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Kat Downs Mulder

Tag Archive: health

A workout at work and/or my 15 minutes of fame

To create this graphic about exercises you can do at the office, the entire graphics department of the Post got together twice a day to do the exercises. It was a hilarious group activity — we attracted a lot of stares from passersby in the newsroom. I really enjoyed jumping around a little bit in the middle of the day to get the blood pumping.

The graphic was a fun collaboration between Laura Stanton, who illustrated many of the department members, Sohail Al-Jamea, who created the animations, Bonnie Berkowitz, who was our exercise leader and researched and wrote all the text and conducted the survey, and me — I helped design and build the interactive and set up the videos and polls.

So far we have had a lot of people voting — about 1,700 for the first exercise. It’s fun to see how people have responded to each exercise, and we’re hoping it is promoting engagement with the piece.

September 19, 2011 Information Graphics, , , , , , , , , , Read more >

Games: Testing your memory

I worked on these games last Monday for publication with Tuesday’s health section. Reporter Leslie Tamura collected a whole bunch of tests that indicate how you’re aging compared to peers. We decided to take some of those tests and replicate them for our online readers. We decided on word recall, face recognition and response time. Simple, but fun. Check them out!

December 20, 2010 Information Graphics, , , , , , , Read more >

The Cost of War

This past Sunday “Coming home a different person” launched, a project I worked on with Whitney Shefte and Alberto Cuadra, alongside reporter Chris Davenport. It features an overview video that covers the increases in traumatic brain injury cases and what doctors are doing to treat it, as well as five case studies of three soldiers and two Marines, and a graphic that explains the science of brain injury.

I initially heard about the story Chris Davenport was working on and thought, wow, this is an amazing multimedia opportunity. I went to Whitney and asked her if she’d like to work on it with me. We huddled with Chris and storyboarded out a basic flow for the intro video and the entire piece — how it would be structured and how we should integrate the graphics with the videos. Read more about how we developed this multimedia piece »

October 7, 2010 Multimedia, , , , , , , , , , , , , , Read more >

New county map: Ultra-high Medicare Billing Rates

I re-purposed the unemployment map for this story about ultra-high billing rates at skilled nursing facilities in the U.S. It shows where facilities are billing ultra-high rates. The Washington Post found that nursing homes have flooded ‘ultra-high’ billing categories with patients, and the amount of waste and abuse could reach billions of dollars a year. Check out the graphic or read the story by Scott Higham and Dan Keating.

March 29, 2010 Maps, , , , , , Read more >

Darfur & FFI

Two fun items on the agenda: Darfur: Who Will Survive Now? and FFI

The Holocaust Memorial Museum had a special display of photographs on the outside of their building last week to raise awareness about the situation in Darfur. They projected enormous photographs onto the three walls on the outside of the building, which were accompanied by music. The images, which were taken by several photojournalists, were hauntingly beautiful. The multimedia presentation was incredibly effective. If you check out the links above, you can see a simulation of the presentation.

NPR had a story last week about a new book coming out, The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, by D.T. Max, which focuses on a family with Fatal Familial Insomnia, a rare hereditary disease related to Mad Cow that kicks in in a person’s late 50s, and makes it impossible to sleep. After about 9 months, the patient dies, basically from having been awake for nine months. There are only 2 families in the U.S. with this disorder, and 20 that are known in the world.

November 28, 2006 Multimedia, , , , Read more >

The Betrayal of the Breakfast Bar

As a faithful fan of breakfast bars, I bought some this weekend on my massive grocery trip. I decided to try something new (I usually go with Nutri-Grain Muffin Bars, Banana Nut- delish), and I picked out Smart Start Healthy Heart Bars, in Strawberry Vanilla.

DO NOT GO THERE.

This morning, I innocently took a bite at my desk. On first bite, I was a bit disgusted, as I don’t like overly sweet things.

My criteria for a delicious breakfast bar:
-moist, but not sticky
-yummy
-doesn’t taste like candy
-doesn’t cause tooth decay
-goes well with yogurt

Now, that list may seem simple to satisfy. Unfortunately, after a few bites of my Heart Smart bar, I realized that it just wasn’t up to par. And so, I decided to check the label.

Iron: Check
Calcium: Check
Vitamin A: Check

Well the problem didn’t seem to lie in the nutritional facts table. So I moved on to ingredients, where I discovered THE PROBLEM.

Ingredients: Oat bran, rice, corn syrup, sugar, fructose…

Now, in a breakfast bar-which by definition must be good for you and a nice “heart healthy” way to start your day- should not have THREE of its top five ingredients be sugar variants. Big Problem.

Since when does Heart Healthy mean “Kill your Pancreas!”?

October 10, 2006 Random Thoughts, Read more >

Foods for fullness

An article about the top 10 foods that keep you full in Women’s Health magazine listed the following foods:

White potatoes
Eggs
Oatmeal
Beans
Fish
Soup
Apples
Beef
Salad
Popcorn

What this means for me and you is that if you eat these foods often, you’re less likely to spend your money on food, which is critical at this point. My plan is oatmeal in the morning, soup for lunch, and beef — it’s for dinner.

Yum.

September 17, 2006 Random Thoughts, Read more >