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About 40% of farm workers in the U.S. are undocumented immigrants, and theyve become a focus of the Trump administrations aggressive immigration crackdown. Terrorized farm workers have been forced into hiding, and farms themselves have been left empty of their workers. Experts have long warned that Trumps promise of mass deportations would threaten industries that rely on undocumented workerslike agricultureand that it could lead to mass disruptions in our food system. Now the Trump administrations labor department seems to be admitting that itself. In a document explaining the administrations new rule cutting farmworker wages, the Department of Labor writes that the labor shortage, in part due to increased [immigration] enforcement, presents a sufficient risk of supply shock-induced food shortages . . . There is ample data showing immediate dangers to the American food supply.” The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce, results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers, per the document. Trumps One Big Beautiful Bill, which includes additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), means that threat will grow, it adds. ‘A win for corporate greed’ The Trump administration is using this risk to justify cuts to farmworker wagesand says more foreign workers are needed to alleviate the threat. Because of this crisis, employers will need to rely even more on the H-2A visa program, which allows farms to bring on temporary foreign workers when theres a shortage of U.S. workers. (Under this visa, workers also lack basic labor protections and have reported issues with worker safety; they also do not have bargaining rights.) And the Department of Labor does not believe American workers will make themselves readily available in sufficient numbers to replace the departing illegal aliens. In theory, a worker shortage should lead to higher wages. But the visa program comes with high costs that have become burdensome, per the DOL, and so additional labor costs, it says, threatens the viability of farming operations. The departments new rule says the program needs reform, and that guest farm worker wages need to be cut to avoid agriculture disruptions. Under H2-A rules, the Department of Labor must advertise agricultural jobs, but it says this hasn’t led to more applications from domestic workers. The American Prospect, which reported on the DOL document, says that’s not entirely accurate. “Workers who apply often do not receive jobs, and nobody is really checking to see if applications are coming in,” it writes. “The system isnt set up to prove that theres a labor shortage of U.S. workers, Daniel Costa, an attorney with the Economic Policy Institute who tracks the H-2A program, told the outlet. The move could reduce wages for all farm workers, no matter their legal status. The United Farm Workers, which represents nearly 7,000 agricultural workers, condemns the wage cuts, which it says would mean a loss of $2.46 billion annually in farmworker wages. Farm workers should be paid more, not less. This regulation is a win for corporate greed; a money grab for big agribusiness that transfers millions of dollars through wage cuts and housing deductions from workers to employers, Erica Lomeli Corcoran, UFW Foundation chief executive officer, said in a statement. The farm workers who feed us every day deserve so much more and we remain committed to ensuring that their labor and dignity is respected.
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A political scientist who studies what helps people connect across differences. A novelist whose books about Native American communities in Oakland, California, sparked a passionate following. A photographer whose black and white images investigate poverty in America. Hahrie Han, Tommy Orange, and Matt Black are among the 22 fellows selected this year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and announced Wednesday. It’s a recognition often called the genius award, which comes with an $800,000 prize, paid over five years that fellows can spend however they choose. The foundation selects fellows over the course of years, considering a vast range of recommendations, largely from their peers. Each class doesnt have a theme and were not creating a cohort around a certain idea,” said Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows program. “But I think this year, we see empathy and deep engagement with community figures prominently in this class.” Through different methodologies, many of the fellows boldly and unflinchingly reflect what they see and hear from deep engagement with their communities, she said. Because fellows don’t apply or participate in any way in their selection, the award often comes as a shock and sometimes coincides with difficult moments. Nabarun Dasgupta, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, had just left a team meeting where he shared that a longtime collaborator in harm reduction work had died when he saw multiple missed calls from a Chicago number, which then called again. It was the MacArthur Foundation. They were awarding him the fellowship in recognition of his work, which includes helping to start a testing program for street drugs to identify unregulated substances and helping to overcome a shortage of naloxone, which reverses an opioid overdose. To make sense of the intense moment that mixed deep loss and recognition, Dasgupta wrote the following in a journal. We are surrounded by death every day. Sometimes, you have to give yourself a pep talk to get out of bed. Other mornings, the universe yells in your ear and tells you to keep going because what were doing is working. In an interview with The Associated Press, he added, I feel like this couldnt have been any clearer of a signal that the work has to go on. Other fellows were contacted by the foundation through email, asking to speak with them about potential projects. Tonika Lewis Johnson, a Chicago-based artist, planned to take the call in the car. The foundation representatives tried to get her to pull over before breaking the news, but she declined. They were definitely worried about my safety, she said laughing, and she did then stop driving. Johnson’s projects are rooted in her neighborhood of Englewood, located on Chicago’s South Side. She has photographed the same addresses in north and south Chicago, beautified residents’ homes and made predatory housing practices visible. All together, her work reveals the very specific people and places impacted by racial segregation. This award is validation and recognition that my neighborhood, this little Black neighborhood in Chicago that everyone gets told to, Dont go to because its dangerous, this award means there are geniuses here, Johnson said. For Ángel F. Adames Corraliza, an atmospheric scientist at the University of WisconsinMadison, the award is also a recognition of the talent and grit coming from Puerto Rico, where he is from, despite the hardships his community has endured. His research has uncovered many new findings about what drives weather patterns in the tropics, which may eventually help improve forecasting in those regions. Adames said usually one of his classes would be ending right when the foundation would publish the new class of fellows, so he was planning to end the lecture early to come back to his office. He said hes having trouble fathoming what it will be like. I am low-key expecting that a few people are just going to show up in my office, like right at 11:02 a.m. or something like that, he said. Before getting news of the award, Adames said he was anticipating having to scale down his research in the coming years as government funding for climate and weather research has been significantly cut back or changed. He said he had been questioning what was next for his career. The prize from MacArthur may allow him to pursue some new theoretical ideas that are harder to get funded, he said. I think people do care and it does matter for the general public, regardless of what the political landscape is, which right now is fairly negative on this, he said about climate and weather science. ___ Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the APs collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of APs philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy. Thalia Beaty, Associated Press
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Forget magical virtual worlds. In its quest to broaden the audience for virtual reality, Meta is now embracing much more familiar surroundings: Owners of Metas Quest VR headsets will soon be able to create digital replicas of any room in their house, and then invite others to visit them in those spaces. Imagine, for instance, having a spontaneous family reunion in a metaverse version of your living room perhaps even with an avatar that looks just like you, and not a character that has escaped from a video game.There is something very magical about scanning a space that you know, bringing someone else who knows that space into it and feeling like you’re there together, says Vishal Shah, the vice president of Metas metaverse.That magic, in turn, could help Meta turn its vision of a 3D metaverse as a social-3D realm into a reality one that has cost the company close to $70 billion to date.When your headset is also a cameraMeta demonstrated the first version of such digital replicas with an app called Hyperscape at its Connect developer conference last year. In the most recent version of the app, people can explore high-resolution 3D captures of a handful of places, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsays home kitchen and Chance the Rappers recording studio.The scans look so detailed and real that you can feel your mouth water when inspecting the ham on Ramsays kitchen counter. Meta even felt the need to add a warning about not leaning on any of the furniture in these virtual rooms.Chance The Rapper’s recording studio [Animation: Meta]But Metas Hyperscape ambitions dont stop there: With an impending operating system update, Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3s owners will also gain the ability to scan their own rooms with their headsets built-in cameras. My first thought was that they probably took a very expensive camera rig to capture these data sets because they look really quite lifelike, says 3D capture tech expert Michael Rubloff. That all of the scenes were captured with just a Quest device [is] completely mind-blowing.Capturing a room with a Quest VR headset is a relatively simple process. First, the headset overlays everything in the room with a kind of mesh of geographic shapes to record its general dimensions and the rough outlines of furniture and other objects. In a second pass, it fills in those shapes with 3D data, a process that to the naked eye looks like generating a mosaic of lots of little photos. Finally, the headset prompts people to look up and around to capture additional height information for any given room.Gordon Ramsay’s home kitchen [Animation: Meta]The whole process of capturing an average room takes less than 20 minutes, according to Meta employees who worked on the project. Then, the raw capture data gets uploaded to Metas servers, where the 3D replica of the room gets rendered over a couple of hours. Once ready, each space will be streamed directly from the cloud — no time-consuming downloads required.Metas digital-room replicas are powered by a novel technology known as Gaussian splatting. In a nutshell, Gaussian splatting doesnt just capture the surfaces of objects like a regular photo camera would. Instead, it deconstructs every object into a collection of three-dimensional blobs, complete with information on how those blobs look from different angles, along with attributes like transparency. To date, most Gaussian splats have been captured with cell phones. However, turning the VR headset itself into a capture device has some distinct advantages. For one thing, Meta controls the hardware, which allows the company to optimize its code for a certain type of camera, instead of having to work with a myriad of different smart phones. Plus, people tend to wave their hands too quickly when trying to capture something. The head movement is not as fast as the phone, explains Meta research scientist Jan-Michael Frahm.Next step: adding avatarsAt launch, spaces replicated with Metas Hyperscape will be private, and only available to the person who captured them. The company is working towards letting people share their captures, and eventually turn them into locations for social get-togethers. Hyperscape captures already run on a game engine that Meta is using for its Horizon Worlds metaverse. Currently, Horizon Worlds is essentially a collection of games and spaces generated from computer graphics that people can explore together in VR. In the future, Horizon users will be able to import their own Hyperscape rooms into Horizon, and invite their friends to join them on a digital replica of their living room couch.I think there’s a real human connection opportunity here, where the environment is just as important in some cases as the people, Shah says.Its also an opportunity for Meta to expand VR beyond its current audience. The company has had more success than some critics give it credit for in establishing VR as a medium for video games and adjacent experiences, including gamified workouts. Meta had sold close to 20 million headset sales in early 2023, and some developers have been able to turn games for Metas Quest headset into real money makers. Ten apps on Metas Horizon store have generated more than $50 million in revenue, while the number of apps with more than $1 million has surpassed 300, according to data shared last month by Meta executives.Mademoiselle Collette French Bakery [Screenshot: Meta]But recently, Quest headset sales seem to have plateaued. Some developershave also complained about declining revenue amid an influx of younger users primarily interested in free titles like the hit VR game Gorilla Tag. Meta aims to counter those trends by broadening the appeal of VR among older users who may not be as interested in gaming. This includes a greater emphasis on traditional entertainment, including a partnership with James Cameron to produce 3D content for Quest headsets.That move mirrors efforts Apple has taken to promote its Vision Pro headset, which has faced its own set of obstacles. Priced far above Metas hardware, the Vision Pro has seen tepid sales, despite integrating with the companys computers for professional use cases. But that has done little to slow a broader industry interest in VR headsets and 3D technologies: Samsung and Google are expected to launch their own headset, code-named Project Moohan, later this month. Like the Vision Pro, it is geared towards immersive entertainment and work use cases.The company has also been working on more lifelike representations of users in VR through 3D-captured personas the company calls codec avatars. While still in development, Shah believes codec avatars could be the perfect complement for Hyperscape. You’re in an environment that looks photoreal. You are with people who look photoreal, he explains. For some people, that’s going to be the most magical thing in a headset.Even without those avatars, 3D capture could become an important time capsule for consumers. The same way photography has aided us with memory preservation, 3D also fulfills that promise for general consumers, argues Rubloff. It gives us the ability to really step back into a moment in time. [Weve been able to] capture the world in 2D for the last 200 years. [Now, were] able to do the same in 3D.
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