The assignment was done out of desperation.  Here is what I'm getting from the unit tests after removing the assignment:
New code:
```python
if self.binary:
    spmatrix.data.fill(1)
    print "self.binary", self.binary
    print spmatrix.todense()
```
(mismatch 20.0%)
 x: array([[1, 1, 1, 0, 0],
       [1, 1, 0, 1, 1]])
 y: array([[3, 1, 1, 0, 0],
       [1, 2, 0, 1, 1]])
-------------------- >> begin captured stdout << ---------------------
self.binary True
[[3 1 1 0 0]
 [1 2 0 1 1]]