A shot in the dark could become a beacon for police.

Kansas City's Police Chief Darryl Forte plans to use some leftover federal grant money to install SpotShotter, a sophisticated rig of audio sensors placed strategically throughout the city that can detect a gunshot and then notify police -- within 25 seconds -- where the shot was fired. The system can determine how many shots were fired, if more than one gun is being fired, if the shots were fired from a moving vehicle and even the direction and traveling speed of the shooter. More >>

Courtesy Ameren Missouri

Callaway Nuclear Power Plant

Ameren Missouri and Westinghouse Electric Company today announced a partnership in order to pursue Department of Energy funds for the development and construction of new types of small nuclear reactors. If Westinghouse wins the DOE investment funds, Missouri will seek from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) a Combined Construction and Operation license (COL) for a Westinghouse Small Modular Reactor (SMR).

Nuclear operations require a lot of acronyms, don't they?
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La Russa's gone, but there's still ugliness out there in #CardinalNation.

Cardinals' fans are a proud lot, especially when it comes to the oft-repeated claim that they're "the best fans in baseball." Apparently that sort of self esteem rubs some people the wrong way.

The Twitter feed Baseball's Best Fans is a storehouse of ugliness, name calling and schadenfreude, all delivered by fans of the St. Louis Cardinals. It's an eye-opener, to say the least (sorry, Tony).
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If you're one of the five remaining speakers of "Yuchi" -- a near-extinct Native American language in Oklahoma -- your tweets will look insane, even to those within your linguistic group.

That's because the "@" character is part of your alphabet, so whenever you type it in, Twitter will wrongly think you're using Twitterese to refer to a different user, such as @Joe_Smith. 

This is the kind of programming problem that Twitter is coming across more and more as it tries to make inroads where minority languages hold sway. And it's exactly the kind of problem that a computational linguist such as Professor Kevin Scannell of St. Louis University is equipped to solve.

Since October, Scannell -- on sabbatical from SLU's Department of Math and Computer Science -- has been flying out to Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco one week per month to consult with their international team on stuff like this. Or how about this one:
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The bigger question: Can Dorsey pull off the mock turtleneck?

​Will Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter and Square) become the next Steve Jobs? That's the question that tech site gigaom.com recently tackled in an article comparing the St. Louis native to the late Apple founder. The website notes that the two both spent a lot of time thinking about the "big picture" of how technology interacts with our lives or our "humaness" as Dorsey puts it.

Writes gigaom:
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Just weeks after targeting St. Louis-based Monsanto, hacktivists affiliated with the online troublemaker group, Anonymous, are boasting of a new feat. This time, they claim to have stolen tons of data -- including identities of confidential informants -- from more than 70 law enforcement computer networks nationwide, including Missouri Sheriff's Association. (The group's promotional video below actually uses footage from a Columbia police SWAT raid).

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The Anonymous slogan: "We do not forgive. We do not forgive. Expect us."

​In the latest of a string of increasingly ballsy attacks, Anonymous -- a loose collective of online ne'er-do-wells -- has trained its sights on the Creve-Coeur-based agri-giant, Monsanto.

Anonymous got national attention for its lively 2008 campaign against the Church of Scientology. But this year, they've taken on targets with much more political and economic clout, such as major credit card companies and just last week an FBI contractor (some 40 members' homes were raided by the feds last January).

Their philosophy is hard to pin down, but Daily RFT will describe it today as "webertarian" ("web" + "libertarian" = see what we did there? Maybe "libertubian" is better). The common thread seems to be a desire to maintain the Internet's chaotic freedom. 

The group voiced its displeasure with Monsanto in a video last year, blasting it for alleged "mental slavery, food control and genetic manipulation" (other grievances are now cataloged on anonpad.com).

But only recently have they taken concerted action -- triggered, according to Cnet, by Monsanto's "lawsuits against organic dairy farmers for stating on labels that their products don't contain growth hormones."
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It knows where you are! And other people can use it to find out.

​Next time you get black-out wasted on Goldschlager and wake up behind a strip mall, you might have no idea where you are. But your iPhone does.

In fact, it's been tracking -- and recording -- your spatial location since the moment you turned it on.

That's a big problem to certain Missourians, who (like people in other states) are now pursuing a class action lawsuit against Apple Inc.

And their beef isn't just about privacy.

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Wait! Don't go! Here's why...

​You've heard the stories. St. Louis is losing its most creative and entrepreneurial people to the likes of Chicago, New York and Austin. If only we were more like Silicon Valley -- the argument goes -- perhaps local boy Jack Dorsey would've founded Twitter in his hometown of St. Louis and not the Bay Area.

But how to stop the brain drain? Judy Sindecuse, a self-described "serial entrepreneur" and founder of the venture capital company Capital Innovators, thinks she has a possible solution. It's called StartUp St. Louis, a tech-company accelerator she's helping to start this fall that aims to launch 40 IT companies in St. Louis within the next four years.
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A Daily RFT reader painted his roof white, and look what happened...

​A regular reader of Daily RFT contacted us yesterday to say he'd just painted the roof of his south-city duplex completely white. The hope was that it would keep the second floor of his home cooler, but he initially didn't think it would do much.

(We asked, and he claimed in reply that he did not work for a hardware store or would benefit in any way from this; he admitted only to being a big "home improvement nerd.")

From the pictures he sent in, it appears he got some outrageously different temperature readings while comparing his newly-painted roof compared to that of his duplex neighbor:

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