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Inside the Making of “Terror in Little Saigon”

A.C. Thompson and Richard Rowley’s search for answers into the killings of five Vietnamese-American journalists took them from cities like Houston and San Francisco, to the jungles of Southeast Asia, to the corridors of power in Washington.




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Terror in Little Saigon

From 1981 to 1990, five Vietnamese-American journalists were killed in what some suspected was a string of political assassinations. Why did the murders go unsolved?




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Religious violence, gender and post-secular counterterrorism

4 March 2020 , Volume 96, Number 2

Katherine E. Brown

This article argues that despite the framing of religion in the discipline and practice of International Relations (IR) as a force for good, or a cause of evil in the world, IR fails to treat religion on its own terms (as sui generis). With a few exceptions, the discipline has pigeonholed religion as a variable of IR, one that can be discussed as one might GDP, HIV, or numbers of nuclear missiles: measurable, with causality and essential properties. IR has also tended to treat religion as equivalent to features of global politics that it already recognizes—as an institution or community or ideology, for example—but in doing so, it misses intrinsic (and arguably unique) elements of religion. Drawing on feminist insights about how gender works in IR, namely that gender is a construct, performative and structural, this article argues a similar case for religion. A reframing of religion is applied to the case of Daesh (so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS) to show how our understanding of the organization changes when we view religion differently. The implications for counterterrorism policies if religion is viewed as more than a variable are explored in light of recent territorial and military losses for Daesh. The article therefore proposes a post-secular counterterrorism approach.




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Online Counterterrorism: The Role of the Public and Private Sectors




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Negotiating With Terrorists




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Jihad and Terrorism in Pakistan: The Case of Lashkar-e-Taiba




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Cubature method to solve BSDEs: Error expansion and complexity control

Jean-Francois Chassagneux and Camilo A. Garcia Trillos
Math. Comp. 89 (2020), 1895-1932.
Abstract, references and article information





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Goodness-of-fit test in the Cox proportional hazards model with measurement errors

A. G. Kukush and O. O. Chernova
Theor. Probability and Math. Statist. 99 (2020), 125-135.
Abstract, references and article information




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Genetic evidence for reconfiguration of DNA polymerase {theta} active site for error-free translesion synthesis in human cells [DNA and Chromosomes]

The action mechanisms revealed by the biochemical and structural analyses of replicative and translesion synthesis (TLS) DNA polymerases (Pols) are retained in their cellular roles. In this regard, DNA polymerase θ differs from other Pols in that whereas purified Polθ misincorporates an A opposite 1,N6-ethenodeoxyadenosine (ϵdA) using an abasic-like mode, Polθ performs predominantly error-free TLS in human cells. To test the hypothesis that Polθ adopts a different mechanism for replicating through ϵdA in human cells than in the purified Pol, here we analyze the effects of mutations in the two highly conserved tyrosine residues, Tyr-2387 and Tyr-2391, in the Polθ active site. Our findings that these residues are indispensable for TLS by the purified Pol but are not required in human cells, as well as other findings, provide strong evidence that the Polθ active site is reconfigured in human cells to stabilize ϵdA in the syn conformation for Hoogsteen base pairing with the correct nucleotide. The evidence that a DNA polymerase can configure its active site entirely differently in human cells than in the purified Pol establishes a new paradigm for DNA polymerase function.




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Artificial Intelligence Prediction and Counterterrorism

9 August 2019

The use of AI in counterterrorism is not inherently wrong, and this paper suggests some necessary conditions for legitimate use of AI as part of a predictive approach to counterterrorism on the part of liberal democratic states.

Kathleen McKendrick

British Army Officer, Former Visiting Research Fellow at Chatham House

2019-08-06-AICounterterrorism.jpg

Surveillance cameras manufactured by Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. at a testing station near the company’s headquarters in Hangzhou, China. Photo: Getty Images

Summary

  • The use of predictive artificial intelligence (AI) in countering terrorism is often assumed to have a deleterious effect on human rights, generating spectres of ‘pre-crime’ punishment and surveillance states. However, the well-regulated use of new capabilities may enhance states’ abilities to protect citizens’ right to life, while at the same time improving adherence to principles intended to protect other human rights, such as transparency, proportionality and freedom from unfair discrimination. The same regulatory framework could also contribute to safeguarding against broader misuse of related technologies.
  • Most states focus on preventing terrorist attacks, rather than reacting to them. As such, prediction is already central to effective counterterrorism. AI allows higher volumes of data to be analysed, and may perceive patterns in those data that would, for reasons of both volume and dimensionality, otherwise be beyond the capacity of human interpretation. The impact of this is that traditional methods of investigation that work outwards from known suspects may be supplemented by methods that analyse the activity of a broad section of an entire population to identify previously unknown threats.
  • Developments in AI have amplified the ability to conduct surveillance without being constrained by resources. Facial recognition technology, for instance, may enable the complete automation of surveillance using CCTV in public places in the near future.
  • The current way predictive AI capabilities are used presents a number of interrelated problems from both a human rights and a practical perspective. Where limitations and regulations do exist, they may have the effect of curtailing the utility of approaches that apply AI, while not necessarily safeguarding human rights to an adequate extent.
  • The infringement of privacy associated with the automated analysis of certain types of public data is not wrong in principle, but the analysis must be conducted within a robust legal and policy framework that places sensible limitations on interventions based on its results.
  • In future, broader access to less intrusive aspects of public data, direct regulation of how those data are used – including oversight of activities by private-sector actors – and the imposition of technical as well as regulatory safeguards may improve both operational performance and compliance with human rights legislation. It is important that any such measures proceed in a manner that is sensitive to the impact on other rights such as freedom of expression, and freedom of association and assembly.




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Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Terrorism: Tomorrow's Threat

1 March 2007 , Number 11

In early November, the retiring head of Britain’s Security Service MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, warned that the danger of a terror attack was ‘serious’ and ‘growing’, with as many as thirty plots underway. Traditional terrorism of the sort practised by the Irish Republican Army has given way to the possibility, if not the expectation, that groups such as Al Qaeda might make use of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons and materials in an attack in Britain. So what are the dangers?

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Syrian Special Forces in gas masks, Saudi Arabia 1990




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Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65940: You might receive "ERROR: PI Point not found" when you query a PI tag name that contains a special character such as an ampersand (&)

When you query a PI tag name or element that contains a special character, such as an ampersand (&), you might receive the following error:



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Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65939: "ERROR: Unable to transcode data to/from UCS-2 encoding" occurs when you run an SQL query using SAS/ACCESS Interface to ODBC on SAS 9.4M5 with UTF-8

When you run an SQL query using SAS/ACCESS Interface to ODBC under the following conditions, you might receive an error: You run SAS 9.4M5 (TS1M5) or SAS 9.4M6 (TS1M6)  i




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Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65900: Registering an Oracle table to the metadata might fail and generate an error

When you register an Oracle table to the metadata, it might fail and generate an error similar to the following: "ERROR: An exception has been encountered...ERROR: Read Access Violation METALIB..."




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Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 35066: When a bulk-loading process fails with "SQL*Loader 2026" error, error message appears as a warning in the SAS log

If a bulk-loading process fails when you use SAS with SAS/ACCESS Interface to Oracle, you will receive the warning: "WARNING: All or some rows were rejected/discarded.: The actual error is "SQL*Loader-2026: The load was aborted because SQL




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Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65834: PROC METADATA returns various errors when the input contains certain multi-byte characters

The METADATA procedure might return an error similar to one of the following:

  • ERROR: Missing root element definition.
  • Full Article


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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65899: "ERROR: ORACLE disconnect error: ORA-03135" occurs when SAS disconnects from the Oracle database server

    When you run 32-bit SAS on Windows and disconnect from the Oracle database server, you might see the error: "ERROR: ORACLE disconnect error: ORA-03135: connection lost contact."




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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65918: SAS Workflow Services fails to respond after a com.sas.workflow.engine.policy.PolicyExecutionException error occurs for a workflow instance

    When the problem occurs, you are unable to perform any workflow actions in a SAS solution that uses SAS Workflow Services.




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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65929: A grid-enabled sign-on to SAS 9.4M6 (TS1M6) fails with errors, including "Remote signon … canceled"

    A sign-on to a grid-enabled environment fails while it is trying to communicate with the client host. The following errors then appear in the SAS log:


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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 64285: The SCD Type 2 Loader transformation in SAS Data Integration Studio generates "ERROR 22-322: Syntax error, expecting one of the following:..."

    If your business key column is a name literal, like " business key "n, a syntax error occurs when that variable name does not follow standard SAS naming conventions.




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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 64459: A SAS Data Integration Studio job receives an error that states "The name '; index_name '; has the wrong number of qualifiers"

    An error occurs because of an incorrectly generated CREATE INDEX clause in an SQL query that is sent to DB2 when the DB2 schema value is SESSION . The error message says "The name '; index_name '; has the wrong number of qualifie




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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65922: Trying to read a Google BigQuery table that contains a variable defined as an array might result in a panic error and SAS shutting down

    Trying to read a Google BigQuery table that contains a variable that is defined as an array of records might result in an error and cause SAS to shut down. This issue occurs when one of the variables contained in




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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65916: Accessing a Google BigQuery table without including the SCHEMA= option in the LIBNAME statement might result in an error

    When you issue a LIBNAME statement for a Google BigQuery database without including the SCHEMA= option, all tables in the project are shown when the libref is expanded. However, if you try to acces




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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 34294: A missing discrete dependent variable in the selection model together with a OUTPUT statement might cause an Access Violation error

    If the following conditions are met in PROC QLIM: the SELECT option and DISCRETE option are specified in the same MODEL statement or ENDOGENOUS statement the same dependent variable with S




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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65927: The Copy Files task in SAS Enterprise Guide 8.2 fails with the message "ERROR: Target folder does not exist or cannot be accessed"

    When you run the Copy Files task in SAS Enterprise Guide and there is no connection to a SAS server, it fails with the following error: "ERROR: Target folder does not exist or cannot be accessed."




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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65903: You see a "java.lang.IllegalArgumentException" error in the log file when you use the IFRS9_Cycle workflow template in SAS Solution for IFRS 9

    The problem occurs on a content release on the SAS Risk Governance Framework.




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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65872: You see a "java.lang.IllegalArgumentException" error in the log file when you use the CECL_Cycle workflow template in SAS Solution for CECL

    The problem occurs on a content release on the SAS Risk Governance Framework.




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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65914: You see the error "Driver does not support this optional feature" after trying to insert or append data to a Databricks table

    You can create create a Databricks table by using PROC SQL, but you cannot insert data into the table. PROC APPEND cannot create a new table or append data to an existing table.




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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65886: Trying to bulk load data into a Google BigQuery database might result in an error

    When you bulk load data into a Google BigQuery database, you might encounter this error: "Error while reading data, error message: CSV table encountered too many errors, giving up...Error detected while parsing row starting at position: 0...Data




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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65844: STRESS task fails with "Fatal error in PMPI_Bcast: Other MPI error, error stack: PMPI_Bcast(1478)"

    In SAS  High-Performance Risk, a STRESS task might fail with a message like the following in the SAS log while the compute server is sending the ScenarioCF/Value data to the HPRisk Engine:



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    Problem Notes for SAS®9 - 65883: SAS Workflow Studio returns a "cannot load" error when you try to open the CECL_Cycle_AFS workflow template for SAS Solution for CECL

    You might see the following error in SAS Workflow Studio when you try to open the CECL_Cycle_AFS workflow template that is shipped with SAS Solution for CECL:



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    Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US

    Medical error is not included on death certificates or in rankings of cause of death. Martin Makary, professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, joins us to explain why we don't measure medical error, and why it is so important that we start. Read the full analysis: http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139




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    Genetic evidence for reconfiguration of DNA polymerase {theta} active site for error-free translesion synthesis in human cells [DNA and Chromosomes]

    The action mechanisms revealed by the biochemical and structural analyses of replicative and translesion synthesis (TLS) DNA polymerases (Pols) are retained in their cellular roles. In this regard, DNA polymerase θ differs from other Pols in that whereas purified Polθ misincorporates an A opposite 1,N6-ethenodeoxyadenosine (ϵdA) using an abasic-like mode, Polθ performs predominantly error-free TLS in human cells. To test the hypothesis that Polθ adopts a different mechanism for replicating through ϵdA in human cells than in the purified Pol, here we analyze the effects of mutations in the two highly conserved tyrosine residues, Tyr-2387 and Tyr-2391, in the Polθ active site. Our findings that these residues are indispensable for TLS by the purified Pol but are not required in human cells, as well as other findings, provide strong evidence that the Polθ active site is reconfigured in human cells to stabilize ϵdA in the syn conformation for Hoogsteen base pairing with the correct nucleotide. The evidence that a DNA polymerase can configure its active site entirely differently in human cells than in the purified Pol establishes a new paradigm for DNA polymerase function.




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    FDA alerts health care providers of EpiPen auto-injector errors

    The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced March 24 that it is alerting health care professionals, patients and caregivers of EpiPen autoinjector errors related to device malfunctions and user administration.




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    How Terrorist Organizations Work Like Clubs

    Days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Osama bin Laden left his compound in Kandahar in Afghanistan and headed into the mountains. His driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, traveled with him. As U.S. and Northern Alliance forces stood poised to capture Kandahar a few months later, bin Laden told Hamdan t...




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    Australian banknote errors / Michael P. Vort-Ronald.




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    Report to the Prime Minister : the prosecution and sentencing of children for terrorism / Dr James Renwick SC.




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    Dissertation on scientific nomenclature, medical and general : exhibiting the defects, anomalies, errors, and discrepancies of its present condition : with suggestions for its improvement / by R.G. Mayne.

    London : J. Churchill, 1849.




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    The errors of homoeopathy / by C.J. Barr Meadows.

    London : H. Renshaw, 1861.




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    Assessing prediction error at interpolation and extrapolation points

    Assaf Rabinowicz, Saharon Rosset.

    Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 272--301.

    Abstract:
    Common model selection criteria, such as $AIC$ and its variants, are based on in-sample prediction error estimators. However, in many applications involving predicting at interpolation and extrapolation points, in-sample error does not represent the relevant prediction error. In this paper new prediction error estimators, $tAI$ and $Loss(w_{t})$ are introduced. These estimators generalize previous error estimators, however are also applicable for assessing prediction error in cases involving interpolation and extrapolation. Based on these prediction error estimators, two model selection criteria with the same spirit as $AIC$ and Mallow’s $C_{p}$ are suggested. The advantages of our suggested methods are demonstrated in a simulation and a real data analysis of studies involving interpolation and extrapolation in linear mixed model and Gaussian process regression.




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    Conditional density estimation with covariate measurement error

    Xianzheng Huang, Haiming Zhou.

    Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 970--1023.

    Abstract:
    We consider estimating the density of a response conditioning on an error-prone covariate. Motivated by two existing kernel density estimators in the absence of covariate measurement error, we propose a method to correct the existing estimators for measurement error. Asymptotic properties of the resultant estimators under different types of measurement error distributions are derived. Moreover, we adjust bandwidths readily available from existing bandwidth selection methods developed for error-free data to obtain bandwidths for the new estimators. Extensive simulation studies are carried out to compare the proposed estimators with naive estimators that ignore measurement error, which also provide empirical evidence for the effectiveness of the proposed bandwidth selection methods. A real-life data example is used to illustrate implementation of these methods under practical scenarios. An R package, lpme, is developed for implementing all considered methods, which we demonstrate via an R code example in Appendix B.2.




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    Measuring symmetry and asymmetry of multiplicative distortion measurement errors data

    Jun Zhang, Yujie Gai, Xia Cui, Gaorong Li.

    Source: Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics, Volume 34, Number 2, 370--393.

    Abstract:
    This paper studies the measure of symmetry or asymmetry of a continuous variable under the multiplicative distortion measurement errors setting. The unobservable variable is distorted in a multiplicative fashion by an observed confounding variable. First, two direct plug-in estimation procedures are proposed, and the empirical likelihood based confidence intervals are constructed to measure the symmetry or asymmetry of the unobserved variable. Next, we propose four test statistics for testing whether the unobserved variable is symmetric or not. The asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators and test statistics are examined. We conduct Monte Carlo simulation experiments to examine the performance of the proposed estimators and test statistics. These methods are applied to analyze a real dataset for an illustration.




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    Agnostic tests can control the type I and type II errors simultaneously

    Victor Coscrato, Rafael Izbicki, Rafael B. Stern.

    Source: Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics, Volume 34, Number 2, 230--250.

    Abstract:
    Despite its common practice, statistical hypothesis testing presents challenges in interpretation. For instance, in the standard frequentist framework there is no control of the type II error. As a result, the non-rejection of the null hypothesis $(H_{0})$ cannot reasonably be interpreted as its acceptance. We propose that this dilemma can be overcome by using agnostic hypothesis tests, since they can control the type I and II errors simultaneously. In order to make this idea operational, we show how to obtain agnostic hypothesis in typical models. For instance, we show how to build (unbiased) uniformly most powerful agnostic tests and how to obtain agnostic tests from standard p-values. Also, we present conditions such that the above tests can be made logically coherent. Finally, we present examples of consistent agnostic hypothesis tests.




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    Statistical errors in Monte Carlo-based inference for random elements. (arXiv:2005.02532v2 [math.ST] UPDATED)

    Monte Carlo simulation is useful to compute or estimate expected functionals of random elements if those random samples are possible to be generated from the true distribution. However, when the distribution has some unknown parameters, the samples must be generated from an estimated distribution with the parameters replaced by some estimators, which causes a statistical error in Monte Carlo estimation. This paper considers such a statistical error and investigates the asymptotic distributions of Monte Carlo-based estimators when the random elements are not only the real valued, but also functional valued random variables. We also investigate expected functionals for semimartingales in details. The consideration indicates that the Monte Carlo estimation can get worse when a semimartingale has a jump part with unremovable unknown parameters.




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    A priori generalization error for two-layer ReLU neural network through minimum norm solution. (arXiv:1912.03011v3 [cs.LG] UPDATED)

    We focus on estimating emph{a priori} generalization error of two-layer ReLU neural networks (NNs) trained by mean squared error, which only depends on initial parameters and the target function, through the following research line. We first estimate emph{a priori} generalization error of finite-width two-layer ReLU NN with constraint of minimal norm solution, which is proved by cite{zhang2019type} to be an equivalent solution of a linearized (w.r.t. parameter) finite-width two-layer NN. As the width goes to infinity, the linearized NN converges to the NN in Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) regime citep{jacot2018neural}. Thus, we can derive the emph{a priori} generalization error of two-layer ReLU NN in NTK regime. The distance between NN in a NTK regime and a finite-width NN with gradient training is estimated by cite{arora2019exact}. Based on the results in cite{arora2019exact}, our work proves an emph{a priori} generalization error bound of two-layer ReLU NNs. This estimate uses the intrinsic implicit bias of the minimum norm solution without requiring extra regularity in the loss function. This emph{a priori} estimate also implies that NN does not suffer from curse of dimensionality, and a small generalization error can be achieved without requiring exponentially large number of neurons. In addition the research line proposed in this paper can also be used to study other properties of the finite-width network, such as the posterior generalization error.




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    Convergence rates of least squares regression estimators with heavy-tailed errors

    Qiyang Han, Jon A. Wellner.

    Source: The Annals of Statistics, Volume 47, Number 4, 2286--2319.

    Abstract:
    We study the performance of the least squares estimator (LSE) in a general nonparametric regression model, when the errors are independent of the covariates but may only have a $p$th moment ($pgeq1$). In such a heavy-tailed regression setting, we show that if the model satisfies a standard “entropy condition” with exponent $alphain(0,2)$, then the $L_{2}$ loss of the LSE converges at a rate [mathcal{O}_{mathbf{P}}igl(n^{-frac{1}{2+alpha}}vee n^{-frac{1}{2}+frac{1}{2p}}igr).] Such a rate cannot be improved under the entropy condition alone. This rate quantifies both some positive and negative aspects of the LSE in a heavy-tailed regression setting. On the positive side, as long as the errors have $pgeq1+2/alpha$ moments, the $L_{2}$ loss of the LSE converges at the same rate as if the errors are Gaussian. On the negative side, if $p<1+2/alpha$, there are (many) hard models at any entropy level $alpha$ for which the $L_{2}$ loss of the LSE converges at a strictly slower rate than other robust estimators. The validity of the above rate relies crucially on the independence of the covariates and the errors. In fact, the $L_{2}$ loss of the LSE can converge arbitrarily slowly when the independence fails. The key technical ingredient is a new multiplier inequality that gives sharp bounds for the “multiplier empirical process” associated with the LSE. We further give an application to the sparse linear regression model with heavy-tailed covariates and errors to demonstrate the scope of this new inequality.




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    Characterization of probability distribution convergence in Wasserstein distance by &#36;L^{p}&#36;-quantization error function

    Yating Liu, Gilles Pagès.

    Source: Bernoulli, Volume 26, Number 2, 1171--1204.

    Abstract:
    We establish conditions to characterize probability measures by their $L^{p}$-quantization error functions in both $mathbb{R}^{d}$ and Hilbert settings. This characterization is two-fold: static (identity of two distributions) and dynamic (convergence for the $L^{p}$-Wasserstein distance). We first propose a criterion on the quantization level $N$, valid for any norm on $mathbb{R}^{d}$ and any order $p$ based on a geometrical approach involving the Voronoï diagram. Then, we prove that in the $L^{2}$-case on a (separable) Hilbert space, the condition on the level $N$ can be reduced to $N=2$, which is optimal. More quantization based characterization cases in dimension 1 and a discussion of the completeness of a distance defined by the quantization error function can be found at the end of this paper.




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    On frequentist coverage errors of Bayesian credible sets in moderately high dimensions

    Keisuke Yano, Kengo Kato.

    Source: Bernoulli, Volume 26, Number 1, 616--641.

    Abstract:
    In this paper, we study frequentist coverage errors of Bayesian credible sets for an approximately linear regression model with (moderately) high dimensional regressors, where the dimension of the regressors may increase with but is smaller than the sample size. Specifically, we consider quasi-Bayesian inference on the slope vector under the quasi-likelihood with Gaussian error distribution. Under this setup, we derive finite sample bounds on frequentist coverage errors of Bayesian credible rectangles. Derivation of those bounds builds on a novel Berry–Esseen type bound on quasi-posterior distributions and recent results on high-dimensional CLT on hyperrectangles. We use this general result to quantify coverage errors of Castillo–Nickl and $L^{infty}$-credible bands for Gaussian white noise models, linear inverse problems, and (possibly non-Gaussian) nonparametric regression models. In particular, we show that Bayesian credible bands for those nonparametric models have coverage errors decaying polynomially fast in the sample size, implying advantages of Bayesian credible bands over confidence bands based on extreme value theory.




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    A new method for obtaining sharp compound Poisson approximation error estimates for sums of locally dependent random variables

    Michael V. Boutsikas, Eutichia Vaggelatou

    Source: Bernoulli, Volume 16, Number 2, 301--330.

    Abstract:
    Let X 1 , X 2 , …, X n be a sequence of independent or locally dependent random variables taking values in ℤ + . In this paper, we derive sharp bounds, via a new probabilistic method, for the total variation distance between the distribution of the sum ∑ i =1 n X i and an appropriate Poisson or compound Poisson distribution. These bounds include a factor which depends on the smoothness of the approximating Poisson or compound Poisson distribution. This “smoothness factor” is of order O( σ −2 ), according to a heuristic argument, where σ 2 denotes the variance of the approximating distribution. In this way, we offer sharp error estimates for a large range of values of the parameters. Finally, specific examples concerning appearances of rare runs in sequences of Bernoulli trials are presented by way of illustration.