The Kentucky and Ohio ones hit me. Lexington and Louisville are to vastly different cities with incompatible cultures. Louisville is an old industrial Catholic city, Lexington is the horse capital of the world (so they say) very agrarian and very Protestant. Those living in either city may travel to Frankfort, but they do not go to each other except for events, definitely not for work. Lexington is closer to Cincinnati both in style, culture and geography. Cincinnati itself is the major hub in the area pulling in people from West Virginia, northern Kentucky and most of Southern Ohio.

Texas looks about right to me. My gut instinct is to also call Florida and the Northeast about on point.

They took ZCTA data and fudged it until it looked cool. 'K. It looks cool. But if part of your method is "making it look cool" are we really learning anything from the process?

So, they made a pretty map. Wonder what the point of it is? Oh, hell, I did not catch this one:

One of the decisions the researchers made was to limit the algorithm to 50 megaregions, which can be seen in the map above, where every node is colored according to the region it belongs to. This made the map more plausible visually. While 50 may sound like an arbitrary number, it makes sense mathematically because a very high percentage of commutes lie entirely within a megaregion relative to paths that cross boundaries between regions.

They ran out of time approaching the deadline? Ran out of money for the computer time? Why not run the data and see how many "mega" regions pop up and go from there? Found the link to the high-res versions of the maps here