William T. White – författare

Rays are among the largest fishes and evolved from shark-like ancestors nearly 200 million years ago. They share with sharks many life history traits: all species are carnivores or scavengers; all reproduce by internal fertilisation; and all have similar morphological and anatomical characteristics, such as skeletons built of cartilage. Rays of the World is the first complete pictorial atlas of the world’s ray fauna and includes information on many species only recently discovered by scientists while undertaking research for the book. It includes all 26 families and 633 valid named species of rays, but additional undescribed species exist for many groups.

Rays of the World features a unique collection of paintings of all living species by Australian natural history artist Lindsay Marshall, compiled as part of a multinational research initiative, the Chondrichthyan Tree of Life Project. Images sourced from around the planet were used by the artist to illustrate the fauna. This comprehensive overview of the world’s ray fauna summarises information such as general identifying features and distributional information about these iconic, but surprisingly poorly known, fishes. It will enable readers to gain a better understanding of the rich diversity of rays and promote wider public interest in the group.

Rays of the World is an ideal reference for a wide range of readers, including conservationists, fishery managers, scientists, fishers, divers, students and book collectors.

This book presents an extension of economic theory to economic organization. It argues that "economic man" seeks to better his lot through a combination of market maximization and cooperation with others, in contrast with the prominent view that self-seeking in markets must be compromised or society will become "a war of all against all". In Chapter 1, the book presents the basics of a unified economic theory that erases the numerous conflicts between microeconomics, the study of individuals acting in markets and macroeconomics, the study of nation-state economics as a whole. Chapter 2 looks at related other schools of thought in economics, including most notably Law and Economics and Catholic economics. While some others schools of economic thought do treat economic organization, none recognizes that economic organizations exist fundamentally to reduce the costs of the communication that makes possible inter-individual economic cooperation. Chapter 3 tells the story of selected utopian communities, which from the economic point of view were attempts to keep economies small enough so that communications in economic matters were essentially costless. Chapter 4 discusses examples of models in microeconomics that require revision to incorporate a more adequate treatment of communications costs and of the economic organizations created to contain them. Chapters 5 and 6 do the same for macroeconomics and international economics, respectively. Chapter 7 discusses the basic failures of the securities markets, which have degenerated so far from their rational function that secrecy and lying, rather than truth-based economic cooperation is the principal source of profits for securities fims.