Jem Chapter 1 Jem was on TV from 1985 to 1988 PLAYING THEM AT THEIR OWN GAME When she was a little girl Parisa Tabriz wanted to be like the title character in the 1980s TV show Jem Jem is the lead singer of a rock band called Jem and the Holograms She has a secret identity She's really a shy girl named Jerrica
Benton Jerrica uses her father's computer to make an alternate 3 D version of herself a pink haired rocker As an adult Tabriz is not a musical rock star And she doesn't have a 3 D version of herself But like Jem she thinks outside the box to come up with creative ideas That skill makes her great at what she does Tabriz needs to think in creative ways to do her job
Tabriz is a rock star hacker for the technology company Google She is a white hat or a computer security expert who makes sure information on the Internet is safe White hats spend a lot of time looking for bugs errors and weaknesses in software They actually try to hack break into their own software so they can fix the bugs By writing better software white hats make sure bad guy hackers the black hats can't steal passwords credit card numbers or private messages Tabriz loves the creative people she works with She loves thinking like the bad guys so she and her team can figure out how to protect computer users 3890 GOOGLE Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as students at Stanford University in California The company's name is based on googol This math term stands for the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros Page and Brin wanted to help people find huge amounts of information on the web They succeeded and Google became the most popular search engine in the world
Tabriz wasn't interested in computers when she was a child IMMIGRANT DAUGHTER Parisa Tabriz was born in 1983 She grew up in a suburb of Chicago Illinois Her father Rahim Tabriz is a doctor He came to the United States from Iran Tabriz's mother Valerie Tabriz is Polish American She is a nurse Tabriz has two younger brothers David and Michael
