China's Courts Are Live Online

China has a remarkable online system to provide live video streams of court trials. On this website: http://tingshen.court.gov.cn/ , China Court Trial Online, you can readily access the surveillance cameras in courtrooms all over the People's Republic of China, and watch the proceedings in realtime.

To use the site, simply scroll down to the map of China, and select any one of hundreds of courts from any of the provinces of China. (If like me, you can't read Chinese be sure to right click on Chrome and select 'Translate to English'.) The site contains archived videos of court hearings as well.

The video records are clearly quite extensive. Tonight, I was able to access both live and archived video of court proceedings in the Shenzhen Nanshan District People's Court:

. . . the Zigong City Gongjing District People's Court in Sichuan:

. . . the Wuhan Railway Transportation Intermediate Court:

. . . and the Lingqiu County People's Court in Shanxi:

According to the home page more than 12 million court proceedings have been posted on the site, and more than 20,000 will be broadcast today. The world's most populous country provides an opportunity to surveil its justice system, and vast resources to allow attorneys to learn from trials on a particular issue, or proceedings before an individual judge or panel.

I've seen videos posted online of appellate court oral arguments in American courts, but I'm unaware of such an extensive system being in place in the courts of any other country.

UTC Time is GMT Time, but what is UTC?

It's very common to find references to UTC time in metadata.

The time is the same as Greenwich Mean Time, the time zone along 0° longitude, and is used to standardize the time collected from email custodians working in various time zones. UTC is also referred to as coordinated universal time. But what does UTC stand for?

You might guess 'universal time code' or that it's the acronym for coordinated universal time in a different language. In fact, the UTC acronym is the result of an anglophone / francophone clash. Organizations in English speaking countries came up with a term coordinated universal time and wanted to use the acronym 'CUT'. The French used the term temps universel coordonné, with the abbreviation TUC. UTC was chosen as a simple compromise that would make sense in neither language but be acceptable to both.

Random Sampling in Relativity

By default Relativity enables sampling on the document object. If an admin has kept this setting in a workspace you should see an icon that looks like this:

. . . to the right of the View bar. When you click on this object, you'll get options to create three different types of randomized samples.

1. Fixed size - will create a random sample set of a specific number of documents.

2. Percentage - will create a random sample set of a particular percentage of documents.

3. Statistical - will create a random sample based on how many documents must be included in order to get an accurate representation of the data set.

The sample will be based on the documents included in a folder, view, or saved search that you have selected.

After selecting one of these radio buttons, a document list will be generated, and the setting will be shown in a title bar:

Note that Relativity does not recommend using statistical sampling on sets of fewer than 300 documents. Confidence levels of 90, 95, and 99% are available for statistical sampling. The margin of error can also be adjusted. If you work with a larger document set, it may make sense to lower the margin of error value. To be clear, the margin of error indicates by how many points the sample may differ from the full set. The confidence level indicates how often the sample will fall within that margin of error. So a statistical sample with a confidence level of 90% and a margin of error of 4% will be within 4% of the values of the full set 90% of time.

Sampling will not be an option when a view is set to show the related items for each document family.