You probably don't ever want to use ``dict`` as a function argument in python since it's the name of a commonly used built-in (http://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html#dict). Also, if we want to do validation here it might be better to use something like the jsonschema module (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/jsonschema/0.5) or take this kind of approach https://github.com/mozilla/datazilla/blob/master/datazilla/model/base.py#L1874.