#rtcc

[rt-closetcryptic]

I spent way too much effort on this one.

[khalid-albeshri]

The Top 10 Construction Firms Driving Growth in Saudi Arabia The construction sector in Saudi Arabia is experiencing rapid growth, driven largely by the Kingdom's Vision 2030 initiative, which aims to diversify the economy and reduce dependency on oil. Here are the top 10 construction firms playing a major role in this transformation: 1. Saudi Binladin Group – Established in 1931, this company has led some of Saudi Arabia’s most iconic projects, such as the Grand Mosque expansion in Mecca and King Abdulaziz International Airport​(DTC - درر تمام | Contracting Company)​(ControlTap). 2. El-Seif Engineering Contracting Company – Known for its work on high-rise buildings, including the Jeddah Tower, which aims to be the world's tallest structure​(DTC - درر تمام | Contracting Company). 3. Al-Rashid Trading & Contracting Co. (RTCC) – Involved in significant infrastructure projects such as the Riyadh Metro, RTCC has been instrumental in developing the Kingdom's transportation network​( ControlTap). 4. Nesma & Partners Contracting Co. Ltd. – This firm has a diverse portfolio, contributing to major projects like the King Saud University and the Riyadh Metro​(DTC - درر تمام | Contracting Company). 5. Almabani General Contractors – Established in 1972, this firm has contributed to the development of King Abdullah Economic City and other key projects​(ControlTap). 6. Controltap General Contracting – Specializing in MEP services, this company has been integral to numerous residential and commercial developments​(DTC - درر تمام | Contracting Company)​(ControlTap). 7. Al Harbi Trading & Contracting Co. Ltd. – Known for its involvement in large government and religious projects, including the Medina Holy Mosque expansion​(ControlTap). 8. Alfanar Construction – With expertise in construction and manufacturing, Alfanar has played a significant role in developing industrial and power infrastructure​(ControlTap). 9. Golden Obelisk Contracting Co. – Renowned for luxury residential and commercial projects, Golden Obelisk is known for its high-quality standards and timely delivery​(ControlTap). 10. Bechtel – A major international player, Bechtel has been involved in key Saudi projects such as the Riyadh Metro and various infrastructure developments​(Mordor Intel). These companies are shaping Saudi Arabia's future by contributing to megaprojects across sectors like transportation, residential development, and energy infrastructure, all aligned with Vision 2030.

#KhalidAlbeshri #خالدالبشري

[anarchotahdigism]

Seattle, at Bruce Harrell's personal urging, is deploying new police surveillance around the city, including the nefarious and notoriously its unreliable Shotspotter, which police regularly use in other areas to justify deadly force and police response, as well as evidence tampering. Shotspotter allows police to update, modify, and delete its files and triggers on the fly as police decide.

"As an alerting system, ShotSpotter exacerbates police violence by sending police on high alert into our neighborhoods. A 2021 report by the Chicago Office of Inspector General showed that “evidence of a gun-related crime” was only found in “9.1% of CPD responses to ShotSpotter alerts”.

But for each of the other 90.9% of alerts, police are still dispatched. A video from 2023 showed a heavy SPD response to a 911 caller alleging shots fired, showing officers pointing their rifles toward an unarmed man in crisis. Officers finally left after a tense standoff with intervening community members. Every false positive is another possibly deadly encounter.

In Chicago, a ShotSpotter alert has already led to an officer shooting and killing 13-year-old Adam Toledo in 2021." ..... "

Just as concerning though, are the other two technologies the City is requesting: CCTV cameras and Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC) software.

The SIR proposes to not just install city-owned CCTV cameras, but also to allow “privately-owned security systems […] to voluntarily share video of storefronts and areas where the public has access” with the City. This would be a massive expansion of police surveillance, giving police potentially real-time surveillance video from any/every business concerned with petty theft or houseless people.

These feeds would then be integrated into Real-Time Crime Center software, which “provides a centralized location for real-time information and analysis” and “integrates dispatch, camera, officer location, gunshot detection, 911 calls, records management systems, and other information into one ‘pane of glass’ (a single view).”

Additionally, the RTCC software for CCTV cameras 'can also provide in-application video analytics that use machine-learned algorithms to analyze camera feeds and, using object recognition, locate specific items, people based on clothing, or vehicles based on description.' " Harrell, a proud Trump supporter, is entrusting a massive panopticon to the same police department that sent the most number of police officers to participate in the 1/06 insurrection and is one of the most brutal PDs in the US. SPD is a threat to Seattle, and with its regular training exchanges with the IOF, a threat to Palestinians as well.

[mariacallous]

In the 1990s, London built the Ring of Steel—a network of concrete barriers, checkpoints, and thousands of video cameras around the historic City of London—after bombings by the Irish Republican Army. The idea was to monitor everyone entering and leaving the Square Mile, what the The New York Times later called “fortress urbanism.”

After the September 11, 2001, attacks, city planners looking to defend New York from terrorism turned to London and fortress urbanism for inspiration. Fusion centers, where US law enforcement agencies share intelligence at a federal level to be analyzed and build a bigger picture of crime, had been around for a few years. But officials began asking, what if fusion centers could be localized? What if local law enforcement could analyze and gather masses of intelligence from one city?

In 2005, they answered with the first “real-time crime center” (RTCC), a sprawling network of CCTV and automatic license plate readers (ALPR) linked to a central hub in the New York Police Department headquarters costing $11 million. Since then, from Miami to Seattle, RTCCs have steadily expanded across the US. The Atlas of Surveillance, a project from the digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which monitors police surveillance technology, has counted 123 RTCCs nationwide—and that number is rising.

Each RTCC is slightly different, but their function is the same: gather surveillance data across a city and use that to build a live picture of crime in the city. Police departments have an array of technologies available to them that span from CCTV, gunshot sensors, and social media monitoring to drones and body cameras. In Ogden, Utah, police even floated the idea of a 30-foot “crime blimp.” In many cases, images that police systems collect are run through facial recognition technology, and the data gathered is often used in predictive policing. In Pasco County, Florida, which operates an RTCC, the sheriff’s office’s predictive policing system encouraged officers to continuously monitor and harass residents for minor code violations such as missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass.

Erik Lavigne is a detective at the Fort Worth Police Department in Texas and communications director at the National RTCC Association. He says there has been a boom in RTCCs over the past year because officers believe they help with more precise policing. He likens the scattered approach to policing in previous years to throwing out a fishnet and hoping to catch something. “For what we had at the time, that worked. But what inevitably happens is, you end up alienating the community because you're not just stopping the bad guys, you're also stopping innocent people that are just trying to live their lives,” he says. “A real-time crime center is a scalpel. We aren't catching the wrong people anymore.”

Lavigne says RTCCs are also a cheaper alternative to hiring more boots on the ground because each camera becomes, in effect, a stationary officer keeping watch over an area. Lavigne says this has proved so effective that analysts at RTCCs have been recording more crime than they can deal with, and  the Fort Worth RTCC has significantly helped decrease vehicle thefts.

Most evidence for RTCC effectiveness, however, is anecdotal, and there is a real lack of studies into how effective they really are. In Detroit, a National Institute of Justice study concluded that Project Green Light—a part of the Detroit Police Department RTCC that established cameras at more than 550 locations, including schools, churches, private businesses, and health centers—helped decrease property violence in some areas but did nothing to prevent violent and other crimes. But police departments argue they do work.

Few people know RTCCs even exist, let alone the extent of the surveillance they entail, so they can receive little public scrutiny and often operate without much oversight. There have long been concerns around how surveillance technologies could affect First and Fourth Amendment rights in the US, but Beryl Lipton, an investigative researcher at the EFF, says RTCCs “hyper-charge” these worries by collating all this data in one place.

“It’s perpetuating this mass collection of people's private information from a whole bunch of different video streams,” Lipton says. “They're really lowering the bar on the ways police can access that information … When there are these types of large databases without proper audit and oversight mechanisms, law enforcement officials and individuals can use them for their own purposes, which can be very scary.”

Regulations around the storage and usage of this data are patchy at best. For example, RTCC-collected data may be shared across jurisdictions because third parties contracted for the hardware or software will also collect data and share it, Lipton says. “Some of these companies will, in good faith, delete data in accordance with retention schedules, but we've seen them not do that,” she says. “With large databases like license plate reader databases, that information is sometimes shared without police departments realizing it and in violation of jurisdictional rules.”

While companies will argue this data is being stored securely, this is no guarantee. In 2020, hackers stole internal memos, financial records, and more from over 200 local, state, and federal agencies from web development firm Netsential, which provided data storage for fusion centers across the US. The trove of leaked data later became known as #BlueLeaks.

“There are real concerns around having this amount of information stored somewhere,” says Lipton, “I have no reason to believe these are somehow more secure systems than we have in other situations. And we know that those get breached all the time, law enforcement agencies in this country get hacked all the time.”

Lipton’s biggest worry is that this ability to follow people remotely and share that data across state lines could instead be used to target people involved in protests and political organizing, which has already happened, or those accessing reproductive health care. “Those issues become compounded because there’s the frightening ‘real time’ element to it,” she says. “That means that if you leave your house, there’s a very good chance that law enforcement could jump into a feed that is just following you around.”

In addition to police setting up their own technology, RTCCs draw on wider existing surveillance networks. Cooperation of public institutions like schools and colleges and privately owned cameras have been crucial to developing RTCCs by giving officers access to cameras that might otherwise need a warrant. In Atlanta, which has seen the number of cameras integrated into their RTCC treble to 15,329 in the past year, four higher-education institutions—Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, Morehouse College, and the Morehouse School of Medicine—installed $700,000 worth of cameras, including five ALPRs, that were linked to the Atlanta RTCC.

Fusus, which claims to be “the most widely used & trusted Real-Time Crime Center platform in U.S. Public Safety,” sells hardware that can be connected to private CCTV cameras and linked up to the local RTCC. Fusus sells a solution that brings all the various technologies under “a single pane of glass,” as the company describes it. Through partnerships with companies that provide surveillance technology, including a $21 million investment from Axon, which produces Tasers and body cams, Fusus promises to integrate these technologies into one RTCC platform for analysts.

Police departments that use Fusus, like the Memphis Police Department, have been encouraging homeowners and local businesses to purchase fususCORE bundles—hardware that connects cameras to an RTCC—ranging from $350 to $7,300, plus an annual $150 subscription. Fusus has even gone as far as developing technology that allows Amazon’s Ring doorbells to livestream to an RTCC.

Amid a push for policing to harness new technologies and become “smarter,” Lipton is quick to point out that more technology doesn’t necessarily equal smarter. “It almost always just means that they're going to keep heavily policing poor and minority areas,” she says. Despite Lavigne’s claims that RTCCs mean the wrong people aren’t getting arrested anymore, in a recent lawsuit, the New Orleans Police Department was sued for arresting a Black man after watching him for 15 minutes through their RTCC and wrongly concluding he had a gun. The department ultimately settled for $10,000 in damages.

Lipton believes relentless surveillance is an infringement of citizens rights and would like to see the use of these technologies limited—aside from facial recognition, which she says should be banned. “There are certain elements we just shouldn't be using at all,” she says. “We should never be applying facial recognition to almost anything … As soon as you apply any really individualizing technology like that, I mean, it's kind of over for people's privacy.” Communities and organizations like EFF and ACLU have been arguing for Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) laws that bring surveillance technologies under the control of elected officials and communities. Cities like Oakland have found success with this, but without nationwide restrictions, the rise of RTCCs will likely continue on the periphery of the public eye.

[aamirshahzad216]

How to Calculate Bearing & Distance Between Two Points: RTCC Surveyor Qu...

[oti-blog1]

Sports Venue and Event Management

Entry 1 - Sustainability practise of a sports stadium 

The sustainable practises of sports stadiums can be described as the development which “minimizes the damage to the natural and social environment and maximizes the efficient use of stadiums” (Zhu et al., 2020, p. 3). An excellent example of a stadium demonstrating sustainability is Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in the United Kingdom. The club decision to sing up to the ‘United Nations Race to Zero campaign’ has seen the implementation of ‘100%’ renewable energy supply and the addition of single-use plastic reduction to drive waste reduction (E.ON, 2022).  

(Recycling guidelines, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium)

Furthermore, the tactical positioning of large-scaled stadiums as community facilitates after sporting events assists the value proposition of expending emissions. Whilst addressing the multiple environmental sustainability categories such as materials, energy and new design and construction to create multi-purpose stadiums can assist with the overall sustainability outcomes of a stadium (Francis et al., 2023). An exceptional example of sustainability practises being demonstrated by stadiums is the Olympic Park Stadium situated in East London. The innovative arena was re-purposed after the 2012 (London) Olympics and became the home stadium to West Ham United. The Olympic Park Stadiums unique design elements saw the central structure built in the shape of bowl which was positioned beneath the ground. This minimised the need for external construction materials reducing emissions. Additionally, during this construction period 800,000 tonnes of soil was excavated and re-used across Olympic Park (Climate Home News, 2012). 

(Birds Eye view, Olympic Park, 2012)

Chard & Mallen (2013) highlight that numerous sports stadiums are introducing environmental programs via installation energy efficient lighting and automation systems to reduce energy usage. Notable actions to reduce energy usage was demonstrated via solar roof panels consisting of semitransparent materials allowing the transmission of natural light into the stadium. The introduction of these panels saved over 20% of annual energy costs. Likewise, to the ground-breaking stadium in Amsterdam fulfilling its sustainability endeavours is the Amsterdam Area home to Dutch Football side Ajax. The stadiums implementation of wind turbines, 4,200 solar panels and an energy storage system powered by second-hand batteries from electric cars. Further methods of sustainability at the Amsterdam Arena is presented via the stadiums rooftop filtration system used to water the pitch and can store residual heat used to ensure frost during the winter months is minimised. Both these methods of sustainability go towards the reduction in energy usage highlighting the multiple ways the stadium practises sustainability (Football Ground Guide, 2024). 

(Ajax Home Stadium, 2021)

References: 

Climate Home News. (2012) London 2012 Olympics: A story of sustainable architecture.

Chard, C., & Mallen, C. (2013). Renewable energy initiatives at Canadian sport stadiums: A content analysis of web-site communications. Sustainability, 5(12), 5119-5134. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/5/12/5119

E.ON. (2022). Five of the world’s most sustainable stadiums. E.ON

Football Ground Guide. (2024) Sustainable football stadiums: How football ground are going green. Football Ground Guide. https://footballgroundguide.com/news/sustainable-football-stadiums#:~:text=Mercedes%2DBenz%20Stadium%20–%20Atalanta%20United%20(USA)&text=MLS%20club%20Atlanta%20United%20plays,has%204%2C000%20rooftop%20solar%20panels.

Francis, A. E., Webb, M., Desha, C., Rundle-Thiele, S., & Caldera, S. (2023). Environmental sustainability in stadium design and construction: A systematic literature review. Sustainability, 15(8), 1-25. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/8/6896

Zhu, L. C., Gao, Z., Zhu, J. M., & Zhang, D. (2020). Construction of the evaluation system of sustainable utilization of large stadiums based on the AHP method. Mathematical Problems in Engineering, 1(1), 1-12.

[sondakikahaberleri101]

#Sektörel

[guncelhaber1]

#Sektörel

[rocky-tops-blog]

January is the perfect time to get a great deal on new kitchen or bathroom countertops. Rocky Tops Custom Countertops has the lowest prices during our New Year Sales Event on our premium natural and engineered stone countertop slabs. Stop by our showroom, located at 3000 S. Broad St., Suite 2, Chattanooga, TN 37408, to see our beautiful granite, quartz, and marble slabs for your residential or commercial project. For more information or to set up a free consultation, call us at (423) 218-2985.

https://rocky-tops.com/new-year-sales-event-2023/ 

#RockyTopsCustomCountertops #RTCC #NewYearSale2023  #DiscountGranite #DiscountQuartz #DiscountCountertops #KitchenCountertopSale  #QuartzCountertops #MarbleCountertops #GraniteCountertops #DiscountKitchenCountertops #DiscountBathroomCountertops

[in-the-words-of-camp-campbell]

David [holding a large box in his arms]: What would you say if I walked in with 6 lost kittens?

Gwen: What’s in the box?

David:

Gwen: David, what’s in the box?

David: I think you know.

[rt-closetcryptic]

[cannibalisticcorpse]

I'm feeling valid in this the first day of hanukkah today.

[georgebenjiart]

Alec Paul Icons

(top pic is an icon drawn by me, bottom pic is a cropped screenshot)

Feel free to use either as an icon, but if ur using the one by me on top then like+reblog and credit me pls and thx

Commission info in bio <3

[magnolia-photos]

Join us on Sunday for a fun day at Rothwell Town Cricket Club. In house cricket competition for the young ones, game starts at 11 am. Refreshments, bacon/sausage rolls, face painting, professional photos for a small fee. Proceeds will be going to Florence's charity fund, an amazing 5 year old from Corby who recently has been diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/bemorefab?utm_term=bq4xZqWwE #justgiving #AML #leukaemia #Florence #rothwell #rtcc #northamptonshire #corby #bemorefab #giving #womenphotographers #nikon #nikonz50 #cricket #funday #familytime #amazingvolunteers #wecandothis #magnoliaphotos (at Rothwell Town Cricket Club) https://www.instagram.com/p/CgP6bfzNOZQ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[thelovelyblark-barg]

look at this though

[obsessive-enthusiast]

Trying out a new brush, have a quick David!