You can call this "research" but it's not science. When you do science you can't just run your data, decide the numbers don't look right, and then tweak them un

You can call this "research" but it's not science. When you do science you can't just run your data, decide the numbers don't look right, and then tweak them until the picture produced looks publishable. That is a way to make art that reflects your worldview, but it won't have any science content left in it. If they wanted to do science they would need to devise a model of megaregions, form hypotheses, design tests ahead of time to confirm or refute those hypothesis, and only then run the data.