Well, OK, but no namecalling till I leave!
These answers are great!
For a useful debunking essay, visit the website of Brian Josephson (a Nobel winner in physics, out of Cambridge) for Drasin's:
How To Debunk Just About Anything
Anybody here bodybuild? Ever met someone who hears you work out and goes, "Flex for me!" or "How much do you lift?" "Well gee. On which muscle set? Flex what?" And aside from hoisting their Miata to impress them, do they know what constitutes measure in your world? (A girl who can lift 16lbs on the tibia is tough... But that wouldn't impress outsiders.)
Given this is a physics forum (man am I impressed with any forum that has greek symbols in their smiley-box) I'll go out on a limb here and 'assume' y'all are monsterbrain science nuts. I'm not here to jump any case about clearly not being real educated about RV prior to creating a 'test' for it (and I can't buck your car up either) but Ivan Seeking was cordial, so I'll give a few pointers from my studies (such as they are--I claim no omniscience!), and anybody interested can put together something more practical.
At that point, I'd be happy to see if I can recruit you some viewers to make fun of at your leisure. We reserve the right to make fun of you in forums you don't read either, if that's alright.
Off the top of my pointy little head, here are a few of the major things worth knowing about RV:
1. In practice it's an art, and the variation in personal skill is drastic. Laymen debate this, but research concluded only 1/2 of 1% of the population seems to be normally capable of something most skeptics would recognize as psi. (Hint: best way to avoid breaking your reality-model by recognizing anything as psi, is to take Ray Hyman's infamous way out by muttering something like, "There is clearly an effect here, but I would prefer not to call it psi." This will happily leave the door open, despite no actual evidence for doing so, for the next several centuries of official denial.)
Now any intelligent measure of something a bit more abstract than chemistry will see there are 'degrees' of performance in anything, and every session varies, just to make it complicated to guarantee anything. (Then again, basketball is easy, visible and measurable, but even the pros don't always make it in.)
This is a case where you can't judge the field by an individual. You really need to find an individual who has some legitimate scientific history of testing out as qualified, and then maybe you can consider them "an example". "Claimants" are seldom more than hype. The 'real deal' folks are usually pretty quiet. Obviously this complicates things for demos...
Having jumped hoops for (in McMoneagle's case) about 20 years in the lab, and in-person demos, and live-camera demos, under a science protocol often managed by an Official Skeptic (a job which like bartending, anybody breathing can qualify for), those people most qualified might not give a rip about doing a session *outside scientific protocol* for someone on the internet who wants you to take time to 'prove' RV to them by remote viewing what's in their bag, under their pillow, in their mind, the lotto numbers, or other common requests.
(Well those aren't the MOST common requests I get through my RV website. Usually they are things that inspire me to respond, "Remote viewing is, er, probably not for you. You might consider seeking professional help." In RV, like law, it's the 99% that give the other 1% a bad name.)
2. Remote viewing is FREE RESPONSE psi. Better targets are generally--with photo feedback so the FB/target is real specific--a location, an event or situation, or some other fairly definitive snapshot in time/space. There are other issues related to target pool bandwidth and such but never mind. (See physics lab http://www.lfr.org/csl/ for info.)
3. It helps to know what RV is good at, and what it is not. The data that comes from RV is, with exceptions, a sampling of what is part of, in close proximity to, or fundamentally related to, the target. Yeah this sounds like serious waffling, but that's the way it is; you work with the tools you have.
Say I do a practice session and I get there are these poles, made of metal, long skinny tubular, with some kind of pattern, multiples of them. The target feedback has several poles prominent in it just like that. Old telegraph poles I guess. I also got data that suggested multiple people had died, that bodies had been punctured, perhaps by bullets. Alas I had damn little info about the whole point of the target in the feedback: a parade of 21 coffins of miners shot by state militia during a strike in the late 1800's.
So if that were a test, I really suck at viewing, because the target was "the parade of coffins" in the photo--I'd have been happy to describe the coffins, wagons, people, or concept of parade, or even public gathering to be awfully easy on myself, but Nooooo... I am not good at RV. Still, when you do enough, you consider empirically that the odds of describing some things so specifically which are either IN or directly related to (such as the 'cause' of) the target, over time, calling it coincidence really stretches it a bit.
Now much of the time I suck even much worse than that example, I'm not a good candidate for proof. I'm just an interested layman who's been studying the research, intell-history, psi methodologies and the social field of RV for some years. (As you might imagine, it's much more fun from the closet-sociologist point of view than the others!)
4. Remote Viewing when utilized in the real world is usually done in a team. All data is taken together and analyzed. (Analysis is the most important, yet most difficult part of this topic, since science that did ops holds it proprietary, intell that did ops won't share analysis methods, and most viewers/psychics are not... well, analysts by personality. With some exceptions.) Of course, the process of analysis might seriously muck it all up worse than any individual session was to begin with, esp. as this is self-trained mostly-layman-efforts to reinvent the wheel in this area.
When one person does RV it isn't always expected to HAVE the answers--it is usually expected to provide info that *leads to* or *contributes to* answers. In combination with other intelligence sources (usually more mundane types), a real 'answer' can often be gleaned. That doesn't mean it isn't valuable; but for most targets, a radio-satellite is a helluva lot more useful. RV is useful for target where *there is no other way to find info* and so even an increase in your odds is worth it.
5. RV is often done in multiple sessions. E.g, several viewers do a session on X, then a tasker considers what is most interesting (such as likely applicability to the question), and tasks more sessions based on that previous data. Obviously this requires your viewers be pretty decent from the start or you're doomed.
If you ask most remote viewers--even those relatively decent by some standards--to describe what is in your bag, analytical interference is going to render the task unlikely to be done well. Too much frontloading. All RV should be doubleblind. Say nothing but 'describe the target'.
It appears one can't do anything with the mind where both analysis and imagination do not play a part. Both are sort of tools, or ways of thinking, and both sort of simultaneously enable RV to be done, yet profoundly affect results, usually in the negative. For this reason all 'real' RV is done physically double-blind, and the practice viewers do constantly is in learning to let go of the mind's need to analyze and label everything.
If you ask viewers double-blind to "describe the target" (which is what is in your bag), many will get around to something about it eventually (RV tends to do a general flitting about the target, and gradually as session lengthens, gets more specific to the 'point' of it), but on a first session, most will be describing parts of the bag, of you, of the creation/concept of what's in there, etc. As viewers are taught and trained to 'describe, not label/analyze', it is rare a viewer will just come out and name the target.
So to summarize, if you're going to construct an experiment to look at remote viewing results, you will want to have:
- Totally free-response, something 'real' and not a simple little object (maybe to you it's the same, but even in a physics sense of energy and entropy, a location is not the same as a little plastic icon for example), pref with photo feedback, so the photo 'defines' what is targeted. {In fact, if you're going to bother challenging people in a given field, get some edu about it (I realize that was part of the email request), so you are actually testing for what they are claiming to do, not what you think they are claiming to do.} Choose something which is specific and set-apart a bit from other things. There is still a nearly infinite pool to choose from after all.
- At least several viewers.
- An understanding going in that you are more likely to get 'pieces of' things in the target, and impressions all over the target, than a clear description or name of "what it is." (It isn't a viewer's job to label things. Figuring out how the data applies to the question is the job of analysts, not viewers. It is their job to describe things. How well they do that depends on--well who knows, sometimes it's impressive, sometimes it's laughable, you just never know!)
[/list=1]
As a last note: never believe anything you hear in the media. Well this probably goes for any topic, but especially RV!
PJ
http://www.firedocs.com/remoteviewing/
Also, please refrain from looking around my office. 
