Puerto Rico has recently emerged as one of the fastest-growing tourist destinations in the Caribbean, a shift accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and promoted by the local government as a response to prolonged economic crisis, austerity, and socioenvironmental disasters. This article argues that Puerto Rico’s recent expansion of tourism is a legal extension of its offshore financial diversification project. It examines how tax incentives and credits, regulatory waivers, and investment laws, most notably the Puerto Rico Incentives Code (Act 60 of 2019), have integrated tourism and luxury real estate into the archipelago’s broader transformation from a corporate tax haven into an offshore financial center. Drawing on sociolegal and political economy scholarship, the article shows how tourism and offshore finance are legally and institutionally entangled, constituting a colonial offshore economy: a legal–fiscal framework that facilitates capital mobility, regulatory arbitrage, and speculative investment. Empirically, it combines legal analysis with two case studies of luxury tourism megaprojects, Moncayo in Fajardo and Esencia in Cabo Rojo, to demonstrate how the colonial offshore economy materializes through tourism development, restructuring land use, redistributing public resources, and intensifying legally mediated forms of displacement and socioenvironmental harm.

Auditory comprehension (AC) develops during the first years of life; however, not all children exhibit typical performance, which may result from the interaction of multiple factors. Therefore, our study aimed to identify the predictive factors of AC in infants with prenatal and perinatal risk factors for atypical brain structure. To test this, a longitudinal study was conducted with 51 participants (28 females; mean age = 36.8 ± 1.4 months). Clinical, demographic, anthropometric, motor, neuropsychological and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data were collected from birth to 36 months. A regression model revealed that the age at achievement of fine motor milestones, gestational weeks, corpus callosum volume and maternal age were predictive of AC at 36 months. Moreover, the mental development index (MDI) of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development-2 (BSID-2) assessment at 12 months predicted AC scores at 36 months. We concluded that AC is influenced by caregivers’ interactions and motor development, thereby facilitating new learning opportunities, but is also affected by the neuropathological patterns associated with their risk condition. In addition, early identification of predictor factors may enable targeted interventions during sensitive developmental periods.

This article examines the use of neural networks in electromechanical sound art and music, where sound is materially enacted through physical means such as motors, solenoids, and physical resonators. It begins with a survey of documented works, outlining a range of current strategies and discussing how technical, material, and performative factors influence their design. Identifying natural language processing as underexplored in this domain, a practice-based case study, Seven Studies for Electric Motors, develops one such language-based approach. The project embeds a small language model for real-time sentence generation, extracts syntax structures, and translates these into patterns of motor-driven sound. Taken together, the survey and case study offer a picture of how machine learning has been integrated into electromechanical practices over the past decade and point to possible directions for further work.