Dylan Jones – författare

Rebellion always starts somewhere, and in the music world of the transgressive teen whether it be the 1960s of the 2020s, The Velvet Underground represent ground zero. Crystallizing the idea of the bohemian, urban, narcissistic art school gang, around a psychedelic rock and roll band - a stylistic idea that evolved in the rarefied environs of Andy Warhol''s Factory - The Velvets were the first major American rock group with a mixed gender line-up; they never smiled in photographs, wore sunglasses indoors, and in the process invented the archetype. They were avant-garde nihilists, writing about drug abuse, prostitution, paranoia, and sado-masochistic sex at a time when the rest of the world was singing about peace and love. Dylan Jones'' definitive oral history of The Velvet Underground draws on contributions from remaining members, contemporaneous musicians, critics, film-makers, and the generation of artists who emerged in their wake, to celebrate not only their impact but their legacy, which burns brighter than ever into the 21st century.

Few people can say they have shaped the cultural landscape of the last four decades while crossing paths with some of the most extraordinary personalities on the planet. But then, of course, Dylan Jones isn''t just anyone.These Foolish Things captivatingly charts Dylan''s life: from his peripatetic childhood and late adolescence in 1970s London - a city then alive with possibility - to his award-winning tenure at what would become one of the most dynamic magazines of its era, GQ. It details how he came to be in that hot seat: a journey through the Swinging London slipstreams of punk and new romanticism, and through i-D, The Face and Arena, which created the platform on which GQ was based, with Dylan as a common denominator.Littered with a gold-star cast of characters - including a who''s who of celebrity from David Bowie and Bryan Ferry to Alastair Campbell and Prince Charles, via Samuel L. Jackson, Piers Morgan and Rihanna - this memoir reflects on how GQ became an established style and how Dylan sought to stir up music, politics and fashion.Witty, perceptive and deliciously entertaining, but by turns bravely vulnerable, These Foolish Things is a memoir like no other: a dazzling retelling of the start of the twenty-first century from one of the world''s most fascinating media giants.

There is a myth that the long, dark days before punk were full of legions of British prog rock groups; that the likes of Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer and Jethro Tull roamed the land, soiling the culture like university-educated Orcs.Wrong.The mid-seventies were dense with extraordinarily sophisticated, mature rock music made by singers, songwriters and musicians who had no problem calling themselves artists. And the records they made aspired to artistic status: everyone was trying to make their own masterpiece, and the sense of competitiveness was like something not seen since the mid-sixties. Three-minute pop singles had given way to concept albums and pop-package tours had been supplanted by rock festivals, and rock in general had a renewed sense of ambition.1975 was the apotheosis of the adult pop, the most important year in the narrative arc of post-war music, and a year that was rich with masterpieces: Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan, The Who by Numbers by the Who, Young Americans by David Bowie, Another Green World by Brian Eno, The Hissing of Summer Lawns by Joni Mitchell and A Night at the Opera by Queen, amongst countless other legendary albums.These records were magisterial; records that couldn''t be bettered. Who could realistically make a more sophisticated album than The Hissing of Summer Lawns? Or a more complex hard-rock album than Physical Graffiti? Or indeed a record as unimpeachable and as prescient as Horses?1975, as Dylan Jones expertly illustrates, was the greatest year of them all.

Practical Goal Programming is intended to allow academics and practitioners to be able to build effective goal programming models,  to detail the current state of the art, and to lay the foundation for its future development and continued application to new and varied fields.  Suitable as both a text and reference, its nine chapters first provide a brief history, fundamental definitions, and underlying philosophies, and then detail the goal programming variants and define them algebraically.  Chapter 3 details the step-by-step formulation of the basic goal programming model, and Chapter 4 explores more advanced modeling issues and highlights some recently proposed extensions.

Chapter 5 then details the solution methodologies of goal programming, concentrating on computerized solution by the Excel Solver and LINGO packages for each of the three main variants, and  includes a discussion of the viability of the use of specialized goal programming packages.  Chapter 6 discusses the linkages between Pareto Efficiency and goal programming.  Chapters 3 to 6 are supported by a set of ten exercises, and an Excel spreadsheet giving the basic solution of each example is available at an accompanying website.

Chapter 7 details the current state of the art in terms of the integration of goal programming with other techniques, and the text concludes with two case studies which were chosen to demonstrate the application of goal programming in practice and to illustrate the principles developed in Chapters 1 to 7.  Chapter 8 details an application in healthcare, and Chapter 9 describes applications in portfolio selection.