At present, hardly any younger person can imagine life without mobile technologies. They use them on a daily basis, including in language learning. Such learning supported with mobile devices is called mobile learning, which seems beneficial especially thanks to the unique features of mobile applications (e.g., interactivity, ubiquity, and portability) and teachers’ encouragement and feedback. The purpose of this review study is to explore original, peer-reviewed English studies from 2015 to April 2019 and to determine whether mobile applications used in the learning of English as a foreign language are beneficial and/or effective. The methods are based on a literature review of available sources found on the research topic in two acknowledged databases: Web of Science and Scopus. Altogether, 16 original journal studies on the research topic were detected. The results reveal that mobile learning is becoming a salient feature of education as it is a great opportunity for foreign language learning. Its key benefits are as follows: the enhancement of the learner’s cognitive capacity, the learner’s motivation to study in both formal and informal settings, the learner’s autonomy and confidence, as well as the promotion of personalized learning, helping low-achieving students to reach their study goals. Although mobile learning seems to be effective overall, it is desirable to design, plan and implement it with caution, according to students’ needs, and to deliver multiple language skills in authentic learning environments.

Background: Rare or orphan diseases have become an important target of healthcare activities all over the world. The study aims to identify ethical questions linked to rare diseases and orphan drugs and ethical principles or approaches applied to solve them. Methods: Relevant peer-reviewed articles were identified by means of a systematic review. The literature was searched from 20 May 2020 to 20 June 2020. The search included the databases PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science (2010 – April 2020). A total of 4,139 papers related to rare diseases were identified; with 1,205 papers obtained from Scopus; 2,476 papers from PubMed; and 458 from Web of Science with keyword search “ethics” AND “rare” AND “disease”, “ethical” AND “orphan”, “ethical” AND “orphan” AND “drug”, and “ethical” AND “rare“ AND “disease”. Finally, XX studies were chosen for further analysis. Results: The main findings reveal five main ethical issues. The most essential one shows that funding research and development in the field of orphan drugs poses an almost impossible dilemma. Other issues include the significance of non-economic values like compassion and beneficence in decision-making related to orphan drugs and rare diseases; the identification of limits to labelling diseases as rare; barriers to global, supranational and international cooperation; and last but not least, determining and establishing panels of decision-makers. Conclusions: A strictly global approach would be the most appropriate way to deal with rare diseases. Nonetheless, international, let alone global, cooperation seems to be completely beyond the reach of the current international community, although the EU, for instance, has a centralized procedure for labelling orphan drugs. This deficit in international cooperation can be partly explained by the fact that the current technologically globalized world still lacks globally accepted ethical values and rules. This is further aggravated by unresolved international and intercultural conflicts. In addition, the sub-interests of various parties as well as the lack of desire to deal with other people’s problems need to be taken into account. The aforementioned problems are difficult to avoid. Nevertheless, let us be cautiously optimistic. At least, there are people who raise ethical questions about rare diseases and orphan drugs.

Visitor management is often too narrowly connected with mass/individual tourism in protected areas. Generally, visitor management can be used in any destination for mass and individual tourism also in connection with optimization of visitor flows, visitor concentration, and optimization of visitor impacts in a very broad sense. This paper focuses on the introduction of the theoretical concept of visitor management; it discusses different visitor management approaches and their principles, compares these approaches, and shortly describes typical visitor management tools. The discussion focuses on the appropriate use of chosen selected tools, mainly carrying capacity approaches, zoning and optimization of tourism infrastructure and monitoring, including tourism sustainability indicators. The computer simulation and prediction of qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the phenomena in destination is also shortly described. The typical application of visitor management in protected areas is described as a case study and a set of recommendations for visitor management are declared.

Foreign language learning in the third age is one of the popular activities among the elderly. The question remains as to how to teach a foreign language to older adults properly. The first objective of this review was to identify suitable pedagogical approaches, teaching methods, or strategies for teaching foreign languages to third-age learners. The second objective was to determine whether foreign language learning later in life is beneficial. The authors used a method of literature review to achieve these goals. The former objective was not fully achieved as there is no clear outcome, although some generalizations based on other review studies can be made. Namely, foreign language teaching among the older generation should be student-centred and a communicative method should be implemented with a special focus on talking about familiar topics and listening comprehension to facilitate a senior’s foreign language learning. In addition, the teaching methods ought to incorporate real life experiences and provide relevant content. Respect should also be paid to the fact that older adults have intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation to learn a foreign language. The latter objective was attained since older people can benefit from learning a foreign language at a later age in many ways, including areas like travelling, social inclusiveness, improvement of cognitive skills, and overall well-being.

The aim of this article is to discuss the effect of learning a non-native language on the enhancement of cognitive performance in healthy native Czech elderly. In addition, special emphasis is put on the qualitative assessment. To do this, 42 Czech cognitively unimpaired seniors were enrolled into the study. These were then divided into an experimental group (i.e., 20 healthy elderly studied English as a non-native language for three months) and a passive control group (22 healthy elderly, who did not undergo any non-native language intervention). The main outcome measures included the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, statistical processing of the data, and a qualitative content analysis. The results indicate that the cognitive performance of the intervention group did not differ from the control group. Therefore, no cognitive enhancement through non-native language learning was achieved. However, the findings of the qualitative analysis show that such non-native language learning with the peers of the same age is especially beneficial for the overall well-being of healthy seniors, especially as far as their social networks are concerned. Furthermore, participant’s subjective feelings from their self-reports indicate that foreign language learning also contributes to acquiring new English words and phrases. However, as there are very few empirical studies on this research topic, further research is needed in order to confirm or refute the present research findings on the enhancement of cognitive performance through non-native language learning in healthy seniors.