The Use of Twitter by Luxury and Midscale Hotels

Twitter has demanded a presence in company brands since its start up in 2008, including the hotel industry. As an up and coming marketing tool, the social media website is still new to both hotels and their guests. Observing the different strategies incorporated by luxury and midscale hotels, the paper provides explanations on how these two segments differ in utilizing Twitter. Through direct interviews with US luxury and midscale hotels and analyzing individual Twitter feeds, it was found that luxury hotels and their target market are much more active on Twitter than the midscale hotel segment. Implications suggest that although there is no current expectation from midscale hotel travelers to follow a Twitter feed, the rising presence of Twitter will demand midscale hotels to actively participate on the social media site in the near future

Non-isothermal cure and exfoliation of tri-functional epoxy-clay nanocomposites

The non-isothermal cure kinetics of polymer silicate layered nanocomposites based on a tri-functional epoxy resin has been investigated by differential scanning calorimetry. From an analysis of the kinetics as a function of the clay content, it can be concluded that the non-isothermal cure reaction can be considered to consist of four different processes: the reaction of epoxy groups with the diamine curing agent; an intra-gallery homopolymerisation reaction which occurs concurrently with the epoxy-amine reaction; and two extra-gallery homopolymerisation reactions, catalysed by the onium ion of the organically modified clay and by the tertiary amines resulting from the epoxy-amine reaction. The final nanostructure displays a similar quality of exfoliation as that observed for the isothermal cure of the same nanocomposite system. This implies that the intra-gallery reaction, which is responsible for the exfoliation, is not significantly inhibited by the extra-gallery epoxy-amine cross-linking reaction.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

On Uniformly finitely extensible Banach spaces

We continue the study of Uniformly Finitely Extensible Banach spaces (in short, UFO) initiated in Moreno-Plichko, \emph{On automorphic Banach spaces}, Israel J. Math. 169 (2009) 29--45 and Castillo-Plichko, \emph{Banach spaces in various positions.} J. Funct. Anal. 259 (2010) 2098-2138. We show that they have the Uniform Approximation Property of Pe\l czy\'nski and Rosenthal and are compactly extensible. We will also consider their connection with the automorphic space problem of Lindenstrauss and Rosenthal --do there exist automorphic spaces other than $c_0(I)$ and $\ell_2(I)$?-- showing that a space all whose subspaces are UFO must be automorphic when it is Hereditarily Indecomposable (HI), and a Hilbert space when it is either locally minimal or isomorphic to its square. We will finally show that most HI --among them, the super-reflexive HI space constructed by Ferenczi-- and asymptotically $\ell_2$ spaces in the literature cannot be automorphic.Comment: This paper is to appear in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Application

A novel comparative study of different layered silicate clay types on exfoliation process and final nanostructure of trifunctional epoxy nanocomposites

© 2016. This version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/The effect of three different organically modified layered silicate clays (Nanomer I.30E, Cloisite 30B and Nanofil SE 3000) on the exfoliation process and on the thermal properties and nanostructure of cured trifunctional epoxy resin based nanocomposites was studied. Optical microscopy showed that the best and poorest qualities of clay distribution in the epoxy matrix were obtained with Nanofil SE 3000 and Nanomer I.30E, respectively. However, the isothermal differential scanning calorimetry scans show that, of the three systems, it is only the Nanomer clay that promotes intra-gallery reaction due to homopolymerisation, appearing as an initial rapid peak prior to the cross-linking reaction. This rapid intra-gallery reaction is not present in the curing curve for the Cloisite and Nanofil systems. This fact implies that the fully cured nanostructure of the Cloisite and Nanofil system is poorly exfoliated, which is confirmed by small angle X-ray scattering which shows a scattering peak for these systems at around 2.53°, corresponding to about 3.5 nm d-spacing.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft