The head is one of the leading communication tools a dog will use to let other dogs know what it's thinking and feeling. The head consists of several body parts and each one is used in conjunction with the others to send the memo about its intentions: the position of the head, what the eyes are doing, the position of the ears, what the dog's mouth is doing. In a wonderful book by one on my favorite authors, How to Speak Dog, Stanley Coren gives it to us step-by-step. When we learn to put it all together, we can understand what our dogs are telling us.

The mouth of a dog gives plenty of information on how the dog may be feeling. It can tell you if the dog is angry or fearful, if something is interesting, or "Hey, I am totally relaxed." A relaxed dog will have relaxed facial muscles with the mouth slightly open. Just the simple act of closing that mouth or a slight change in the head position and the dog is telling us it is interested in something else and evaluating the situation.

How many times have you heard the phrase "It's just a dog"? But time is certainly changing our opinions and treatment toward - and our lives with - our furry companions. "A dog is a family member" is a good way to describe the evolution taking place.

Focusing on "It's just a dog" suggests that dogs are creatures with no ability to think; they just follow humans around for food and shelter. Consequently, dogs must have no feelings. No joy, no anger, no love, no loss.

We are lucky to live in a time in which such viewpoints are changing, and huge kudos must be given to early dog trainers and animal behaviorists for realizing that the "dogs have no feelings" argument is clearly wrong.

In May 2015, the federal government suffered a massive data breach, a hack that exposed the names and Social Security numbers of more than 21-million people.

In a press release, the Office of Personal Management (OPM) reported that as a result of its "aggressive effort to upgrade the agency's cybersecurity posture," the agency discovered the massive theft of background records, reportedly originating in China, including "identification details such as Social Security numbers; residency and educational history; employment history; information about immediate family and other personal and business acquaintances; health, criminal, and financial history; and other details. Some records also include findings from interviews conducted by background investigators and fingerprints. User names and passwords that background-investigation applicants used to fill out their background-investigation forms were also stolen."

This was a new breach - not the same looting of 4.2-million records that the agency discovered in April of this year.

The news didn't stop OPM Director Katherine Archuleta, appointed to the post in 2013, from congratulating herself for the agency's great strides in security. It was her "comprehensive IT strategic plan" that led to the knowledge that these incidents had happened.

But Archuleta lasted about one day after praising herself for noticing the theft, and the latest news is that the fingerprints of 5.6-million people were also grabbed in the mega-hacking of OPM's "cybersecurity posture."

OPM assures us that "federal experts believe that, as of now, the ability to misuse fingerprint data is limited." As of right now ... this second ... as we hit the press ... you probably have nothing to worry about if your fingerprints got stolen from OPM's data banks. Hurrah.

Even Archuleta would probably concede that discovering a robbery is not quite as good as preventing it. But let's go so far as to say that the nature of bureaucracy itself is more to blame than Archuleta is for having failed to fix how her agency functions.

Of course, governments are not the only organizations vulnerable to being cyber-attacked because of lax security. Other victims in recent years have included Target, Chase, and Sony.

But it's the decades-old privacy-invading policies of the federal government that have routinely converted all such breaches of personal data into potentially limitless disasters for the victims.

It's "war on cops" season again, in which politicians and pundits toss around the political football of officer safety. So now is an opportune time to look at the dangers of police work.

First, the big headline numbers: fatalities and homicides.

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF) keeps track of all the officers who have died on the job, from any cause, going back to the 19th Century.

Looking at officer fatalities per million residents since 1900, the broad sweep of history shows that police work has been getting a lot safer since Prohibition ended (with a temporary reversal during the 1960s and 1970s).

But, of course, not all fatalities are homicides. In fact, in recent years, only about a third of work-related police deaths have been from murder.

NLEOMF doesn't separately track homicides, but the FBI has its own database for felony killings of police in the past few decades. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has also conducted a national police census every four years since 1992, giving us some reliable estimates for the total number of sworn officers up through 2008.

And no matter how you slice it, police work has been getting a lot safer. Fatalities and murders of police have been falling for decades - per resident, per officer, and even in absolute terms.