Reopening amid the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a battle on social media. The supporters perceived that the lockdown policy could damage the economy and exacerbate social inequality. By contrast, the opponents believed it was necessary to contain the spread and ensure a safe environment for recovery. Anatomy into the battle is of importance to address public concerns, beliefs, and values, thereby enabling policymakers to determine the appropriate solutions to implement reopening policy. To this end, we investigated over 1.5 million related Twitter postings from April 17 to May 30, 2020. With the aid of natural language processing (NLP) techniques and machine learning classifiers, we classified each tweet into either a “supporting” or “opposing” class and then investigated the public perception from temporal and spatial perspectives. From the temporal dimension, we found that both political and scientific news that were extensively discussed on Twitter led to the perception of opposing reopening. Further, being the first mover with full reopen adversely affected the public reaction to reopening policy, while being the follower or late mover resulted in positive responses. From the spatial dimension, the correlation and regression analyses suggest that the state-level perception was very likely to be associated with political affiliation and health value.

No abstract

The recent increasing trend of investments in wind energy projects to support sustainable development requires an appropriate risk evaluation model to ensure the success of these projects. Early studies focus on opinion and discussion from subject matter experts. However, the expertise level in the subject is varied, and evaluation without considering expert competency can cause biased results. On the other hand, most of the project cost estimation models do not consider uncertainty in all cash flow parameters. In response, this article proposes a model that evaluates risks in wind energy investment projects by considering the knowledge and background of experts. Then, an integrated model of risk evaluation and cost estimation is developed. The model consists of three main stages: risk identification based on a systematic literature review (SLR); risk analysis phase 1 based on a modified fuzzy group decision-making; and risk analysis phase 2 based on a Monte Carlo simulation method. The main advantages of the proposed model are: (a) providing a comprehensive risk identification in wind energy investment projects; (b) using a modified fuzzy model to improve the risk assessment process by considering the expert competency in wind energy projects; and (c) establishing an integrated model to evaluate the cash flow of the investment. A wind farm in the Middle East is selected as the case study to examine the usability and practicality of the proposed model. The results show that the most important risks are ‘change in regulation and policy’, ‘dependency on the international market for importing raw materials’ and ‘market competitiveness’. On the other hand, the financial assessment under uncertainty shows that the profitability of the investment can be varied, and it emphasises the importance of an appropriate risk management process to guarantee the success of the investment.

No abstract

No abstract