The concept of relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive sciences, logic, and library and information science. Most fundamentally, however, it is studied in epistemology (the theory of knowledge). Different theories of knowledge have different implications for what is considered relevant and these fundamental views have implications for all other fields as well.

Definition[link]

"Something (A) is relevant to a task (T) if it increases the likelihood of accomplishing the goal (G), which is implied by T." (Hjørland & Sejer Christensen,2002).^[1]

A thing might be relevant, a document or a piece of information may be relevant. The basic understanding of relevance does not depend on whether we speak of "things" or "information".

Epistemology[link]

If you believe that schizophrenia is caused by bad communication between mother and child, then family interaction studies become relevant. If, on the other hand, you subscribe to a genetic theory of relevance then the study of genes becomes relevant. If you subscribe to the epistemology of empiricism, then only intersubjectively controlled observations are relevant. If, on the other hand, you subscribe to feminist epistemology, then the sex of the observer becomes relevant.

Epistemology is not just one domain among others. Epistemological views are always at play in any domain. Those views determine or influence what is regarded relevant.

Politics[link]

During the 1960s, relevance became a fashionable buzzword, meaning roughly 'relevance to social concerns', such as racial equality, poverty, social justice, world hunger, world economic development, and so on. The implication was that some subjects, e.g., the study of medieval poetry and the practice of corporate law, were not worthwhile because they did not address pressing social issues.^{[citation needed]}

Logic[link]

In formal reasoning, relevance has proved an important but elusive concept. It is important because the solution of any problem requires the prior identification of the relevant elements from which a solution can be constructed. It is elusive, because the meaning of relevance appears to be difficult or impossible to capture within conventional logical systems. The obvious suggestion that q is relevant to p if q is implied by p breaks down because under standard definitions of material implication, a false proposition implies all other propositions. However though 'iron is a metal' may be implied by 'cats lay eggs' it doesn't seem to be relevant to it the way in which 'cats are mammals' and 'mammals give birth to living young' are relevant to each other. If one states "I love ice cream," and another person responds "I have a friend named Brad Cook," then these statements are not relevant. However, if one states "I love ice cream," and another person responds "I have a friend named Brad Cook who also likes ice cream," this statement now becomes relevant because it relates to the first person's idea.

More recently a number of theorists^[who?] have sought to account for relevance in terms of "possible world logics" in intensional logic. Roughly, the idea is that necessary truths are true in all possible worlds, contradictions (logical falsehoods) are true in no possible worlds, and contingent propositions can be ordered in terms of the number of possible worlds in which they are true. Relevance is argued to depend upon the "remoteness relationship" between an actual world in which relevance is being evaluated and the set of possible worlds within which it is true.

Economics[link]

The economist John Maynard Keynes saw the importance of defining relevance to the problem of calculating risk in economic decision-making. He suggested that the relevance of a piece of evidence, such as a true proposition, should be defined in terms of the changes it produces of estimations of the probability of future events. Specifically, Keynes proposed that new evidence e is irrelevant to a proposition, given old evidence q, if and only if p/q & e = p/q and relevant otherwise.

There are technical problems with this definition, for example, the relevance of a piece of evidence can be sensitive to the order in which other pieces of evidence are received.

Cognitive science and pragmatics[link]

In 1986, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson drew attention to the central importance of relevance decisions in reasoning and communication. They proposed an account of the process of inferring relevant information from any given utterance. To do this work, they used what they called the "Principle of Relevance": namely, the position that any utterance addressed to someone automatically conveys the presumption of its own optimal relevance. The central idea of Sperber and Wilson's theory is that all utterances are encountered in some context, and the correct interpretation of a particular utterance is the one that allows most new implications to be made in that context on the basis of the least amount of information necessary to convey it. For Sperber and Wilson, relevance is conceived as relative or subjective, as it depends upon the state of knowledge of a hearer when they encounter an utterance.

Sperber and Wilson stress that this theory is not intended to account for every intuitive application of the English word "relevance". Relevance, as a technical term, is restricted to relationships between utterances and interpretations, and so the theory cannot account for intuitions such as the one that relevance relationships obtain in problems involving physical objects. If a plumber needs to fix a leaky faucet, for example, some objects and tools are relevant (i.e. a wrench) and others are not (i.e. a waffle iron). And, moreover, the latter seems to be irrelevant in a manner which does not depend upon the plumber's knowledge, or the utterances used to describe the problem.

A theory of relevance that seems to be more readily applicable to such instances of physical problem solving has been suggested by Gorayska and Lindsay in a series of articles published during the 1990s. The key feature of their theory is the idea that relevance is goal-dependent. An item (e.g., an utterance or object) is relevant to a goal if and only if it can be an essential element of some plan capable of achieving the desired goal. This theory embraces both propositional reasoning and the problem-solving activities of people such as plumbers, and defines relevance in such a way that what is relevant is determined by the real world (because what plans will work is a matter of empirical fact) rather than the state of knowledge or belief of a particular problem solver.

Law[link]

The meaning of "relevance" in U.S. law is reflected in Rule 401 of the Federal Rules of Evidence. That rule defines relevance as "having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence." In other words, if a fact were to have no bearing on the truth or falsity of a conclusion, it would be legally irrelevant.

Library and information science[link]

This field has considered when documents (or document representations) retrieved from databases are relevant or non-relevant. Given a conception of relevance, two measures have been applied: Precision and recall:

Recall = a : (a + c) X 100%, where a = number of retrieved, relevant documents, c = number of non-retrieved, relevant documents (sometimes termed "silence"). Recall is thus an expression of how exhaustive a search for documents is.

Precision = a : (a + b) X 100%, where a = number of retrieved, relevant documents, b = number of retrieved, non-relevant documents (often termed "noise").

Precision is thus an a measure of the amount of noise in document-retrieval.

Relevance itself has in the literature often been based on what is termed "the system's view" and "the user's view". Hjørland (2010) criticize these two views and defends a "subject knowledge view of relevance".

See also[link]

Look up relevance in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Source criticism
• Description
• Distraction
• Information-action ratio
• Information overload
• Intent
• Relevance theory

References[link]

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (June 2009)

• Gorayska B. & R. O. Lindsay (1993). The Roots of Relevance. Journal of Pragmatics 19, 301–323. Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society Press.
• Hjørland, Birger (2010). The foundation of the concept of relevance. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(2), 217-237.
• Keynes, J. M. (1921). Treatise on Probability. London: MacMillan
• Lindsay, R. & Gorayska, B. (2002) Relevance, Goals and Cognitive Technology. International Journal of Cognitive Technology, 1, (2), 187–232
• Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (1986/1995) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (1987). Précis of Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Behavioral and Brain Science, 10, 697–754.
• Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (2004). Relevance Theory. In Horn, L.R. & Ward, G. (eds.) 2004 The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, 607-632. http://www.dan.sperber.fr/?p=93
• Zhang, X, H. (1993). A Goal-Based Relevance Model and its Application to Intelligent Systems. Ph.D. Thesis, Oxford Brookes University, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, October, 1993.

External links[link]

• Malcom Gladwell - Blink - full show: TVOntario interview regarding "snap judgements" and Blink

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (March 2012)

David Allen Aaker (born 1938) is a consultant and author on the field of marketing,^[1] particularly in the area of brand strategy. He is currently the Vice Chairman of Prophet, a global brand and marketing consultancy firm, Professor Emeritus at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley and an advisor to Dentsu, a major Japanese advertising agency. He blogs on Aaker on Brands.

Education[link]

David Aaker was born in Fargo, North Dakota in 1938. He received his B.S. in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management and subsequently attended Stanford University where he received his M.A. in Statistics and Ph.D in Business Administration.^{[citation needed]}

Career[link]

He is currently E.T. Grether Professor Emeritus of Marketing Strategy at the Haas School of Business^[2] and consults exclusively for Prophet clients. He is the creator of the Aaker Model™ and has authored over 100 articles and 15 books on marketing and branding, including his latest, Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant.

His first of five brand books, Managing Brand Equity, defined brand equity. His second, Building Strong Brands, developed the brand identity model used by many firms. His third, Brand Leadership, extended the brand identity model and discussed how to develop brand building programs. The fourth, Brand Portfolio Strategy, develops tools and concepts to create brand portfolios that are prioritized, clear, energized, and synergistic. His fifth, Spanning Silos, addressed the silo crises caused by product and country silos inhibiting the development of effective and efficient marketing programs. His latest, Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant shows success in dynamic markets involves creating offerings so innovative that they create new categories or subcategories making competitors irrelevant. His books have been translated into eighteen languages with sales well over one million.^{[citation needed]}

He is also featured in a chapter of Conversations with Marketing Masters -- a collection of insights from some of the world's most influential marketing gurus. He is on the Board of Directors of the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano Countries, and serves on the following editorial boards: Journal of Strategic Marketing, Marketing Management, The Journal of Brand Management, Strategy & Leadership, and The Russian Management Journal.

Honors[link]

He has been awarded three career awards for contributions to the science of marketing (the Paul D. Converse Award), marketing strategy (the Vijay Mahajan Award), and the theory and practice of marketing (the Buck Weaver Award). He has also won awards for the best article in the California Management Review and (twice) in the Journal of Marketing. He was a fellow at World Economic Forum at Davos (1999-2000).^{[citation needed]}

Response[link]

Journal of Marketing reviewed Building Strong Brands, Brand Leadership, and Brand Portfolio Strategy. It found Building Strong Brands to be "quite practical", providing tools for brand management, and suggested it is aimed at middle managers. However it found the books Brand Leadership and Brand Portfolio Strategy to be very similar to each other, with the former contained nothing that wasn't in the latter book.^[3]

Books[link]

• Managing Brand Equity, 1992, ISBN 978-0-02-900101-1
• Building Strong Brands, 1995, ISBN 978-0-02-900151-6
• Developing Business Strategies, 2001, ISBN 978-0-471-06411-4
• with Erich Joachimsthaler Brand Leadership: The Next Level of the Brand Revolution, 2000, ISBN 978-0-684-83924-0
• Strategic Market Management, 2007, ISBN 978-0-470-05623-3
• From Fargo to the World of Brands: My Story So Far, 2005, ISBN 978-1-58736-494-5
• Brand Portfolio Strategy: Creating Relevance, Differentiation, Energy, Leverage, and Clarity, 2004, ISBN 978-0-7432-4938-6
• Spanning Silos:The New CMO Imperative, 2008, ISBN 978-1-4221-2876-3
• Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant, 2010, ISBN 978-0-470-61358-0
• Brand Building and Social Media (2011)
• Preference vs. Relevance (2011)
• Wi ning the Brand Relevance War (2011)
• Eight Characteristics of Successful Retail Concepts (2011)
• Personal Branding Interviews: David Aaker (2011)

References[link]

External links[link]

• David Aaker's Blog

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2010)

Marleen Temmerman is a Belgian politician and a member of the Socialistische Partij Anders. She was elected as a member of the Belgian Senate in 2007.^[1] On 8 February 2011, she told the spouses of Belgian politicians to ban sex until the country forms a government.^[2]

Notes[link]

v t e Different Socialist Party / (Socialistische Partij Anders) Leadership Karel Van Miert · Frank Vandenbroucke · Louis Tobback · Fred Erdman · Patrick Janssens · Steve Stevaert · Johan Vande Lanotte · Caroline Gennez · Bruno Tobback Former partyformation Belgian Labour Party / Belgische Werklieden Partij (BWP) · Belgian Socialist Party / Belgische Socialistische Partij (BSP) Related organisations Animo · Zij-kant · S-Plus · Curieus · sp.a rood · Vonk · FOS-socialistische solidariteit Symbols Charter of Quaregnon · The Internationale · May Day · Red Rose Belgian socialist pilar Socialist Party / Parti Socialiste (PS) · Socialist Party Sozialistische Partei (SP) · General Federation of Belgian Labour / Algemeen Belgisch Vakverbond (ABVV) · Socialistische Mutualiteiten · Center for Homecare / (Centrum voor) Thuiszorg · De Morgen · Vermeylenfonds · Rode Valken

This article about a Belgian politician is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

International House of Prayer
International House of Prayer
The International House of Prayer in Kansas City, MO
Location	Kansas City and Grandview, Missouri
Country	United States
Denomination	Non-denominational
Churchmanship	Evangelical
Membership	over 2000
Website	www.ihop.org
History
Founded	May 7, 1999 (1999-05-07)
Founder(s)	Mike Bickle

The International House of Prayer (also known by its acronym IHOP or by IHOP–KC) is an evangelical charismatic Christian missions organization based in Kansas City and Grandview, Missouri that focuses on prayer, worship, and evangelism.^[1]

Doctrinally, IHOP–KC is evangelical, post-tribulational, and affirms historic premillennialism. IHOP-KC places great importance on the practices of prayer, worship, fasting, and discipleship.

IHOP–KC has a prayer room in Kansas City, Missouri and runs a Bible and ministry school called the International House of Prayer University (IHOPU) in nearby Grandview, Missouri.

Overview[link]

The International House of Prayer was founded by Mike Bickle. The organization began in a small building off of Grandview Road in Kansas City, Missouri as a prayer room dedicated to worshiping Jesus night and day. Since that time, IHOP has grown and spread out over several different locations throughout south Kansas City and Grandview, Missouri. As of November 2010^[update] the church had over 1,000 staff and a student body of another 1,000 individuals.^[2] IHOP is most well-known for its daily prayer meetings based on its "harp and bowl" worship model that are held 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year since September 19, 1999. While the prayer meeting is the primary ministry of IHOP, the missions organization has also established many different ministries that service its community. These prayer meetings, which are streamed live on the internet and through GOD TV,^[3] alternate regularly between music and prayer through all hours of the day and night. ^[4]

IHOP staff regularly teach on themes that include prayer, worship, the Great Commandment, the Great Commission, eschatology, understanding God's spiritual purposes for Israel, spiritual gifts and other various evangelical themes.^[3][2]

International House of Prayer University[link]

The International House of Prayer University is a Bible college with campuses at Grandview, Missouri. The president of the university is Allen Hood who is on the International House of Prayer's leadership team.^{[5][dead link]} As of November 2010^[update] there are 1000 full time students enrolled, and prayer is central to the educational process.^[2]

Expansion[link]

The IHOP-KC Project consists of plans to build a facility on 125 acres of land adjacent to Highway 71 that once belonged to Harry Truman. They expect to spend $150 million dollars on the project.^[3] There are several apartment complexes in Grandview, Missouri inhabited primarily by members of IHOP.^[2]

In late 2009 and early 2010 reports of revival at the IHOP center led to increased attendance at their prayer services and conferences.^[6]

Controversy[link]

When IHOP moved to a new location in an old shopping center in the Terrace Lake neighborhood of Kansas City in 2002 many members of the local community voiced suspicions about the ministry. IHOP attempted to allay their fears in a series of community meetings.^[7][8][9] IHOP has been credited, however, with helping the local economy by bringing large numbers of visitors to the area.^[10] A writer from the McClatchy-Tribune News Service has stated that IHOP is "Kansas City's biggest religious phenomenon in a century".^[3]

The Southern Poverty Law Center has criticized IHOP because of the extent to which their teachings emphasize Jesus making war on his enemies at His Second Coming.^[11]

On September 14, 2010 IHOP (International House of Pancakes) announced that they were suing the International House of Prayer for trademark dilution and infringement.^[12] The lawsuit was dropped on December 21, 2010, with the dispute resolved out of court.^[13]

See also[link]

• Justice House of Prayer
• Onething conference
• TheCall
• Youth with a Mission

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official Site