New Users Please Read

For New Users

This External Brain is built with TheBrain software, a powerful knowledge management system that is extremely flexible and has a very short learning curve. To better understand why we've chosen TheBrain software for this purpose, click here to jump to the relevant thought.

You don't need to be familiar with TheBrain software to take advantage of this External Brain. If you are new to our External Brains), a few pointers:

1. When you enter an External Brain you'll see that the screen is split into a "Plex" (to the left) and a Notes Field (where you're reading this text). You navigate through an External Brains via the thoughts in the Plex, including the categories of thoughts "pinned" to the top of the Plex.

2. In the Notes Field you can read text, watch videos, and access URLs.

3. We've structured this External Brain around Mini-Brains, each of which organizes information specific to an individual sub-topic. We limit the amount of information organized in Mini-Brains in order to avoid information overload.

4. Mini-Brains can contain different kinds of materials but are organized consistently as follows (materials in order of potential appearance):

• Pro and Con Arguments (Blue)
• Graphics by Year (Violet)
• Text Extracts by Year (Light Brown)
• Publications by Year (Light Blue)
• News and Opinion by Year and Month (Tan)
• Videos by Year (Purple)
• Web Sites and Other Resources

5. You'll also see collections of pre-set search terms. These are customized for the topic you've landed on, and automatically launch searches using Google, Google Scholar, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Quora.com, Reddit and potentially other sites. These pre-set search terms are a very quick way to check for relevant information on-line.

6. The larger your screensize, the easier it is to navigate an External Brain. If you are accessing an External Brain through a tablet or smartphone, their smaller screens make navigation a bit more challenging, but everything works in basically the same way.

7. When you click on a category of Mini-Brains via the thoughts pinned to the top of the Plex, you'll see multiple Mini-Brains associated with each category. Mini-Brains are color-coded as follows:

• Green - These simplest of the Mini-Brains have a single "parent thought," and all of the other thoughts are linked to that parent. The number of thoughts is limited to ~30, making the Mini-Brain extremely simple to explore. Most Mini-Brains fall into this category.

• Yellow - These Mini-Brains still have a single "parent thought, but not all of the rest of the thoughts are directly linked to that parent thought. So you can click down through some thoughts to subsidiary thoughts. The number of thoughts in these Mini-Brain is larger, but the Mini-Brains are still very simple to explore.

• Orange: These Mini-Brains may contain many more thoughts (up to a few hundred), and therefore involve more complex organization. But everything in these Mini-Brains is still physically connected and therefore easy to explore by clicking your way through the Mini-Brain.

8. In most cases the Mini-Brains are joined together by a "Tag" rather than a physical link (you can see the little tag icon). That means that when you click on a specific Mini-Brain the Tag and the other Mini-Brains will seem to disappear. We do that to avoid visual clutter while you are exploring a Mini-Brain. To pull the Mini-Brain collection up again just click on the category thought pinned to the top of the Plex.

9. If you are accessing this Mini-Brain on-line for the first time can access everything in the External Brain, but getting to a lot of the information will involve clicking on URL links that will then open up as new Tabs in your browser. You can avoid this by downloading the External Brain (see the On-Line vs. Download Access thought at left)

10. The information we organize in Mini-Brains is publicly available, and you could replicate much of what's in Mini-Brains with enough Web searching. But even then you wouldn't come across some of the most interesting websites, videos, infographics, and other materials we've run across in our 20,000 hours of searching, and that you can find in these External Brains.

You'll probably get the hang of navigating External Brains in just a couple of minutes, even via your browser, and don't hesitate to send questions to the Climatographers via info@yourexternalbrains.com. Your feedback will allow us to figure out how we can make your user experience as productive as possible.

Mark Trexler and Laura Kosloff

The Climatographers