schools affiliated with's Timbuktu's three main mosques.

The scholars imported parchment and vellum manuscripts via the caravan system that connected northern Africa with the Mediterranean and Arabia. Wealthy families had the documents copied and illuminated by local scribes, building extensive libraries containing works of religion, art, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, history, geography, and culture.

"The manuscripts are the city's real gold," said Mohammed Aghali, a tour guide from Timbuktu. "The manuscripts, our mosques, and our history—these are our treasures. Without them, what is Timbuktu?"

This isn't the first time that an occupying army has threatened Timbuktu's cultural heritage. The Moroccan army invaded the city in 1591 to take control of the gold trade. In the process of securing the city, they killed or deported most of Timbuktu's scholars, including the city's most famous teacher, Ahmed Baba al Massufi, who was held in exile in Marrakesh for many years and forced to teach in a pasha's court. He finally returned to Timbuktu in 1611, and it is for him that the Ahmed Baba Institute was named.

Hiding the Texts

In addition to the Ahmed Baba Institute, Timbuktu is home to more than 60 private libraries, some with collections containing several thousand manuscripts and others with only a precious handful. (Read about the fall of Timbuktu.)

Sidi Ahmed, a reporter based in Timbuktu who recently fled to the Malian capital Bamako, said Monday that nearly all the libraries, including the world-renowned Mamma Haidara and the Fondo Kati libraries, had secreted their collections before the Islamist forces had taken the city.

"The people here have long memories," he said. "They are used to hiding their manuscripts. They go into the desert and bury them until it is safe."

Though it appears most of the manuscripts are safe, the Islamists' occupation took a heavy toll on Timbuktu.

Women were flogged for not covering their hair or wearing bright colors. Girls were forbidden from attending school, and boys were recruited into the fighters' ranks.

Music was banned. Local imams who dared speak out against the occupiers were barred from speaking in their mosques. In a move reminiscent of the Taliban's destruction of Afghanistan's famous Bamiyan Buddha sculptures, Islamist fighters bulldozed 14 ancient mud-brick mausoleums and cemeteries that held the remains of revered Sufi saints.

A spokesman for the Islamists said it was "un-Islamic" for locals to "worship idols."

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NRA vs. Mark Kelly at Gun Violence Hearing

It's a showdown on guns, featuring two powerful but conflicting forces in the gun control movement -- Mark Kelly, the astronaut husband of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz.; and Wayne LaPierre, the fiery executive vice president and CEO of the National Rifle Association. The two testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee today in the first congressional hearing on gun violence since the deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. last month.

Kelly, whose wife was seriously injured in the mass shooting that killed six people in Tucson, Ariz. two years ago, will appear on the panel, just weeks after launching Americans for Responsible Solutions, an organization promoting the implementation of universal background checks and limits on high capacity magazines.

"Overwhelmingly, you told us that universal background checks and limiting access to high capacity magazines were top priorities -- and I'll make sure to address each of those ideas in my opening remarks," Kelly wrote in an email to supporters Tuesday. Kelly asked the group's allies to sign a petition calling on Congress to pass legislation on both issues.

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On the opposite end of the spectrum is LaPierre, who states the NRA's opposition to universal background checks and urges legislators not to "blame" legal gun owners by enacting new gun control laws.

"Law-abiding gun owners will not accept blame for the acts of violent or deranged criminals. Nor do we believe the government should dictate what we can lawfully own and use to protect our families," LaPierre was to say Wednesday, according to prepared remarks released by the NRA.

"Proposing more gun control laws -- while failing to enforce the thousands we already have -- is not a serious solution to reducing crime," says LaPierre in his prepared text.

In the wake of the shooting in Newtown, Conn., the NRA advocated placing armed security guards in every school in America, an initiative LaPierre will promote in Wednesday's hearing, arguing that "it's time to throw an immediate blanket of security around our children."

In an interview with ABC News' Diane Sawyer earlier this month, Kelly and Giffords said they hope the Sandy Hook shooting, in which twenty children and six adults died, will spur legislative action on gun policy.

"Enough," Giffords said.

"After the shooting in Tucson, there was talk about addressing some of these issues, [and] again after [the movie theater massacre in] Aurora," Colo., Kelly said. "I'm hopeful that this time is different, and I think it is. Twenty first-graders being murdered in their classrooms is a very personal thing for everybody."

Today's hearing is the first meeting ever for Kelly and LaPierre, according to an interview Kelly gave to CNN Tuesday. Kelly, who has shot at an NRA practice range with his wife, noted that he is a gun enthusiast but is not a member of the NRA.

"You would think with my background I would be a member of the NRA. I own a gun. I recently bought a hunting rifle a few months ago. I went through a background check. It took I think about 20 minutes. It's a small price to pay to make us safer. We're not going to stop every one of these mass shootings. We're not going to stop every murder with a handgun in our cities, but I think we'd go a long way to reducing the violence and preventing some," Kelly told CNN.

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Netted Costa Rican birds pay small price for art

Colin Barras, contributor

See more in our gallery: "Creatures of the air caught in the mist"

MILDLY distressed and hopelessly tangled, these birds look like the poster children for some environmental tragedy of our own making. In reality, they are the face of modern ornithology.

Todd Forsgren, a photographer based in Baltimore, Maryland, is fascinated by the long and intertwined history of birds and art. The two meet in the mist nets researchers use to trap Costa Rica's wild birds, which cause a short-lived, slight shock but no injury. The Montezuma oropendola (left) and boat-billed flycatcher (right) caught here are moments from being freed. "I hope as people learn more about the moderately traumatic process of mist net trapping, they will see the images as beautiful," says Forsgren.

Earlier generations of birds have paid a higher price in the name of art. Forsgren draws inspiration from the lifelike paintings that feature in John James Audubon's famous 19th-century monograph The Birds of America, which is among the most valuable of all printed books. But their lifelike poses are deceiving: Audubon shot and mounted his birds before painting them.

A century later, bird art was at the forefront of the new environmental movement. Artist and ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson used photographs to paint an early field guide to the birds of North America. Because of people like him, binoculars, not shotguns, became the ornithologist's primary tool.

Today, through advances in technology, it is radio transmitters that are cracking the remaining mysteries of bird ecology. That's where the mist nets come in, offering an easy and safe way to catch birds so that the transmitters can be fitted. "My photographs are about our world progressing, and moving forwards in some direction," says Forsgren.

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All 20 on board Kazakh airliner "killed in crash"

ALMATY, Kazakhstan: All 20 people on board a domestic flight in Kazakhstan operated by the SCAT airline died Tuesday when their Bombardier jet crashed on approach to Almaty airport in thick fog, the airline said.

"Twenty people were on board -- five crew members and 15 passengers," the airline said in a statement, quoted by the Interfax news agency.

"According to preliminary information there are no survivors," the statement added, saying the aircraft was a CRJ-200 made by Canadian manufacturer Bombardier.

SCAT said the plane went down about five kilometres (three miles) short of the financial centre's main airport on a flight from the northern steppe city of Kokshetau.

Commercial KTK television said the plane crashed into a suburb of Almaty but gave no information of possible casualties or damage on the ground.

The Kazinform news agency reported that officials from both the interior and transportation ministry had travelled to the site of the crash.

The accident came just a month after a crash that killed 27, claiming the lives of much of the top echelon of the Kazakh state border service including the acting chief.

Aviation disasters remain a scourge across the former Soviet Union due to ageing hardware that often has not been replaced since the fall of the Soviet regime, as well as human error.

- AFP

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