Despite Thursday's rain, Cummins Inc. (NYSE:CMI) has broken ground on its global Distribution Business headquarters in downtown Indianapolis. The new building is expected to open in late 2016 on the former Market Square Arena property.

Seungji Mun created a simple shaped chair that is designed to minimize industrial waste. The Economical Chair’s design is such that during production of four chairs per 4′ x 8′ international standard plywood sheet there is absolutely zero waste.

Once the design is cut, the shapes are achieved through a plywood bending technique to get the curves of the seat and the bends of the legs.

Opinions on Indiana’s new religious freedom law — which critics say would allow businesses to deny services to gays and lesbians — tend to divide demographic groups along the same lines as same-sex marriage.

We don’t yet have polling specifically on the Indiana law, which Gov. Mike Pence asked the legislature to change on Tuesday, but younger, less religious and Democratic-leaning Americans oppose allowing businesses to deny service to gay couples. Other Americans are split. But one group is an outlier: African-Americans.

A recent Public Religion Research Institute poll found 39 percent of African-Americans supported same-sex marriage. Based on that number, we would expect only 42 percent of African-Americans to support laws requiring businesses to serve same-sex couples the same way they would opposite-sex couples.¹³

That’s not the case.

African-Americans are by far the largest outlier of any of the 15 demographic groups (people were sorted according to age, race, religion and party affiliation) studied, according to Pew Research. Overall, African-Americans’ views resemble those of young adults and nonreligious Americans: 61 percent of black respondents favored laws requiring businesses to serve same-sex couples.

If you set aside responses from African-Americans, 83 percent of the variation in support for laws requiring businesses to serve same-sex couples just like straight couples is explained by support for same-sex marriage. Including African-Americans drops the variation explained to just 52 percent.

Why are African-Americans so much more in favor of anti-discrimination laws than same-sex marriage? That’s hard to say, but there are at least two opposing demographic forces at work.

On the one hand, the fact that African-Americans are more likely to be religious also makes them more likely to oppose same-sex marriage. On the other — as Claire Gecewicz and Michael Lipka of Pew Research point out — African-Americans (perhaps based on their own history of being discriminated against) are more likely than white people to say that gay Americans face discrimination.

In the case of businesses serving gay customers, opposition to discrimination was stronger than the pull of religion.

Geographical proximity to a major legal market may be a good predictor of “big law” career success, a new study shows.

Milhaus has sent a press release promoting their new development located at 10th and Park. Unlike many new downtown projects that have occurred since the 2008 market crash, this one is intended to be owner-occupied. A few new renderings were released and are shown below:

Shown below are the approved site plans and earlier renderings on the IHPC staff report:

It looks to be a solid project overall.

Governor Mike Pence has named Dennis Bassett director of the Indiana Finance Authority. He is the former chairman of JPMorgan Chase in Indiana and currently serves as director for the state's Department of Financial Institutions.

Evansville attorney Joshua Claybourn posted some sad news on his Facebook page of the passing of former Marion Co. Deputy Prosecutor and Republican Party activist Terry Record of Evansville at the age of 34. Long-time readers of this blog will probably recall Record's highly-publicized and tragic fatal drunk driving arrest and conviction that claimed the life of 47-year old Jimmy Cash on the city's Southside in 2007. Here's Claybourn's Facebook thoughtful posting on Record's passing and his efforts towards redemption:

It's with sadness I let my friends know of the passing of Terry J. Record at the young age of 34 years old. Terry was a contemporary of mine. He graduated from Harrison H.S. in Evansville, Indiana University in Bloomington, and law school at Southern Illinois. He had many gifts and talents, including public policy and law that eventually landed him a brief spot on the staff of Indianapolis prosecutor Carl Brizzi and then as attorney with the state. But his high profile involvement with politics also made his demons more visible as well. Terry's public struggle with the law culminated most notably with a DUI crash that killed another driver and resulted in over a year in jail. Sadly, this aspect of Terry's life is what many will remember. But I will remember his courageous path toward redemption and a renewed faith, particularly through the Catholic tradition. He worked hard to cross the bridge of forgiveness toward a new hope. I do not know if Terry ever found that in this life, but I pray and trust that he has found it in his new one.

Record received a two-year sentence, which he served on home detention. He also lost his license to practice law. Record had blogged at one time at radio talk show host Abdul-Hakim Shabazz' blog, Indiana Barrister, for a period of time prior to his arrest. Unfortunately, his struggle with alcoholism was no doubt exacerbated by a poisonous work environment former Marion Co. Prosecutor Carl Brizzi fostered for those like Record who worked on his campaigns and in his office during his two terms as prosecutor. It's unfortunate he didn't get the help he needed before such a tragic set of events played out eight years ago. Our condolences to the Record family on the loss of their son.

Located on a third of an acre within the Chatham Arch Neighborhood, 11 blocks north of Monument Circle, Indianapolis, stands a contemporary new home that redefines urban infill architecture. Pulling from the context of the surrounding homes, the City Cottage, through key visual connections, honors the past while writing its own future. The Cottage’s north façade evokes a strong vertical presence, creating a relation to the repetitive cadence of surrounding properties’ masonry piers. A strong layer of privacy is formed through its mass while peeling away to large expanses of glazing, intended for view sheds, both inward and outward. Along with its vertical connections, City Cottage respects the horizontal elements from the neighborhood, adding to the rhythm of the streetscape, specifically the eaves and elevated floor lines. Implementing a simple footprint, a functional layout was conceived by focusing the core functions of a home at the center. These functional spaces, anchored by “transitions” allowed for the common spaces to flow between each other, a void was cut from the footprint, providing a private, vegetated, urban courtyard sheltered from the street by the stair massing, steel gate, and cedar wood fence. Within, a Zen-like plunge pool situates itself at the corner ...

The results of the Wine School exam on Langhe nebbiolo.

This Spring, Winthrop Avenue between 52nd and 54th Street will be repaved, and receive some new sidewalks as well. This will help the stretch attract even more new investment, which has seen Developer Town, Bent Rail, and other new ventures in the past few years. The new Meridian Kessler Quarterly Magazine had a vision of a new Winthrop Avenue that will look more like a mixed-use district. I contacted Mary Owens from Meridian Kessler, and she sent me a PDF of the renderings. First off is the current condition (note that Developer Town has added some windows in the front of the building since this image was created):

 

 

 

This effort is a key part of the Meridian Kessler Subarea Plan, which is currently being updated to encourage form-based codes in the neighborhood. This is an exciting change that will help make the neighborhood more connected and walkable.

Why a major college basketball job isn’t like a major college football job, and what this could mean for a school like Indiana.

In college football, there is a clear caste system. If you want to win the college football playoff and national title, you have to be a Power 5 school. Otherwise, you don’t really have a shot. The recent conference realignment in college athletics has helped to make this clear.

However, this doesn’t exist in college basketball, which has become more of a meritocracy. And this meritocracy makes finding a coach in college hoops a much more difficult prospect. Even at schools with the rich history and tradition like Indiana University.

During the past decade, several mid-majors in college hoops have risen from "cute Cinderella story" to "perennial top-25 team." Ever since George Mason shocked UConn to reach the Final Four in 2006, college basketball teams that aren’t in these Power 5 conferences have been making inroads and coming closer to achieving a national title. Mason, VCU, Butler, and Wichita State have all made final fours. Gonzaga could be a 1-seed for the second time in three years. The Atlantic 10 conference got six teams in the tournament last year, which is as many as the ACC did. And some of these high-performing schools, such as Creighton, Xavier, and Butler, have used their success to elevate themselves to better conferences.

Thus, you don’t need to be at a major conference anymore to be a very successful college basketball coach. Instead of football, where recruiting classes are 20-25 players a year, basketball coaches only need to recruit 2-3 in most seasons. In addition, not every mid-major school has a football program either. Or they field a smaller-scale FCS squad. Without as much money tied up in football, they can focus on other sports.

Now, as of this writing, Tom Crean is still employed as Indiana basketball coach. Thus, this article should not be taken as an endorsement of him staying or him going. But I wanted to touch on a couple of the top mid-major coaching names that I’ve heard as potential replacements down the line, and why they might not be willing to leave their current positions to come to Bloomington.

These two coaches are Gregg Marshall and Shaka Smart.

Both Marshall and Smart have made Final Fours at their current gigs at Wichita State and VCU respectively, and each has consistently been making the NCAA tournament for the past few seasons. As coaches of mid-major schools, they have also been prime candidates for making moves to a major conference program. But both have stayed in their current roles, garnering raises and extensions, despite both the overt and covert temptations of larger schools. And why should they? Marshall has repeatedly discussed his family’s desire to stay in Wichita, and the Shockers have a rocking home crowd, as was evident on College Gameday last weekend. The same goes with Smart, whose teams draw a raucous atmosphere to the Siegel Center in downtown Richmond. Both coaches are at teams who are the main game in town from November to March, in cities that are both larger than Bloomington but still don’t have pro teams.

All of this is a problem for a place like Indiana, where the results of the past 20 years have not measured up to the banners hanging up in Assembly Hall. Other college hoops programs that have the "blue-blood" moniker, such as UNC, Duke, UK, and Kansas, have tasted success more recently. Even UCLA, who hasn’t won a title in 20 years, still made the Final Four for three straight years from 2006-08. When they made a coaching change two years ago, the guy they got was Steve Alford. And though Alford the player did great things at IU, I think all the writers on this blog agree that Alford the coach should not come back here. In addition, no hire is ever a sure thing. Yes, Calipari has worked out great for Kentucky, but the same athletic director also hired Billy Clyde. So you never know.

The mid-majors have leveled the playing field, and with the strong support of fanbases and without the money tied up in football programs, they can afford to keep strong coaches around for longer. Of course, were Fred Glass and company wanting to make a change, it would never hurt to ask and offer the farm. But the recent success from coaches like Marshall and Smart proves that you can field championship-caliber programs without having to be at a Power 5 conference.

We took a text-message conversation between the TCQ editorial staff and repurposed it as a screenplay for your consumption.

The TCQ editorial staff has a group text, which is often the source of many of the weird things we do here. Today, actual, substantive conversation broke out regarding the issue of student attendance at Assembly Hall. Kinda. It is published below, in its entirety, published as a screenplay. Please enjoy this all-access look inside the minds of college basketball bloggers. It's like HARD KNOCKS: CRIMSON QUARRY, but without Vontae Davis' grandma.

SCENE: Ben is from Vermont, and received his graduate degree from Indiana. Swick grew up in and attended Indiana as an undergraduate, before going to an out-of-state law school. Robbins grew up around Bloomington & had season tickets as a youth, attending another school for undergrad before returning to IU for law school. ALL PERSPECTIVES ARE REPRESENTED HERE

*ACTION*

Ben R.: hey, I get very sensitive when east coast IU fans get called out so I might write something about this:

Dakich: "I blame the administration for allowing too many east coast d-bags in there."

— The Assembly Call (@AssemblyCall) February 16, 2015

Kyle Robbins: That wasn't T-I-C? I thought it was semi T-I-C?

BR: I mean yeah, but it's not just him. Bunch of threads over on (MESSAGE BOARD REDACTED) last night. I think there's a broader point about student section not showing up and it has nothing to do with entitled east coast students.

Kyle Swick: Yeah, students have really been kicked in the dick all year about not showing up to games. I think a column about attendance would be a good idea, because it has been down all year. Address all the theories, include a thorough dismissal of the “east coast” nonsense

*short delay, no responses*

KS: Or a minor dismissal of it, IDK

KS: but I was at the Maryland / Michigan games, hundreds of seats in the balcony were empty

KR: PERSONAL HOT TAKE: minor dismissal, because i do subscribe do it -- partly

KS: BEDFORD COMIN’ IN HOT

KR: #TOWNIE

KR: BUT IT’S OKAY! people that haven’t lived in indiana their entire live don’t grow up with it and, in all reality, won’t be as engrained with #IUBB from their younger days.

KS: My personal hot take is it’s actually the opposite, those who have lived and died with IU for ~20 years are so furious at Crean and the “direction of the program” they’ve stopped showing up.

BR: Or they go to grad school in btown for two years like me and get swept away in the fun of big time games at assembly hall

KR: and that’s what great and awesome -- there should not be a *CENSORED* requirement to be a historian of indiana basketball to be a *CENSORED* fan

BR: Exactly. and that's where we sorta get into the Michigan or Nebraska football problem

KR: so my take is 1) yes, to a degree, it’s true. 2) it has no bearing on attendance the second said student sets foot on campus

KS: I think letting in out of state kids over in-state kids with the same numbers to get more tuition is BS but that’s happening literally everywhere and that is not the east coast kid’s fault.

KR: no, especially in an society where living in the same state in which you grew up isn’t as prevalent as it was 40 years ago

BR: Yeah - I chose IU because it had the second best public affairs grad progam in the country and the best one was in the dystopian hellhole of Syracuse. Basketball happened to be a nice addition to all of it

KS: Fact is: the fans in the margins aren’t going to a game on a sunday night when it’s balls cold and the opponent is meh and the perception of the team is not great. Two years ago? They would, because #rankings, but jockeying for 4th place isn’t bringing out the casuals

KR: actuality: 1) college attendance is down everywhere. see alabama football -- possibly, yes, maybe because of out of state students. 2) organically, assembly hall is really a terrible place to watch a basketball game (most of the seats are bad.) 3. Television.

KS: And that’s sports-wide: at-home experience now far exceeds in-arena experience in every facet except atmosphere

BR: Yeah my gf preferred Mackey to AH and I found it hard to blame her unfortunately

KS: IU secondary market tickets are $120+ for each remaining game. Who on earth would pay that?

KR: right now, right this second, i’m an indiana student. the IU ticket office gave me GA tickets for two games & i’m scared of heights. I DON”T SIT IN BALCONIES. i’m not going unless i have good seats, period.

KS: I take xanax to fly on airplanes

KR: i just don’t fly

KS: It’s awesome. Coolest fear ever.

KR: i had a dream about plane crashes last night, usually do when i’m #stressed

KS: I’m not afraid of heights per se, strictly flying, and really just take off. Once I’m up there nbd because the #zax usually wears off midway through, but getting up to 400 mph on the ground and then tilting up nooooooooooooooooooooope

BR: In-air turbulence is the worst

KR: see, i’m just a control freak and assume everyone else is incompetent

KS: yeah that’s part of it

KR: wait what if we just post this thread as our piece on attendance this is good

KS: Turbulence is just sky pot holes. And according to my ATC friend most “turbulence” people feel is actually referred to as “chop.” Pilots don’t notice it, no one gives a shit, it’s nothing. Mild turbulence would freak the *CENSORED* out of most people because they’ve never actually felt it before

KR: yeah I'm turning this into our piece on attendance, our JOINT COLUMN

BR: Exactly. Still freaks me out though

KS: god get over it ben, east coasters smh

KR: "don't tweet"

BR: Attendance and airline fears

KR: "don't fly"

KS: “don’t sit in balconies”

KS: abraham lincoln was in a balcony ppl forget that

KR: truth, honestly

BR: hahahahah

KR: speaking of truth I might go to the tom Crean show

BR: Lincoln was watching Our American Cousin starring GeorgiaBoiler.

KS: oooooo rekt

KR: disclaimer: I'm posting the text of this as is

KS: at least transcribe it to remove the noise

KR: well yes

(did not actually happen)

KR: so back to attendance

KS: can you edit when i used the eff-word because i have to protect my #brand

KR: yes

KS: you can even put me asking you to censor it

KS: think your last point has some serious merit, season-ticket holders don’t want to go if they got shitty seats. Which goes back to the “why do we not have a student section”

BR: Yeah I was mad that I couldn't rush the court against Wisconsin and my friends could (with their backpacks on because grad school)

KS: The Izzone, Michigan, Illinois, they surround the court and it’s awesome. Even Purdue lines everyone up in a corner from row 1 to the top. Indiana? “Well some of y’all can sit here which is cool. We’ve sprinkled the rest of you throughout the balcony and also your season tickets included, like, eight games. GO HOOSIERS.”

BR: For me here's what it boils down to. it's weird, irregular start times plus it can be nice to watch on tv on a cold afternoon or evening (and with beer that you can't get at AH) plus as a student your seat changes every time. ALSO if there's a home game on Sunday you can't get chick fil-a

KS: Basically people only put up with the model, by and large, when the team is great. But Indiana can’t change it without uprooting hundreds of season ticket holders.

BR: Yeah also IU ticket office screwed up my season tickets big time last year and separated me from the group that I signed up with and put me on the opposite game schedule as them. And basically said "no takebacks" when we tried to correct it

KR: yeah, it's no ones fault -- except the building. you know who's sure not sitting in the balcony? people that pay real money. give the students those tickets, they just won't go. but they'll at least buy EM to get more GA

BR: Right. I don't think any of my measly 8 season tix were GA last year though

KS:

KR: yesssssssssss

END SCENE

The massive Circle City Industrial Complex, located at Massachusetts and 10th Street, is under new ownership, which is looking to breathe life into both the building and the surrounding neighborhood. They have release a pdf, which explains the proposal in detail.  The project will open up a portion of the currently vacant southern third for studios and a possible restaurant, which this portion of Massachusetts Avenue lacks.

A broad view of the neighborhood can be seen below. Notice that there appears to be a call to redevelop much of the industrial portion of Mass Ave, as well as needed attention to surrounding neighborhoods:

Other key slides are seen below, which show the scale of this building and a few specific ideas:

There is a possibility of extending a portion of the proposed Pogue’s Run Trail indoors, which will be called the Maker’s Trail:

East 10th Street has been seeing some attention lately, and this project could help bridge the gap between the commercial area and downtown. The large area to the north of this building remains an even larger challenge, which can only be tackled through investment to increase the population of both residents and workers. This looks to be a good start.

Monday is Presidents Day — officially Washington’s Birthday — and there are few monuments as presidential as the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota’s Black Hills. The massive sculpture, which was started in 1927, features the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. But which four leaders really deserve to be immortalized in the massive rock? Since we’re FiveThirtyEight, we’ve turned to the pollsters. And though Franklin Roosevelt would be a contender now, the head sculptor got it right.

This belief is based off historians’ rankings. Since 2009, three surveys, from C-SPAN, Siena College and the United States Presidency Centre (USPC), have polled historians, asking them to order the U.S. presidents from best to worst. The results have been fairly consistent.

PRESIDENT	C-SPAN RANK	SIENA RANK	USPC RANK		AGG. SCORE
Franklin Roosevelt	3	1	1		1
Abraham Lincoln	1	3	2		2
George Washington	2	4	3		3
Theodore Roosevelt	4	2	5		4
Thomas Jefferson	7	5	4		5
Harry Truman	5	9	7		6
Woodrow Wilson	9	8	6		7
Dwight Eisenhower	8	10	10		8
John Kennedy	6	11	15		9
James Monroe	14	7	13		10

Lincoln and Washington are, not surprisingly, among the top four presidents in all three polls. Theodore Roosevelt has been among the top five in each of them, and Jefferson has been among the top seven in every survey. Aggregated together, the top four presidents who had served by 1927 are the ones on Mount Rushmore.

The foresight of head sculptor Gutzon Borglum to have picked the four best presidents possible shouldn’t be undersold. It may have been obvious to stick Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington on Rushmore, but the choice of Theodore Roosevelt was far less so. Roosevelt had only been out of office for 18 years when the project began, and it was probably difficult at the time to see how someone who had only been elected to one term and had not served during a time of major war would be remembered as great. Andrew Jackson, who was put on the $20 bill in 1928, might have been a more evident choice. In historian and author Arthur Schlesinger’s first historians’ poll in 1948 and his second in 1962, Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, president during World War I, ranked ahead of Teddy.

Why was Roosevelt chosen? It’s difficult to discount the fact that Borglum knew him personally. There’s also a belief that then-President Calvin Coolidge wanted two Republicans on Mount Rushmore.

But Franklin D. Roosevelt has since joined the four Rushmore presidents in historical greatness; he’s consistently rated among the top three commanders in chief. So, if Bolgrum were working today and could only feature four presidents, who would get the ax?

The most likely choice is Jefferson. In choosing FDR over the third president, Bolgrum would be switching one Democrat for another. Jefferson also rates the lowest of the original four on Mount Rushmore in the aggregated president’s rankings. And in polls of the public taken by Gallup and Washington College in the past 10 years, he was rated the lowest of the original four. Lastly, consider the controversy Jefferson has sparked centuries after his presidency — he was clearly racist — and we can make a good case that he might be gone if Mount Rushmore were built today.

Overall, though, Mount Rushmore is backed up by the stats. It’s set in stone that its presidents are among the best four we’ve had.

The best Côte Chalonnaise reds convey what makes Burgundy ideal for pinot noir wines, and often at far more affordable rates.

In most college towns, the unofficial start to next football season is National Signing Day. After months and even years of courting, athletic programs officially find out Wednesday which of recruits they’ve snagged, and which they’ve lost to rivals.

For those who care to listen, there’s going to be a lot said about which schools nabbed the best recruiting class. But the pundits don’t have the last word — wins and losses do. I looked at how well schools’ recruiting classes translate into wins on the field and created a rating of how much each program underperforms or outperforms.

I built my data set using two sources. I used ratings created by Ken Massey, a statistician best known for his system of rating sports teams, to measure team success. The ratings take into account factors such as win-loss and strength of schedule, which allowed me to distinguish between two teams with an identical win-loss record. I then used recruiting data from Rivals to measure how well a team recruited in each year from 2002 to 2014.⁸ With that, I made a simple statistical model to predict where a team would finish in the ratings and compared the prediction to its actual 2014 rating.⁹

The chart below shows how much better or worse each school fared in 2014 compared with how its recruiting predicts that it would finish.

But that only tells us about the past year. I replicated the analysis for each season since 2005 to see which programs are habitually over- or underachieving.¹⁰

Anchoring the top of the overachievement scale is Wisconsin, who on average finishes 32 spots higher than predicted. Also at the top of the scale is Oregon, which turns top-30 recruitment years into top-10 finishes, and Missouri, which has turned top-40 recruits into two top-5 seasons. The chart also shows that Georgia Tech’s overachievement in 2014 was not an anomaly. Despite having had just one top-40 recruiting class since 2002, the Yellow Jackets have had multiple strong seasons over the past decade.

The worst of the underachievers are Colorado, Illinois and Indiana. And unsurprisingly, several years of coaching changes, off-field distractions and underwhelming on-field performance have left the football powerhouses of Michigan, Miami and Tennessee among the underachievers.

If your team is a perennial overachiever and has an unusually strong recruiting class this year, perhaps expect big things in the next few years. If you’re a fan of an underachieving team, don’t get too excited just yet about a strong recruiting class. It hasn’t done much good in the recent past.

UPDATE (Feb. 4, 5:50 p.m.): Minnesota was left out of the data for this article despite being in a Power 5 conference. In 2014, it overachieved by 17.3 points on the Massey scale, but over the past 10 years it finished 9.4 points lower than predicted on average.

A primary strength of the St.-Joseph region is the granite slopes on which the best vineyards are planted.

The wine comes from the same general area as Barolo and Barbaresco, but it is usually softer and more accessible.

The Public Relations Director for the Indiana State Fair Commission is moving on. In a letter to colleagues and members of the media, Andy Klotz says after 14 years, he has accepted a similar position with Indianapolis-based Angie's List.

The view driving down South Madison Avenue would never be mistaken for being particularly scenic. Acres of post-war  housing yielded to many discount stores, payday loan outlets and used car dealerships. Shortly after passing Manual High School, one cannot help […]

The new firm, with more than 6,500 lawyers in more than 50 countries, aims to take advantage of China’s growing economic heft and the increasing number of deals being made overseas by its companies.

A decade after Adolf Hitler was defeated, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and research center in Jerusalem, began gathering the names of the approximately 6 million Jews from Europe and North Africa murdered by Nazi Germany. Today, 70 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the work goes on — with more than 1 million victims still unaccounted for.

The international data-collection project began in 1955, stemming from an Israeli law that established Yad Vashem. The Nazis left little evidence of their genocide. Hundreds of thousands of Jews who survived the Holocaust moved to Israel after the war, and the museum staff sought their help recovering details of the destroyed Jewish communities of Europe. In the 1950s, they and others around the world filled out 800,000 one-page forms listing details of victims: their names, where they lived, who their parents were.¹² “We consider them almost paper tombstones,” Cynthia Wroclawski, manager of the Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project at Yad Vashem, said of the pages of testimony. (Shoah is the Hebrew word for the Holocaust.) Some 2.5 million of these paper tombstones are contained in the museum’s Hall of Names.

Today, many of the original data submitters are dead, as are most people who were alive during the Holocaust. Yet the museum continues to devote staff — about 40 people — and resources — millions of dollars over the past decade — to filling gaps in its database, searching for clues about who died, where and how they died, and who they were when they lived.

Alexander Avram, who is in charge of the central database, describes the work as “a very big puzzle that has to be put together.” He said it grows “ever more complicated and challenging.”

By most estimates, nearly 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.¹³ So far, Yad Vashem has gathered 7 million records. But these include lots of overlap — the same name reported by different survivors or from other sources such as deportation lists. Avram estimates that there are 4.3 million different people in the database — and only about 3.5 million people with information about their place of residence. The biggest gaps are in Poland, the former Soviet Union and Romania: Roughly half of victims’ names from those countries are known, compared to 97 percent or more of victims from many Western European countries.

To fill the gaps, researchers are reaching out to Jewish groups in Eastern Europe, seeking to connect with survivors or their descendants who have information they haven’t yet shared. They’re also traveling to Orthodox Jewish synagogues and cemeteries to photograph memorials and plaques, seeking names that might have been missed. And they’re combing through millions of pages of documents they haven’t yet digitized, entering data manually.

The work, at this stage, yields new information slowly. “You can say the low-hanging fruit was collected,” Avram said. Wroclawski said Avram frequently tells his colleagues that now just two of 20 names are likely to be new ones, compared to five of 10 in earlier stages of the work.

It’s unlikely that the project will ever yield the name of every Jewish victim, Wroclawski said. In many places, whole Jewish communities were wiped out, she said. “There’s nobody living there anymore. There might just not be any remnant of those people by their names.”

Wroclawski and Avram had relatives who died in the Holocaust. Wroclawski searched for details in Latvia but encountered an obstacle that has stymied research in many places: The archives had been destroyed by administrators who didn’t think they mattered to anyone.¹⁴ “Sometimes you don’t have luck,” she said. “Sometimes you’re left with a question mark.”

Avram’s uncle died in France, and some of his relatives in Romania were persecuted. “But it’s not a personal issue,” he said. “It’s a job with a mission.”

I asked him why he and his institution have the mission to remember every victim by name. He answered by mentioning a book published by Yad Vashem, “Final Letters,” that collected letters written by victims

“In many of those letters, there is a call: ‘Remember, don’t forget us,’ ” Avram said. “This is like an order: Don’t forget.” Many survivors, too, decide their purpose is to testify about those who didn’t survive, he said. There is also a cultural aspect to the mission. Many Jews traditionally annotate prayer books with their family history and pass them along through the generations. Yad Vashem is continuing the tradition by writing these records for families who aren’t able to, including those who were wiped out. “Many times I say that Jews are the people of memory,” Avram said.

The purpose is not, primarily, to refute Holocaust deniers. “If somebody is willing to say that the Holocaust didn’t happen, I am not sure that a list of victims will convince him,” Avram said.

Scholarship also isn’t the main goal, though the database could help researchers seeking to learn about Jewish prewar history. It also has been a boon to people researching their families. Sometimes people have been reunited with relatives who they thought were dead by finding their submissions of information about other relatives.

Yad Vashem doesn’t set a high bar for inclusion of testimony. The thinking is that few people witnessed deaths personally and survived. So, for instance, the best evidence about some victims might be witness accounts of their deportation from a Jewish ghetto, coupled with evidence that the train they left on was bound for Auschwitz. Staff will check to ensure a submission doesn’t contradict other information. I asked whether someone named as a victim ever turns out to have survived. Avram said it happens rarely. “Unfortunately, we only had a few hundred cases like this,” he said. “I would be very happy if they were in the thousands or tens of thousands.”

Making the information searchable and accessible was itself a feat of data management. Avram, who has two master’s degrees in philology, the study of languages, led staff in digitizing pages of testimony that were filled out in dozens of languages. The database, which went online in 2004, is searchable in English, Hebrew, German, Russian and Spanish. It has been programmed to match queries with one spelling to entries with another: Isaac Cohn from Bratislava could be the same man as Yitzchak Cohen from Pressburg. It recognizes variants of Alexander in many languages, such as Sasha, Sender and Sandor. Thousands of these sorts of equivalents had to be entered manually.

“We had to build it from scratch,” Avram said.

The database excludes the names of most victims whom staff know were not Jewish.¹⁵ Some Holocaust victim databases maintained by others, such as those of victims at particular concentration camps or the one run by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., strive to include the names of the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, including gays, Roma people and people with disabilities. Asked about parallel data-collection efforts, which include JewishGen’s Holocaust Database, Avram said, “Everyone went on with his own project. We are trying to coordinate and see how we can cooperate.”

Avram and Wroclawski envision further improvements to the database: connecting records of victims who were related to allow for genealogical research, say, or linking records, photos and other resources on a single victim to create a memorial page. There is also more Avram would like to do to connect Hebrew names with local variants. And there’s lots more data that’s been collected but not inputted, including information from all those digital photos of memorial plaques and tombstones.

The most urgent task, though, is to collect testimony from any survivors before they die or simply forget. “We are always in the last hour,” Avram said. “Unfortunately, we can see the numbers are dwindling. It’s a fact of life.”

Wroclawski is leading the outreach effort to try to get staff and volunteers in position to listen when people are ready to talk. “We want to be there when the person who has never opened up and never has said anything says, ‘My goodness, I really am the last person to remember these people. I need to tell someone.’ “

Google is investing in Elon Musk’s company, which is planning a broadband network of 4,000 satellites. The pioneering Teledesic tried something similar two decades ago but failed, notes Robert Cyran of Reuters Breakingviews.