Today, we’re happy to bring you a Q&A with Kembrew McLeod, who will be writing the upcoming 33 1/3 on Blondie’s Parallel Lines !

Tell us a bit about yourself in an extended author biography.

I’m a writer, documentary filmmaker, university professor, media prankster, spazz dancer, children’s music producer, and all around man of many hats. I began writing about music over two decades ago in old-school paper ’zines, and then made the transition in 1995 to online music writing in outlets like Addicted To Noise, SonicNet, and MTV.com. It was a new frontier, and I distinctly remember having to explain to label publicists what the Interweb was. Since then, I have published five books on popular music, copyright law, and—most recently—pranks. My writing has also has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, Slate, Salon, SPIN and Rolling Stone. Additionally, I’ve…

A team of MIT researchers have discovered a possible way to make multicore chips a whole lot faster than they currently are, according to a recently published research paper.

The researchers’ work involves the creation of a scheduling technique called CDCS, which refers to computation and data co-scheduling. This technique can distribute both data and computations throughout a chip in such a way that the researchers claim that in a 64-core chip, computational speeds saw a 46 percent increase while power consumption decreased by 36 percent. This boost in speed is important because multicore chips are becoming more prevalent in data centers and supercomputers as a way to increase performance.

The basic premise behind the new scheduling technique is that data has to be near the computation that uses it, and the best way to do so is with a combination of hardware and software that distributes both the…