During the past decades the importance of soft skills for labour market outcomes has grown substantially. This carries implications for labour market inequality, since previous research shows that soft skills are not valued equally across race and gender. This work explores the role of soft skills in job advertisements by drawing on methods from computational science as well as on theoretical and empirical insights from economics, sociology and psychology. We present a semi-automatic approach based on crowdsourcing and text mining for extracting a list of soft skills. We find that soft skills are a crucial component of job ads, especially of low-paid jobs and jobs in female-dominated professions. Our work shows that soft skills can serve as partial predictors of the gender composition in job categories and that not all soft skills receive equal wage returns at the labour market. Especially "female" skills are frequently associated with wage penalties. Our results expand the growing literature on the association of soft skills on wage inequality and highlight their importance for occupational gender segregation at labour markets.

This paper investigates the advantage of adopting a flexible resource control scheme when performing HTTP-based adaptive streaming across LTE systems. To guarantee video fluidity, mobile video streaming is known to require a large bandwidth overhead with respect to the net encoded video rate. The quality of a received video stream is impacted by variations in the size of the transmitted video packets (chunks), and by statistical fluctuations in the data rate at which the allocated downstream wireless channel operates. First, in considering an illustrative video scenario, we show that the chunk size distribution is heavy-tailed, and is well fit by a Gamma distribution. Second, we employ a HAS based proxy video manager and resource controller at the base station node. Based on the channel quality observed and reported by a mobile client, the manager selects the proper channel bandwidth and data rate levels at which to transmit the stream's chunks, in accordance with the selected encoded video rate and the configured Quality of Experience (QoE) level at which the user is targeted to receive the video stream.The communications data rate is also set to assure an acceptable low video reception stall probability. To illustrate the performance of such a dynamic bandwidth allocation scheme, we compare it with an operation that employs a stationary setting of the channel bandwidth, and we compute the gain achieved when such adaptations are performed at the base station node on a chunk by chunk basis. We show by analysis, and confirm by simulations, the improvements achieved in the system's performance behavior through the use of the adaptive resource allocation scheme

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