Last week, at the leading European particle physics laboratory, CERN, an institution straddling the French-Swiss border far from the superhot center of American politics but well within its sphere of influence, the question arose: is it more important to determine who the next American president will be or to discover why all matter in the universe has mass, rather than weighing nothing?
Like the political context, a broader context of modernist ideas, projects, practitioners and institutions straddles the boundary between art and philosophy, education and politics, theory and practice, individual and social.
Regulators are unlikely to change this because banks might face losses if forced to book their bonds at market prices.Without big institutions to straddle both markets, India is an inhospitable place for the hedge funds and hustlers who normally play the arbitrage game.
For now, most institutions will probably straddle both worlds.
The most common model has been the intermediate organisation, straddling the boundary between universities and NHS institutions.
We network with institutions and organizations that offer internships straddling the theory/practice opposition, from communication to activism, from urban agriculture to marketing.
Jersey, where the financial sector accounts for over half of all tax revenues, is home to a sophisticated banking industry, co-operates with other governments on tax matters and requires banks and other licensed institutions to have a "real presence" on the island.More confusingly, some jurisdictions straddle both categories.
(Even more so in institutions like mine, Georgia Regents University and Health System, which, as our state's only public academic health center, straddles both worlds).
The physicist, and hundreds of other scientists from scores of institutions worldwide, worked on one of four experiments, each involving a mammoth particle detector, at the Large Hadron Collider, which straddles the Swiss-French border.
