What Is Online Banking

Online banking (or Internet banking or E-banking) allows customers of a financial institution to conduct financial transactions on a secure website operated by the institution, which can be a retail or virtual bank, credit union or building society.

To access a financial institution's online banking facility, a customer having personal Internet access must register with the institution for the service, and set up some password (under various names) for customer verification. The password for online banking is normally not the same as for telephone banking. Financial institutions now routinely allocate customer numbers (also under various names), whether or not customers intend to access their online banking facility. Customer numbers are normally not the same as account numbers, because a number of accounts can be linked to the one customer number. The customer will link to the customer number any of those accounts which the customer controls, which may be cheque, savings, loan, credit card and other accounts.

To access online banking, the customer would go to the financial institution's website, and enter the online banking facility using the customer number and password. Some financial institutions have set up additional security steps for access, but there is no consistency to the approach adopted.

Features

Online banking facilities offered by various financial institutions have many features and capabilities in common, but also have some that are application specific.

The common features fall broadly into several categories

 A bank customer can perform some non-transactional tasks through online banking, including: 

• viewing account balances

•  viewing recent transactions

•  downloading bank statements, for example in PDF format

•  viewing images of paid cheques

•  ordering cheque books

• Bank customers can transact banking tasks through online banking, including -
• Funds transfers between the customer's linked accounts
• Paying third parties, including bill payments (see, eg., BPAY) and telegraphic/wire transfers
• Investment purchase or sale
• Loan applications and transactions, such as repayments of enrollments

• Financial institution administration
• Management of multiple users having varying levels of authority
• Transaction approval process
 

Here is some example of online banking web page and link: 

•  CIMB Bank

http://www.cimbclicks.com.my/ 

 

• Maybank 
  http://www.maybank2u.com.my/ 

 

Plastic Surgery

Plastic surgery is a medical specialty concerned with the correction or restoration of form and function. Though cosmetic or aesthetic surgery is the best-known kind of plastic surgery, most plastic surgery is not cosmetic: plastic surgery includes many types of reconstructive surgery, hand surgery,microsurgery, and the treatment of burns.

Reconstructive plastic surgery is performed to correct functional impairments caused by burns; traumatic injuries, such as facial bone fractures and breaks; congenital abnormalities, such as cleft palates or cleft lips; developmental abnormalities; infection and disease; and cancer or tumors. Reconstructive plastic surgery is usually performed to improve function, but it may be done to approximate a normal appearance.

The most common reconstructive procedures are tumor removal, laceration repair, scar repair, hand surgery, and breast reduction. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the number of reconstructive breast reductions for women increased in 2007 by 2 percent from the year before. Breast reduction in men also increased in 2007 by 7 percent. Some other common reconstructive surgical procedures include breast reconstruction after a mastectomy, cleft lip and palate surgery, contracture surgery for burn survivors, and creating a new outer ear when one is congenitally absent.

Plastic surgeons use microsurgery to transfer tissue for coverage of a defect when no local tissue is available. Free flaps of skin, muscle, bone, fat, or a combination may be removed from the body, moved to another site on the body, and reconnected to a blood supply by suturing arteries and veins as small as 1 to 2 millimeters in diameter.

Madonna before and after plastic surgery

 

Angelina Jolie before and after plastic surgery

LYNAS

The Lynas Corporation issue has been going on for a while now. This is one serious matter which needs to be addressed or it would have a lot of consequences later. In fact, it all began when the government invited Lynas Corp to build its plant in the Kuantan area where it would be producing rare earth materials. Make no mistake about this, rare earth are not that rare to begin with.

In fact, rare earth metals can be found in several places and the whole production involves mining and extracting it. Rare earth metals are important as it is used to produce many of today’s devices. This include the likes of catalytic converters, wind turbines, the more known disk drives, hybrid car batteries, mobile phones as well as television screen displays. This means that rare earth metal is pretty much one of the material which is used to power up today’s appliances, which means that if it can be produced in Malaysia, the cost of these devices could be greatly reduced. But is that going to be the case.

At the moment, supply of rare earth in the world comes from China which commands some 97% of the supply. These minerals are found in ores where it contain very small amounts of uranium and thorium, which are radioactive elements and hence, there is a very important debate about whether it would be hazardous.

The argument for Lynas is that people are constantly being exposed to a certain radioactive exposure level which is at 1mSv per year. The Lyncas project involves Lynas Corp of Australia which is involved in the production and sale of rare earth ores and its products. What it wants to do in Gebeng, which is not far from Kuantan is to process the rare earth ore which they mine from Mount Weld in Western Australia. The rare earth ore will come through the container which will port at Kuantan.

Their reason is that there are skilled workers and gas and water supplies here while it is also located close to the Kuantan port. In Gebent, Lynas Corp will extract the rare earth minerals from the ore where they will mostly be used for export.

The big question is what about the waste? That is the biggest concern that drew Himpunan Hijau to protest. Lynas Corp claims that the waste will be used to make products which will be safe or tored in secure containers in certain sites. Where exactly are the sites? Is it going to be in Malaysia? Word has it that to attract Lynas to build their site here, they are exempted from 12 years of tax. So who is actually benefiting from all this?

Nobody wants the waste from the rare earth ore because they are radioactive. No country wants them. What happens when they run out of space to store the waste? What if they pour it into Kuantan river? All this questions must be answered and they must be satisfactory before they can start their operations because if not, there will surely be long term effects.