It seems that the latest scipy (0.13.0) handles these border cases but earlier versions do not. The 0x1 and 1x0 cases will also fail, so I'll need to update the code to handle the case where either of the dimensions are 0. 

Do we want to treat a 0x0, 1x0, and 0x1 matrix the same way? i.e. as a null/empty matrix