SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Revelation this week of Berkshire Hathaway dumping its $315 million stake in General Electric is stoking doubt in the blue chip stock.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — House-sharing broker Airbnb poses a threat to traditional hotels. But Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson worried more about Google, Amazon and Apple when he visited the University of Maryland's Robert H.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Interstate trucking by 2020 will be first, followed by autonomous taxi service. About half the fleet of U.S. cars become essentially autonomous by 2030. This driverless pathway recently was described for WalletHub by Henry Lucas, Robert H. Smith Professor of Information Systems at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Everybody knows Uber and Airbnb. The two startups are so big that their names have become not just noun, but verb. The riding-hailing service and the house-sharing service are two of today's best-known unicorn companies, privately held startups valued at more than $1 billion.  There was a time when the notion of a $1 billion tech startup seemed like a far-fetched, mythical creation. Today, though, there are loads of these companies out there. 

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Does food actually taste worse when we're dining alone? Recent research suggests solitude negatively affects our enjoyment of food, but finds we can counter the effect by positioning a mirror or a photo of ourselves where we can see it. The findings, from researchers at Japan's Nagoya University, will be published in a forthcoming edition of the journal Physiology

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Football season hasn't even started and already the National Football League is tackling some difficult challenges. It's coming off a season that saw an 8 percent decline in television viewership and now is faced with startling new evidence about the serious medical risks its players face.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – The end is near for Libor, the scandal-plagued financial benchmark formerly dubbed "the world's most important number." British regulators say they will phase out Libor, the London interbank offered rate, by the end of 2021, replacing it with a more transparent set of metrics more closely aligned with loan transactions.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Maybe those wildly high CEO salaries aren't an entirely bad thing.

Amna Kirmani, the Ralph J. Tyser Professor of Marketing at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, has been selected as one of three co-editors of the Journal of Consumer Research. Her editorship begins in January 2018 following the completion of her appointment as editor of the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Even as our social media identities become more tightly interwoven in many aspects of our lives, should our postings and profiles be off-limits when it comes to our job searches? Human resources industry experts in the United States are recommending that companies exercise caution in scrutinizing the social media accounts of their job applicants, whereas in the European Union, regulators are recommending that companies ban the practice altogether.