(upbeat music) - From NJ PBS studios, this is NJ spotlight news with Brianna Vanozzi.

- Hello, and thanks for joining us tonight.

I'm Joanna Gaggis, Brianna Vanozzi is off.

>>> Coming up, Bayonne vs.

Everybody.

We talk with Jamie and Mason Rincón about their epic run in the Little League World Series and the biggest takeaways for the father-son duo.

Plus, exploring the universe.

We talk with one astronomer involved in a new study photographing the Southern Hemisphere and what the results could tell us about the cosmos.

But first, layoffs are happening around the state.

We take a look at New Jersey's job market with Department of Labor Acting Commissioner Kevin Jarvis.

Funding for NJ Spotlight News provided by RWJBarnabas Health.

Learn more at RWJBH.org.

The latest jobs reports show that New Jersey has lost nearly 26,000 jobs between June and July.

And several large companies have recently announced they're leaving the state.

So what do these numbers mean and are they an indication that the state's business climate is in trouble?

Here to talk about that and more is Kevin Jarvis, Acting Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

Acting Commissioner, great to have you on the show.

I want to start with the latest jobs numbers.

We are seeing reports come out, jobs reports come out this summer that are showing losses in the tens of thousands.

July and August totaled nearly 26,000 job losses.

I just want to ask, do these numbers concern you at all?

Thank you for the question, Joanna.

And look, anytime there's a report of any job losses, we obviously get concerned.

Part of what we do here is trying to make sure that people are trained and that they have good jobs.

The Sherrill administration is focused on bringing businesses to New Jersey to make sure that we have jobs for the people of New Jersey.

That being said, the job numbers that we've seen are preliminary job numbers.

Those numbers always get adjusted as more information comes into play.

There's some methodological issues with some of those job numbers, too.

I think there's some seasonal adjustments that need to be made, and we anticipate that those numbers are going to be dramatically changed.

I also always caution people to never just look at one indicator.

You don't want to just look at a single jobs report.

In fact, the household survey, which measures the unemployment rate, indicated we actually had a gain of about 9,000 jobs in July, which is why the unemployment rate went down to 4.4%.

So there's a multitude of factors that we look at.

We take every reported job loss seriously to try to make sure that we're providing the services that people need for that, but we need more information to really make an accurate determination of what these prospective job losses mean.

Yeah, you said the Sherrill administration is working to bring business into the state.

And at the same time, we have seen reports recently that several large companies are pulling out that includes Samsung, Mars Wrigley, folks in the business and industry groups say that this points to an unfriendly business climate in New Jersey.

So my question, does the state need to reevaluate some of its policies that impact business, including the corporation business tax, just as one example?

Well, Governor Sherrill has already been reevaluating all of the policies and doing everything she can to try to bring businesses into New Jersey.

You know, one of the things that she did, uh, from the very beginning of her administration is create a dashboard and efforts to try to streamline the permitting and licensing process that always adds to costs and delays that businesses see and it's bearing fruit.

Only six months into the administration, I know DEP, one of its most problematic permitting backlogs has already been reduced by 75% and at the Department of Transportation, they've completely eliminated one of the backlogs that they've had in the permitting process.

So efforts are underway to try to make New Jersey more business-friendly, but at the same time working to make sure that we continue to protect workers.

New Jersey has a very strong history of protecting workers, and I don't think that those two are mutually exclusive.

I think we can attract businesses here, as we've been doing, while also protecting workers.

And I would point out to those who talk about the business climate, five years ago in 2021, New Jersey had about 250,000 employers.

Last year, that number was up to 290,000, and this year it's at 297,000.

So I think New Jersey has been doing a good job at attracting businesses, but we always strive to improve and to make it better, and I think the Sherrill administration is doing that.

In terms of tangibles, what are some things that this administration is doing to try to attract more business?

Sure.

Well, again, one of the things, as I mentioned, is that they're trying to streamline the permitting and licensing process.

That's something that we often hear from businesses.

Some of the other things we're doing are making sure that we're continuing to invest in our world-class workforce.

One of the things that always attracts businesses to New Jersey is the quality of our workforce and that's something near and dear to the hearts of us here at the Department of Labor where we invest money in training programs, apprenticeship programs to make sure that those employers who are coming to our state and who are already in our state have that pipeline of qualified trained people in the skills they need them to be trained in so that they can make their businesses viable and that's what we do here and we're going to continue to invest heavily in apprenticeship and job training.

I've had multiple discussions with the governor and lieutenant governor.

It's a priority for them and it's one that we're going to continue to work on.

Yeah I know that about nine million dollars was just invested into those apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs.

Just can you quickly tell us who you select and how that selection process is awarded?

Sure so those are two different programs the pre-apprenticeship and the gains program which are apprenticeships in non-traditional sectors.

A lot of people think of apprenticeships and they immediately think the building trades, bricklayers, laborers, carpenters, things of that.

But we've also expanded apprenticeship into those other high demand occupations that we see in New Jersey.

So we have apprenticeships in K through 12 education, certified nursing apprentices, IT, cybersecurity, and we're always looking to expand.

One of the ones we're looking to expand into now and we've been working on is an apprenticeship for meat cutters for our supermarkets and our food industries because we find that that's a high paying job and a job where there is a demand for skilled workers.

And so where that's part of a grant opportunity process.

In other words, we put out a notice of grant opportunities for those training grants and companies and employers apply for those.

We have those apprenticeships.

And since 2000.

Let me jump in here.

Sure.

I want to jump in here because I want to make sure we get to this.

The state recently expanded job protected leave for workers.

and what change will they see?

It really impacts everyone in New Jersey who works because by expanding those protections, the temporary disability insurance and family leave insurance, those programs apply to any and all employers, regardless of the size of the employer.

And it provides job protected leave to care for a seriously ill family member or for yourself.

This is not only part of those worker protections that I talked about that the governor is working to make sure that we continue to honor, but also it helps employers because as anyone knows a worker who is focused on God forbid a spouse who is fighting a condition a serious illness or their own disability and they have to come back to work before they're really ready because they are worried about their job their mind isn't on their job by providing this job protection and this leave it ensures that people are able to take the time to care for themselves or their loved one that they need so that when they do come back to work they're more productive.

And of course this doesn't apply to those covered by New Jersey family leave but folks can just look on their pay stub to see which type of insurance they have yes?

Correct, correct and family leave and family medical leave, the federal policies are still also available for people to use as well.

All right, we've got to leave it there.

Kevin Jarvis, acting commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Workforce and Labor and Workforce Development.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Sarana.

Under the Dome is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

It was Bayonne vs.

Everybody this summer as the Hudson County Little League All-Star team made it all the way to Williamsport for the first time ever as they competed in the Little League World Series.

The team picked up two exciting wins in the series before the All-Star players' historic run came to an end.

One of the players who helped them on that run was 12-year-old Mason Rincon alongside his dad and assistant coach Jamie Rincon.

They're both here with us now to share their highlights from the season.

Jamie, Mason, so great to have you guys here.

Congratulations on an epic run.

You've had an incredible run.

First, winning the state championship.

You went on to win the Metro Regional Tournament.

You were at Williamsport.

You had an entire community cheering you on.

Mason, I want to start with you.

Just what has this experience been like for you?

It's been a blast, you know, spending the time with my dad and also all my teammates.

It just felt special to be like we completed the goal and made it to Williamsport.

Yeah, Jamie, same question to you.

What's this felt like for you as a dad, as a coach, helping to contribute to the team's success, watching your son thrive like this?

It's been surreal because I'm now enjoying the journey because as we're going through it, I'm coaching.

So I'm strategizing, I'm thinking about the next team.

I'm always keeping them humble, bringing them back, making sure that the task at hand stays the task at hand.

But since we've been back, whether it's walking through the neighborhood and seeing someone that stops me just 'cause I have my Metro hat on, or they might recognize me, to thank me, you know, for being able to do the things that we did and be able to-- one person said, like, bring Bayonne back together.

Like, the community feels more like a community because of that, 'cause they were looking forward to whenever we played.

That's what makes it surreal.

Doing it with my son, I thank him because he took the 12-year-old me to Williamsport.

Because I remember when I was 12 and younger, watching it, wishing, hoping I could go, and never in my wildest dream did I would think that my son was able to take me to Williamsport.

So that 12-year-old me could live out his dream.

That's beautiful.

The kid at heart never goes away, right?

And you have to see that, have that moment and have it with your son.

Mason, I know you just started eighth grade.

You know, what's it been like coming home, the welcome home in Bayonne and beyond.

I mean, it wasn't just Bayonne cheering you on.

You have the whole state rallying behind you, walking through the halls in school.

What's it like now?

It's definitely special just to see everybody, you know, wanting an autograph, wanting a picture, or just like everybody welcoming me home.

Like all the applause that I'm getting when I get to school.

It's just amazing to see how my school just supports me and they congratulating me on my run.

- And of course it's a whole team effort and you guys fought hard together.

Mason, you caught the public's attention with that walk-off home run.

Is that your favorite moment of the series or do you have a different favorite moment?

What's your standout, that was my moment.

>> Just that wasn't necessarily the moment for the team.

I think it was just that final out of regionals, getting that ground ball right back to me and just flip it to Leandro at first base just felt like just so real.

Like my dad said, we just did that and we just made a Williamsport for the first time.

So yeah.

>> Jamie, you said you were locked in your coaching, you're strategizing that whole time.

What did you see in terms of the growth of these players, of the team as a unit, of the players individually?

>> The biggest thing was that they were a band of brothers.

I call them the Bayonne Brothers of Summer of 26.

And seeing the evolution of, if you go throughout our whole run, it wasn't just Mason, it wasn't just someone.

It was someone every game, every game, whether it's in districts, sectionals, states, regionals, even in Williamsport.

It was a Joey Dwyer making a catch in right field.

making a great play a short stop AJ Tapia getting a nice key hit.

Maybe it was Chase Klemkowski.

Like he pitched his butt off against the Mid-Atlantic team when we beat Pennsylvania.

It was Leandro making great plays at first base.

Jet Bridges was one of the keys in the comeback when we beat Connecticut in Regionals with the base hit to put us up 7-6. without his five RBI's in the Regional Championship, we don't make it to Williamsport.

So it was seeing how each, I talked about it throughout the run.

I'm like, everybody's going to have their moment.

Their moment will come.

And it was great to see that they believed, they kept their head down, we kept working.

And as we kept kind of like checking off a box, you see the belief even more and more.

And then you just saw like extraordinary, like I tell people magic happened.

Whether it was a state, whether it was us that regionals in the championship, I'm sure everybody thought we were gonna lose down 62 going into the third inning.

But our boys believed and their belief as a team was what got us to Williamsport.

And I was so proud of them and proud and happy that they were able to experience what they experienced in Williamsport.

Because it is like Disneyland for baseball for a little kid.

It's treated like a major leaguer from the moment you get there to even the moment you leave.

So it was just, I wish every 12 year old little leaguer can do it.

And I know that that's the best part of getting there is that not everybody can.

And I hope that next year there's another dad and a son that able to go experience because it beyond my wildest dreams, beyond my wildest dreams.

>> Mason, I wanna ask you what has baseball meant to you over the course of your life?

You started in Brooklyn, but you're here in Bayon, what has it meant to you?

>> It's meant a lot definitely cuz I just grew up playing baseball, I always used to go practice with my dad, whether it was like, like at right after school or a little late at night, but just it meant a lot to like make it there because it's just my whole life.

I've just been playing baseball and it just yeah, I'm not a lot.

>> I know that we celebrate the wins, you lost two games in this series.

And sometimes, we know the adage, you either win or you learn.

So Mason, I wanna ask you, what did you learn in those moments where you didn't win?

>> Just learn to be a team, it's not one guy that helps us win.

There's definitely people that highlight the win, but it's definitely you can't win with one person on the field.

There's other eight guys that need to help you win.

So just being as a team more and just not being selfish at the play or being selfish in the field.

Just competing as a team and seeing what the outcome is.

Yeah, beautifully said.

Bayonne versus everybody.

What does that mean to you both?

It's being the underdog.

Nobody thought we were going to win states.

Nobody thought maybe we would even pass sectionals.

So I think that's where it resonates.

Because being on such a small community, it gets probably overshadowed because we're so close to New York City.

And I think that that's where it came from.

We're going to work hard.

We're going to give you 100%.

We're going to hustle.

We're going to have grit.

And at the end of the day, we could be OK with that.

And that's what got us to Williamsport.

That's what got us to Regionals.

And it allowed the world to understand that, you know what?

It's OK being the underdog.

And I love it.

I love the Bayonne versus everyone.

I love seeing it on t-shirts.

I love seeing it on sweaters.

So it took-- it got a whole life of its own once we were at Williamsport, because our community did travel.

We had three buses, four buses, five buses.

The whole section on the west side-- They showed up.

Oh, they did.

They turned out.

They showed up.

And we were-- those of us who didn't get on the bus, we were rooting you on.

Jamie and Mason Rincone, great job.

Congratulations.

You are champions to all of us.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Do you ever wonder if we're alone in space or if there's more out there?

Well, Rutgers University is participating in a study that's capturing images of the southern sky through a massive new camera, giving us never-before-seen images into the beyond.

Saurabh Jha is a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at Rutgers who's helping to analyze the results, and I recently spoke to him about the project.

Saurabh Jha, so great to see you on the show.

Can you tell us a little bit more about this legacy survey of space and time and what it will accomplish?

Yeah, this is going to be a huge revolutionary leap forward in our ability to observe the dynamic universe.

So with the Rubin Observatory in Chile, which is a large six and a half meter diameter telescope, and attached to that telescope is the world's largest digital camera, and it's going to take pictures of the sky unlike we've ever seen before.

With such a wide field of view, it can go and look at the basically the whole sky in just a period of a few days, taking a point after point after point, and then after those few days it's going to go back and do it over and over and over.

And so far our views of the sky have really been images.

You've seen pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope or the Hubble Space Telescope.

Those are static images.

What the Rubin Observatory and its legacy survey of space and time are going to do is make a movie of the universe.

We're going to see the changing dynamic universe over 10 years, getting images over and over of the sky, seeing all the different things that change in the universe.

So I'm very excited about that.

That's really near and dear to my own research.

I'm curious, is there anything you're looking for in particular when it comes to changes, when it comes to this dynamic universe?

Yeah, for me, my research is to study exploding stars, what we call supernovae.

So these are stars at the end of their lives and some of them, not all, some of them explode.

And we can see those stellar explosions halfway across the universe.

And so far over the past, you know, decades, we've observed thousands of these exploding stars.

And with the Rubin Observatory, over its 10-year survey, we're going to observe millions of exploding stars.

So for me, that's the research that I'm most excited with, study those stars and how they explode.

And the other thing about those is those exploding stars can tell us about things we don't see.

So one of the big discoveries that we've made over the last decades in astronomy is the idea that most of the universe is dark.

Most of the universe is stuff we can't see.

And so you might ask, well, why are we building a telescope for things we can't see?

And the reason is that what we see is the effects of those dark components of the universe on the things we can see.

So for example, dark matter and dark energy, those are two parts of the universe that we have inferred that must exist out there because of their effects on the things that we can see.

And in particular, what I studied... What is that?

Can I jump in here?

What is dark matter?

What is dark energy?

Just put that into layman's terms.

We don't know.

That's the great question.

Those are the questions that the Rubin Observatory is going to try and figure out.

What are those things?

Those are basically names that we have for things that we know must be out there because of the effects that we see.

So for example, we see that galaxies spin faster than they should, or clusters of galaxies, the galaxies move around faster than they should.

We see the whole universe expanding faster and faster with time.

That's not what we expected if there wasn't anything else out there, any of this dark matter or dark energy.

So we see the effects of those things on the stars and galaxies that we can observe, and we don't know what they are.

We want to know what they are.

And so with the Rubin Observatory and its survey, what we're going to do is we're going to study these galaxies and exploding stars in more detail and in more numbers than we've ever had before.

And that's going to help us hopefully understand what is dark matter and what is dark energy beyond the effects that we already know about.

So we know that this is a 10 year study.

Let me ask you this.

How do you believe that the images, the data that comes out of this will help to shape perhaps an entire generation of study of the universe?

For sure.

This is a long-term endeavor.

And so we're really excited that it has just started.

And in fact, just with a few weeks or even a year of data, we're going to learn, we're going to go beyond what we had done before.

So that's going to be very exciting.

So throughout the 10-year survey, it's not like you have to wait until all 10 years are done and then we'll learn something.

Throughout that survey, we're going to learn more and more about the universe.

So I'm very excited for students, especially like graduate students or undergraduate students or even elementary school students or high school students, as this LSST starts now, the things that we're going to learn from the data over the next decade, you know, should revolutionize our understanding of astronomy and cosmology and our place in the universe.

So it's a really exciting time for that long survey to begin.

The Rubin Observatory is in Chile.

I have to ask, how did Rutgers get involved in this?

That's right.

So the amazing thing, so the Rubin Observatory is, there are people from all over the world involved, but the prime sort of sponsors of the Rubin Observatory are the National Science Foundation in the United States, which really built the observatory, the telescope that you're looking at right there, and the United States Department of Energy, which is the organization that built the digital camera, the world's largest digital camera.

So you need both.

You need the telescope and the camera to take the pictures.

And once that enterprise, basically anyone in the United States or in Chile or other partners around the world can get the data.

So at Rutgers, we're very interested in ideas about galaxies and the universe, how the universe has formed, how it's evolved with time, what is dark matter, what is dark energy.

So Rutgers astronomers have been involved in planning for Rubin and working on how Rubin is going to observe the universe for a long time.

So we're really excited about getting this data, getting as things get started and seeing what we can see.

And I know you touched on the camera, but just help us better understand the magnitude of this camera that we're talking about.

This is not something you pick up in your hands.

That's right.

So, you know, in your phone, you have a little tiny camera that takes beautiful pictures.

This camera is the size of an automobile.

So it is a huge, large digital camera.

And it's the thing that allows us to take a picture of a wide part of the sky.

So many full moons in diameter.

If you can imagine looking up at the full moon and you say, oh, that's a pretty small piece of the sky.

This camera can do many full moons across at one time.

And because it's attached to such a big telescope that can collect a lot of light, we don't have to take a long exposure.

So this camera takes an exposure of about 30 seconds and then it moves on to the next piece of the sky and takes another picture.

And so every 30 seconds or so, new data is coming from the telescope, gets sent off to processing centers in the United States and other places in the world.

And then that data become available.

So over and over, big pictures of the sky, just one image from the Rubin Observatory and its camera would fill 400 high definition TVs.

So if you think about 400 flat screen TVs, you'd have to put them side by side just to observe at the pixel level, one image from the Rubin camera.

And then we're gonna get an image like that every 30 seconds or so.

And so every night that the weather is good, the telescope is gonna be observing for 10 years.

So we're gonna collect tons and tons of data, petabytes of data, filling up hard drives all around the world.

And then, you know, we're gonna see that movie of the universe.

So that's really the most exciting thing.

- Absolutely incredible.

And really just makes you realize how tiny we are in this massive universe that we exist in.

So Rob Jha, distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at Rutgers University.

Thanks very much.

That's going to do it for us.

I'm Joanna Gaggis for the entire team here at NJ Spotlight News.

Thanks for being with us.

We'll see you right back here tomorrow.

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