Is an L.A. Raiders jacket still a sign its wearer may be a gang member? Probably not, according to A Street Guide to Gang Identity (gangid.uc-davis.edu), a Web site created by University of California at Davis design professor Janet Hethorn—but a rolled-up pants leg or a colored bandanna might be. In 1990, after some of her design students in Minneapolis were attacked by gang members, Hethorn, whose Ph.D. thesis was about MTV's impact on teen fashion, decided to study the styles gang members use to identify themselves. "The newspapers were full of articles about somebody getting killed because of what they were wearing," says Hethorn, who gets her information on ride-alongs with police. "I already had this background and research capability in understanding adolescent fashion.... I thought, this is my world." Police laud Hethorn's illustrations and discussions of suspect styles, from tattoos to clothing colors, as a good resource for parents and educators. "It's current, it's ongoing, and the Web site is immediately accessible to the practitioners who need it," says Sgt. L.A. Evenrud, a Minneapolis gang investigator. "It's not [something] just available in a hardcover book."

THE MOUSE THAT ROARED

When computers still took punch-cards and Bill Gates was knee-high to a mainframe, Douglas Engelbart submitted a patent application for an "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System." You probably know his 1963 invention by another name. "No one remembers who first called it that," says Engelbart, 72, "but we all agreed that it looked like a mouse." Though the Smithsonian has asked for the historic hardware—a wooden box with a copper wire "tail" and a single red button—it lies in a closet of Engelbart's Atherton, Calif., home.

But despite the point-and-click ease the mouse brought to computing—a prerequisite for the World Wide Web and Windows—Engelbart's employer, Stanford Research Institute, reaped the financial rewards. "I made a conscious decision at age 25 that money would be secondary," says Engelbart. In 1989, after he had beaten lymphoma and retired from research, he and his daughter Christina formed the Bootstrap Institute, a think tank located in office space donated by Logitech, a company that last year manufactured its 100 millionth mouse. Engelbart now lectures software and technology leaders and preaches the wonders of another brainstorm, his five-button, one-handed keyboard. Is he at all frustrated that others made billions from his invention? No, says the shy, slight engineer. "I feel frustrated in not having had more of an effect on the world."

Move over, Kevin Bacon. The King wants his title back—as the rightful center of the entertainment universe. Brett Tjaden, a University of Virginia grad student who helped start the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon site—at which users enter an actor's name to see how many links it takes to get back to Bacon's cinematic oeuvre—has created a similar site called the Oracle of Elvis (darwin.clas.virginia.edu/—acs5d/oracle.html). Type in "Gwyneth Paltrow" and you get a score of three: she starred in 1991's Hook with Dustin Hoffman, who acted in 1982's Tootsie with Teri Garr, who was in 1967's Clambake with Elvis. Says Tjaden: "Some people stay up all night trying to beat the Oracle."

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