- Height5′ 11″ (1.80 m)
- Derek Abbott was born in South Kensington, London UK in 1960. In 1978, he began work at the GEC Hirst Research Centre, London, UK, and graduated from Loughborough University, UK, with a BSc (Hons) in Physics. He migrated to Australia in 1986, and worked at Austek Microsystems as an analog VLSI design engineer until 1987. He took up at the University of Adelaide, where he completed his PhD in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, graduating in 1997. He was promoted to full Professor in 2006. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (USA) and also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (UK).
His interests are in complex systems, mathematics, probability, photonics, renewable energy, and forensic genealogy.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Derek Abbott
- SpouseRachel Egan(2010 - present)
- The fact that there simply is 5,000 times more sun power than our consumption needs makes me very optimistic. It's a fantastic resource. We have the ingenuity to send man to the moon, so we definitively have the ingenuity to tap the sun's resources.
- The biggest challenge is escaping from the economic effects of vendor lock-in where large investments in nuclear and traditional energy sources keep us 'locked-in' to feeding monsters that will bring us down an economic black hole. It's rather like the play The Little Shop of Horrors where a man-eating plant is initially fed small amounts, but then its voracious appetite sends it into a downward spiral swallowing up anyone that gets in its way.
- As with most 'paradoxes,' it is not that our intuition is necessarily bad, but that our intuition has been badly informed
- In a healthy democracy, when a party wins by a small margin, instead of name-calling the 'dumb' voters of the opposition, we should be celebrating the fact that the opposing voters preserved the integrity of democracy
- In many committee meetings, in today's big organizations, there is a trend towards the idea that decisions must be unanimous. A wise committee should accept that difference of opinion and simply record there was a disagreement. The recording of the disagreement is not a negative, but a positive that demonstrates that a systemic bias is less likely.
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