The notion of functions dependent locally on finitely many coordinates plays an important role in the theory of smoothness and renormings on Banach spaces, especially when higher order smoothness is involved. In this note we investigate the structural properties of Banach spaces admitting (arbitrary) bump functions depending locally on finitely many coordinates.

The aim of this paper is to study the relationships between the concepts of local near uniform smoothness and the properties H and H*.

A new lower bound for the Jung constant $JC\left(l^{\left(\Phi \right)}\right)$ of the Orlicz sequence space $l^{\left(\Phi \right)}$ defined by an N-function Φ is found. It is proved that if $l^{\left(\Phi \right)}$ is reflexive and the function tΦ’(t)/Φ(t) is increasing on $(0,{\Phi }^{-1}\left(1\right)]$, then $JC\left(l^{\left(\Phi \right)}\right)\ge \left({\Phi }^{-1}(1/2)\right)/\left({\Phi }^{-1}\left(1\right)\right)$. Examples in Section 3 show that the above estimate is better than in Zhang’s paper (2003) in some cases and that the results given in Yan’s paper (2004) are not accurate.

Banach spaces which are L-summands in their biduals - for example $l^1$, the predual of any von Neumann algebra, or the dual of the disc algebra - have Pełczyński’s property (V*), which means that, roughly speaking, the space in question is either reflexive or is weakly sequentially complete and contains many complemented copies of $l^1$.